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This weekend, I witnessed the Vibe Shift firsthand.
When we met for lunch, my mother’s first topic was the DNC. Who spoke and how great they sounded. How excited she was about the whole thing. She corrected me on “Comma-lah’s” name, which I’d apparently been mispronouncing, and used that as a springboard to discuss Kamala t-shirts. She didn’t mention that watching the DNC had been inspiring enough to get her volunteering to write postcards and stuff mailers. It was clear that she was all-in on the program without ever discussing policy—or even Donald Trump.
Dad chimed in a couple times to note that the overall messaging was much more positive, except for Bernie Sanders, who sounded unchanged from the last ten years. He appreciated this. I’d say he represents a section of the populace with immense distaste for Trump, but a comparable disdain for politicians who spend too much time talking about the man.
I had been under no illusions that Mom would vote anything but Democrat. Dad, not so sure; I’d have given good odds of a protest vote if the Libertarian candidate wasn’t such a non-entity. More likely that he abstained. But the last couple weeks appear to have left him much more comfortable voting D. The same has to be true for Mom, too, as I never saw this level of enthusiasm for anything Biden did or said.
That’s the Vibe Shift: apathy to enthusiasm.
It doesn’t take a coordinated blitz of friendly op-eds, since my parents were getting this straight from the TV. It doesn’t take an iron grip on that TV presentation; the DNC herds their cats, but they can’t convince Bill Clinton to get off stage. And it doesn’t even take a winning policy slate. The Democrat base, the casual never-Trumpers, maybe even the grillpillers? They’re just glad to have a candidate under the retirement age.
If we are talking vibes and just random anecdotes, then republicans are very excited about the RFK and (to a lesser extent) Tulsi endorsement. Both RFK and Tulsi are big in the Rogan orbit. Could help Trump and helps with enthusiasm. Listen to the roar of the crowd when RFK walked on stage Friday in Arizona. That’s vines.
The fact that RFK is the counter enthusiasm on the R side is sad and desperate. We’re not building enthusiasm anymore to build the wall or drain the swamp or even fight inflation. It’s a crackpot lefty further watering down any sense of conservatism.
What are the conservatives even conserving anymore? We don't really have a way of life to conserve that actually has principles and promotes belief in God. Churches have been hollowed out, the lifestyle of most 'conservatives' in America is nothing but rural poor people indulging in thoughtless moment to moment hedonism.
Conservatism as a project has clearly failed, as far as I'm concerned. The right needs to move away from this idea of conserving a past which is gone, and move towards building virtues and morals in culture that don't exist anymore.
Some combination of patriotism, protecting the rights of the socially conservative quintile to their trad lifestyle, and sanity in certain regulatory and tax policies.
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I want to argue with you, but it's hard to. I've also been profoundly distressed that Trump is the best our nation can muster in defense of it's founding principles, before they are abolished entirely and written out of history. He's like a fucking child, pretending to be Thomas Jefferson. He can gesture at ideas he doesn't understand, but knows the adults in the room talk about with reverence. He governs like my four year old pretends to woodwork in the shop with me. Which is to say, he sits at his desk, mimes some actions he thinks he's seen politicians do, but has no understanding of how to work the levers of power. He's also not allowed to use any of the real tools actual politicians use to govern.
And yet, he's it. He's all that's left. Americanism has been extirpated from all the institutions that train up future leaders. Nobody with experience working the levers of power will ever believe in our founding principles ever again. That's how thoroughly our nation has been attacked and conquered. I'm waiting for three letter agencies to start quartering troops in our homes just to teabag the bill of rights completely. It's going to be an increasingly centralized command economy, increasingly looting the country to give party members in good standing the spoils, and fewer and fewer rights and standards of living for everyone else. And probably flooding the country with people who will rape, maim and murder the founding stock of the nation.
The conservative movement does have people who are extremely smart and capable: Vance, DeSantis, Thiel, and Musk for example.
But they can't speak to the people because, as you mention, the people just want government handouts, legal marijuana, and Doordash.
Trump can speak to the rubes, and he is willing to work with the smart people in the room. Choosing Vance is evidence of that. It might not be much, but it's the best we've got. The alternative is just more socialism forever.
I'll put DeSantis down as a maybe, but Vance, Thiel and Musk are radical libertarian opportunist. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have their help, god knows we need it. They might even put off the abolition of free speech 5 or 10 extra years. But their entire temperament is wrong to "conserve" anything. Their have that typical silicon valley mantra of "move fast and break things". Works great when you are building an unmanned reusable rocket. Less great when you are attempting to restore the republic.
Unless you are using the Romans as your template. But that only buys a generation or so of time, at most. Though it would be satisfying.
I disagree. Actually much of the libertarian right, via a ton of really weird reverse-engineering of religion through game theory and such a la @coffee_enjoyer, have come to genuinely respect religious institutions and social coordination mechanisms.
In fact, a few of them have even genuinely converted to religious beliefs privately, I have heard through the grapevine. (Not the figures I mentioned, but some in that space)
We're going through a massive religious revival at the moment, it just hasn't gotten the public's attention yet due to censorship of anything right-coded and the tight grip of the media. I don't think it will be long before you start to see more and more of these figures publicly coming out as religious.
There may be a religious revival among a very certain set of previously agnostic to atheist right-leaning people in specific industries who spend a lot of time on Twitter, I see no evidence in church attendance numbers or other factors of any actual shift in religiosity among the larger population.
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The religious revival is notable for only really happening among heterosexual white men. I believe this is because it’s become clear to everyone that the ruling belief system has no place for heterosexuals or white men, and they’re searching for an alternative belief system and community that values and valorizes heterosexuality instead of rejecting and demonizing it. The young straight men I know are either depressed and demoralized, or they’re religious.
Old religions have the social proof and track record to do this. They’re also attracted to personal development and ideological purity, which is why traditional Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and to a lesser extent confessional Protestantism, are the religions of choice. Evangelicals bend too far to try and appeal to the world with laser shows and electric guitars, and mainlines try too hard to appeal to the world with ideological indifference.
But the problem is it takes two to tango, and straight women are the movers and shakers of the ruling belief system. So you’re ending up with straight men crowding into Latin masses and Divine Liturgies, with the women there so crowded with male attention that it might as well be Tinder or so obsessed with a rigid sense of gender roles that no spiritually-sensitive man could ever be masculine enough for them. The one exception I’ve found is the genuinely rad-trad Catholics who are comfortable attending mass at SSPX chapels, where there do seem to be a lot of women. This certainly has a lot to do with having 7 children to a family, approximately half of which will statistically be women.
I don’t actually know if this current wave of religious revival will last, if it can’t reproduce it can’t persist. Rad trad Catholics will, but I don’t have much optimism for the future of Eastern Orthodoxy in America as I think the orthobro converts will burn themselves out, and the evangelistic and phyletistic contradictions at the heart of Orthodox ecclesiology will eventually show their ugly face.
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The religious revival is, if anything, a reactionary retreat in response to the disgusting progressive ideology. I will use such a negatively loaded term because the actual visceral response most normies have to Drag Kids, or Black Crime Is Just Unfair Noticing, or Public Junkie Defecation Is Part And Parcel Of Living In A Big City is disgust.
Secular humanism and urban social dynamics have turned out to be bitter tinctures because progressive shibboleths have not been filtered for failure. With the continual rot of safety and education failings being unable to address due to the moral sanctity of the poisoners, religion is a steady bulwark standing against the continual social degradation. It is no surprise that some would find genuine comfort in religion as a result.
I honestly don't think Musk Thiel Vance are especially intelligent and capable. Certainly their public profile allows for such generous assessments to be feted, but thats just a best-fit for the Smartsuit, not that the suit actually fits. Too many normies don't think especially highly of Musk or Vance, and Thiel is not on the public radar. Also, Trump kicked out the last smartdicks he had (Tillerson, Mattis, Bolton - I accept the controversy about this dude, pls no bully), so there is a risk that being smart isn't actually good enough to stay in the cabinet.
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I think conservatism as a popular movement is quite minimized, yes. But as an intellectual movement with real political force, it endures.
Say what you will about Project 2025, but The Heritage Foundation isn't going anywhere. And, besides AEI, it is the most influential think tank on the right. Furthermore, thinkers like Deneen are on the up in conservative intellectual circles currently. Now, are "conservative intellectual circles" going to amount to much more than bespectacled dudes smoking cigars and mentally masturbating about a benevolent dictatorship? Probably not, but they will continue to exist. The whole point of conservatism is that it functions even as a small minority. It's a movement based around not doing much and doing that slowly.
The popular right wing movement is going to be the Techno-Libertarianism of Peter Thiel and his greater orbit. I mean, that's why JD Vance got the VP pick. It's a seductive movement because it attracts big money and top human capital, but I worry that it lacks any appeal to women and, more broadly, families. Thiel himself is a gay transhumanist. Nothing wrong with the gay part and nothing currently wrong with the transhuman part, but, taken together, this is hard for the Nebraska insurance salesman and his 2nd grade teacher wife to really get behind they did with Reagan.
The competing popular movement is Club For Growth et al. While pro-growth is a very broad and appealing economic argument, it comes with some thorny social baggage. Close to open boarders, offshoring. It offers nothing in the way of "community cohesion" or "social order" which, while highly vibes based, are important for a conservative inspired movement.
While they're are certainly fights to be fought on the right, I have more (vibes based) confidence they'll figure it out. This is because the left is trying to decide between actual statist communist and explicit racism as its number one priority.
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I agree, but I'd go one step further: the best would be to stop worrying not only about conserving vs changing things, but about what counts as "right" vs "left". Align yourself with What Is Good and work for that, regardless of whether it is present or absent in your culture, ancient or new, "left" or "right", progressive or reactionary. The moment you take your eyes off The Good and start choosing your values based on political alignments is the moment you lose your way. Politics ought to never be anything more than merely instrumental.
Beautifully said. I absolutely agree with this.
We have an incredible opportunity with the current political realignment to reintegrate Goodness with politics. I say we take it.
How so?
Well basically, there's a bunch of chaos and things are up in the air. That means opportunity to form something new.
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In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same. (George Orwell, 1941)
I've been curious since reading it a few years ago... how are those suet puddings doing?
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Remember that he was deliberately writing propaganda because he believed that the war would create conditions for a communist revolution in the UK.
The essay series was literally crafted to sell Ingsoc to tories worried about the war. It's as exploitive as any other communist propaganda.
It's the same basic thing as a Democrat telling you "vote Biden to cool down the culture war," barely hiding his utter contempt for the rube he's manipulating. Or "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it"
Lying to people that nothing they love is going to change is the first step in destroying every they love.
It does, however, characterize 'rural poor people indulging in thoughtless behavior' as essentially conservative behavior, without sneer, as early as 1941.
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Tangential, but either George Orwell is a believer in the magic soil hypothesis or didn't realize that mass immigration could ever be a thing.
As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, foreign conquest doesn't necessarily change a country. But wholesale replacement of its population does. The Norman invasion didn't change the fundamental character of England. It merely replaced the ruling class. But the Saxon invasion did change England and made it what it is today. It did so by extirpating the prior residents and replacing them.
What emerges after 100 more years of mass immigration will be far less English than if the Germans had conquered it in WWII.
Orwell died in 1950, a full 18 years before Enoch Powell’s much-maligned “Rivers of Blood” speech. So my money is on the latter.
That's my view as well.
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