Don't compare Twitter to Substack like-by-like. These are different beasts with complementary effects. Substack was crucial for penetrating the intelligentsia (or EHC as you would say). It isn't competing with X; it's competing with the NYT opinion columns and, at its best, with the news columns too. Academics don't send tweet links around their listservs. Substack has also been material in raising the intellectual level within the GOP, if nothing else by exposing the stupid and spotlighting the good.
I would also offer a third way to understand the "vibe shift": Progressive infighting split the Democrat coalition. Of course, any Quillette author would have told you this was eventually going to happen, but few expected it to happen that fast. Give Hamas some credit, or at least its fans on US campuses; great job on the "Genocide Joe" brand. It's now over a year since the loose cannons have set the ship on fire, and the fire brigade is still barely visible. Activists still have veto power over left-wing media (see what happened to Washington Post); dumb money still feeds NGO grafters and crazies; and with Bluesky, the center-left has fled right into the maw of the progressive firebugs. Will *that* change within the next 4 years? Theoretically possible, but it requires the kind of charisma you would associate with Trump, not anyone in the other aisle.
The culture shifting back to the right when Musk bought Twitter is a nice example of a just-so story, but it doesn't pass the smell test. Wokeness peaked in 2020, not in 2022. Democrats were panicking even when they won a trifecta because the win was way narrower than expected despite Trump's unpopularity and backlash to BLM and Defund the Police was clear even then. And then the Democratic trifecta plus the excesses of an administration with a low-energy leader that was largely outsourcing its domestic policymaking to progressive interest groups turbocharged the backlash.
Trump's popularity is likely to suffer the same fate: he has a trifecta and is too old and uninterested in governance to micromanage a coalition that is sure to do many unpopular things when left on autopilot. Plus there's the optics that billionaires have a front seat at the table and are now running the country that the public is unlikely to tolerate for very long. The energy behind wokeness might soon be channeled into "eat the rich".
Liberals don't like an emphasis on identity - think Sam Harris, Bill Maher, and Steven Pinker. "Progressive" is the polite term for the woke, not "liberal."
I wonder how much the "vibe shift" has to do with the fact that this time around, Trump won record large vote shares among the "diverse" voter groups - blacks, Hispanics, native Americans - that the Democrats have so long taken for granted. A few weeks after the election, I wrote an article speculating about why that might be, called "Identity Politics Blows Up in the Democrats' Face."
It seems that Americans of all races and ethnic backgrounds have just gotten tired of Democrats obsessing over race, gender, etc. - the reason why the "Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for You" ad was so effective. Turns out these people just want to be known as "Americans" and respected for that, and this is what Trump is giving them.
Now it's true that the public tends to get tired of whatever party's in power, especially when inflation was high (as it was during Biden's term) so I am not ruling out the Dems dumping the more toxic aspects of their program and running a successful campaign on economic issues in 2028 or 2032, when the GOP's getting blamed for the country's problems. But I think the "vibe shift" was real, in the sense that Americans (of all races) had gotten really, really fed up with the Democrats' obsession with race and sex and other identity markers (+ tolerance for illegal immigration) and that the Dems need to change course to win. Which they will probably do, eventually, as there are plenty of smart Dems (like Noah Smith) who are fully aware of this need.
There's a sense of legitimacy to Trump's 2024 victory that he simply didn't have in '16. He didn't win thanks to the quirks of our system this time. He won his party's nomination by deliberately not running for it, and received both a higher total number of votes and a higher percentage of votes than he did in either 2016 or 2020. If anything, him being significantly more powerful now than he would've been had he just won in 2020 makes everyone who participated in the efforts of the Resistance, whether the lowliest campaign volunteer or Obama himself, feel as though all they did the last decade was help DJT. A joke candidate who won by accident will now be the most transformational and important PotUS since FDR.
Maybe true but that didn't stop Trump from winning record shares of the racial and ethnic groups that the Dems are used to relying on. If the Dems don't change their messaging sooner rather than later, they're looking at President Vance in 2028 and 2032.
It will require much more than just a change in messaging. Right now the Democratic Party is of, for, and by the educated elites. Working class people will not vote Democratic until the leadership of the party changes.
Thanks for taking vibe shift discourse to the next level. I've been tossing around the phrase a lot lately, taking for granted what it actually means much less how to think about it.
There is also a major danger that the right will think that because normal people broadly agree with them on gender, speech policing and illegal immigration that they are suddenly ready to welcome the wackiest conspiracy theories and a quasi-theocratic government. As the left indulged its worst, most off-putting, most dysgenic people, the right has plenty of these types waiting to come out of the woodwork (the raging misogynists, the Jew-obsessives, the race-war preppers.)
People like the Tates or Fuentes ranting about repealing the franchise and the need to re-enslave are the mirror image of the 'obese lesbian' firefighters who let you suffocate to death in your burning house as an offering on the alter of diversity, and equally as off-putting.
Left-wing idpol tweets still go viral on Twitter, but the most noticeable changes from the ancien regime I've noticed are:
1. Trending stories are no longer editorialized with a left-wing narrative. During the summer of 2020 whenever you'd click a trending topic, there'd be a single paragraph summary providing the progressive rundown of the event.
2. There are both right-wing and left-wing trending tweets. Under pre-Elon Twitter whenever you'd click on a trending hashtag in the search, it would show an endless stream of progressive rants, whereas now it also shows the right-wing equivalent.
3. Right-wing tweets also go viral. It used to be rare for right-wing tweets to get over 100k like, whereas now it happens on the regular
You have it exactly backwards with regard to your analysis of Twitter. Democrats have not lost Twitter, Twitter has lost Democrats. Even worse for Twitter, the educated people with Elite Human Capital have abandoned Twitter. It’s not really a discourse anymore, it’s a just a place for Musk and his followers. And with him decompressing in real time on a very big stage there isn’t much left to do there except watch the shitshow unfold in real time.
The vibe shift is mostly you insulating yourself from any voices that disagree with you in any significant way. I am not on Twitter but you have most likely made the very human mistake of the fact that everyone on Twitter agrees with you just mean that there are none left who disagree with you or that they are culturally and intellectually insignificant. I am probably one of the very few left who engaged with you on a regular basis in any sort of intellectual manner who has fundamental disagreements with you.
Taking control of the government is a huge thing and the Republicans should rightfully be proud of this fact. If they manage government well and deliver on the bread and butter issues that actual swing voters care about, they will cement a generational majority. The sycophancy of tech billionaires is not what matters here: Twitter is always collapsing in political and cultural significance and I doubt Facebook will change much. Facebook is only used by older people anyway, and I suspect Zuckerberg is just talking his book with regard to politics. He is extremely opportunistic, which means he can be useful to Trump but will abandon him as soon as the winds shift.
I hope Trump the best, America could use some good leadership. So far, he has already underperformed my already low expectations for him, focusing on taking revenge for presumed grievances, showing himself an ass on the topic of California wildfires, threatening Panama and Columbia, and partying with billionaires. This might excite his base (personally I am skeptical of even this) but it’s not the stuff a permanent Republican majority is created out of.
I wonder what will happen if a critical mass of people migrate from X. With the recent Reddit subreddit bans of posting X links (done in response to Elon’s alleged Nazi salute), I think it’s possible that there is a migration away from X to one of the alternative sites. Reddit is culturally important for normies
I know multiple people whose thinking is influenced by Reddit (unfortunately). But perhaps you’re right that it doesn’t affect culture in the way X does
Reddit no longer fosters meaningful discussion like it used to. There's been too much purging and censoriousness, and too great a flooding of normies into the userbase.
Twitter also has serious problems. The site is flooded with ads, spam, and scams, and much of the site's useful info is now less accessible after whatever monkeying Elon's done to the site. But it still is coming out ahead of Reddit and Bluesky simply by ridding itself of leftist moderation, and thus it's actually possible for constructive discussion, which rejects blank-slatist social fantasies as explanations for our problems.
Don't compare Twitter to Substack like-by-like. These are different beasts with complementary effects. Substack was crucial for penetrating the intelligentsia (or EHC as you would say). It isn't competing with X; it's competing with the NYT opinion columns and, at its best, with the news columns too. Academics don't send tweet links around their listservs. Substack has also been material in raising the intellectual level within the GOP, if nothing else by exposing the stupid and spotlighting the good.
I would also offer a third way to understand the "vibe shift": Progressive infighting split the Democrat coalition. Of course, any Quillette author would have told you this was eventually going to happen, but few expected it to happen that fast. Give Hamas some credit, or at least its fans on US campuses; great job on the "Genocide Joe" brand. It's now over a year since the loose cannons have set the ship on fire, and the fire brigade is still barely visible. Activists still have veto power over left-wing media (see what happened to Washington Post); dumb money still feeds NGO grafters and crazies; and with Bluesky, the center-left has fled right into the maw of the progressive firebugs. Will *that* change within the next 4 years? Theoretically possible, but it requires the kind of charisma you would associate with Trump, not anyone in the other aisle.
The culture shifting back to the right when Musk bought Twitter is a nice example of a just-so story, but it doesn't pass the smell test. Wokeness peaked in 2020, not in 2022. Democrats were panicking even when they won a trifecta because the win was way narrower than expected despite Trump's unpopularity and backlash to BLM and Defund the Police was clear even then. And then the Democratic trifecta plus the excesses of an administration with a low-energy leader that was largely outsourcing its domestic policymaking to progressive interest groups turbocharged the backlash.
Trump's popularity is likely to suffer the same fate: he has a trifecta and is too old and uninterested in governance to micromanage a coalition that is sure to do many unpopular things when left on autopilot. Plus there's the optics that billionaires have a front seat at the table and are now running the country that the public is unlikely to tolerate for very long. The energy behind wokeness might soon be channeled into "eat the rich".
Liberals don't like an emphasis on identity - think Sam Harris, Bill Maher, and Steven Pinker. "Progressive" is the polite term for the woke, not "liberal."
I prefer the term Slave Morality over progressive or liberal when it comes to woke
I wonder how much the "vibe shift" has to do with the fact that this time around, Trump won record large vote shares among the "diverse" voter groups - blacks, Hispanics, native Americans - that the Democrats have so long taken for granted. A few weeks after the election, I wrote an article speculating about why that might be, called "Identity Politics Blows Up in the Democrats' Face."
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/identity-politics-blows-up-in-the
It seems that Americans of all races and ethnic backgrounds have just gotten tired of Democrats obsessing over race, gender, etc. - the reason why the "Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for You" ad was so effective. Turns out these people just want to be known as "Americans" and respected for that, and this is what Trump is giving them.
Now it's true that the public tends to get tired of whatever party's in power, especially when inflation was high (as it was during Biden's term) so I am not ruling out the Dems dumping the more toxic aspects of their program and running a successful campaign on economic issues in 2028 or 2032, when the GOP's getting blamed for the country's problems. But I think the "vibe shift" was real, in the sense that Americans (of all races) had gotten really, really fed up with the Democrats' obsession with race and sex and other identity markers (+ tolerance for illegal immigration) and that the Dems need to change course to win. Which they will probably do, eventually, as there are plenty of smart Dems (like Noah Smith) who are fully aware of this need.
There's a sense of legitimacy to Trump's 2024 victory that he simply didn't have in '16. He didn't win thanks to the quirks of our system this time. He won his party's nomination by deliberately not running for it, and received both a higher total number of votes and a higher percentage of votes than he did in either 2016 or 2020. If anything, him being significantly more powerful now than he would've been had he just won in 2020 makes everyone who participated in the efforts of the Resistance, whether the lowliest campaign volunteer or Obama himself, feel as though all they did the last decade was help DJT. A joke candidate who won by accident will now be the most transformational and important PotUS since FDR.
It's enough to quiver the liver.
Moderates are sick of the Democrats but that doesn’t mean they are sold on what MAGA is selling.
Maybe true but that didn't stop Trump from winning record shares of the racial and ethnic groups that the Dems are used to relying on. If the Dems don't change their messaging sooner rather than later, they're looking at President Vance in 2028 and 2032.
It will require much more than just a change in messaging. Right now the Democratic Party is of, for, and by the educated elites. Working class people will not vote Democratic until the leadership of the party changes.
Thanks for taking vibe shift discourse to the next level. I've been tossing around the phrase a lot lately, taking for granted what it actually means much less how to think about it.
That bar chart really should go all the way down to 0 on the y-axis. The approval rating differences aren't as stark as they look.
There is also a major danger that the right will think that because normal people broadly agree with them on gender, speech policing and illegal immigration that they are suddenly ready to welcome the wackiest conspiracy theories and a quasi-theocratic government. As the left indulged its worst, most off-putting, most dysgenic people, the right has plenty of these types waiting to come out of the woodwork (the raging misogynists, the Jew-obsessives, the race-war preppers.)
People like the Tates or Fuentes ranting about repealing the franchise and the need to re-enslave are the mirror image of the 'obese lesbian' firefighters who let you suffocate to death in your burning house as an offering on the alter of diversity, and equally as off-putting.
Left-wing idpol tweets still go viral on Twitter, but the most noticeable changes from the ancien regime I've noticed are:
1. Trending stories are no longer editorialized with a left-wing narrative. During the summer of 2020 whenever you'd click a trending topic, there'd be a single paragraph summary providing the progressive rundown of the event.
2. There are both right-wing and left-wing trending tweets. Under pre-Elon Twitter whenever you'd click on a trending hashtag in the search, it would show an endless stream of progressive rants, whereas now it also shows the right-wing equivalent.
3. Right-wing tweets also go viral. It used to be rare for right-wing tweets to get over 100k like, whereas now it happens on the regular
You have it exactly backwards with regard to your analysis of Twitter. Democrats have not lost Twitter, Twitter has lost Democrats. Even worse for Twitter, the educated people with Elite Human Capital have abandoned Twitter. It’s not really a discourse anymore, it’s a just a place for Musk and his followers. And with him decompressing in real time on a very big stage there isn’t much left to do there except watch the shitshow unfold in real time.
The vibe shift is mostly you insulating yourself from any voices that disagree with you in any significant way. I am not on Twitter but you have most likely made the very human mistake of the fact that everyone on Twitter agrees with you just mean that there are none left who disagree with you or that they are culturally and intellectually insignificant. I am probably one of the very few left who engaged with you on a regular basis in any sort of intellectual manner who has fundamental disagreements with you.
Taking control of the government is a huge thing and the Republicans should rightfully be proud of this fact. If they manage government well and deliver on the bread and butter issues that actual swing voters care about, they will cement a generational majority. The sycophancy of tech billionaires is not what matters here: Twitter is always collapsing in political and cultural significance and I doubt Facebook will change much. Facebook is only used by older people anyway, and I suspect Zuckerberg is just talking his book with regard to politics. He is extremely opportunistic, which means he can be useful to Trump but will abandon him as soon as the winds shift.
I hope Trump the best, America could use some good leadership. So far, he has already underperformed my already low expectations for him, focusing on taking revenge for presumed grievances, showing himself an ass on the topic of California wildfires, threatening Panama and Columbia, and partying with billionaires. This might excite his base (personally I am skeptical of even this) but it’s not the stuff a permanent Republican majority is created out of.
How will various law suits about discrimination impact the culture of academia?
Will 2021 academics be seen as bad guys in the books written in 2029?
I wonder what will happen if a critical mass of people migrate from X. With the recent Reddit subreddit bans of posting X links (done in response to Elon’s alleged Nazi salute), I think it’s possible that there is a migration away from X to one of the alternative sites. Reddit is culturally important for normies
Reddit is completely inconsequential for culture though. r politics is popular and active but also near totally self contained.
Bluesky has some lib normies joining, I don't think it will reach critical mass but it has a shot at least.
I know multiple people whose thinking is influenced by Reddit (unfortunately). But perhaps you’re right that it doesn’t affect culture in the way X does
Reddit no longer fosters meaningful discussion like it used to. There's been too much purging and censoriousness, and too great a flooding of normies into the userbase.
Twitter also has serious problems. The site is flooded with ads, spam, and scams, and much of the site's useful info is now less accessible after whatever monkeying Elon's done to the site. But it still is coming out ahead of Reddit and Bluesky simply by ridding itself of leftist moderation, and thus it's actually possible for constructive discussion, which rejects blank-slatist social fantasies as explanations for our problems.