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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.
RFK built the largest independent political campaign since Ross Perot. He has a big political organization made up of volunteers from the broad political middle of the country. He is, besides, like Trump, much smarter than consevatives.
I don't understand this at all. You're saying that two people are, individually, more intelligence or cognitively capable than an intellectual movement?
Political apparatchiks have an insular and provincial view of the American electorate based mostly on hearsay and things they learned from their political science courses. They aren’t necessarily reading the room as it actually is, but seeing it through lenses that are decades out of date and thus either don’t work anymore (seriously, who’s watching political ads on TV, let alone basing their votes on them? Hence Trump was able to get around the media gatekeepers because he understood that people are much more engaged with social media and online platforms and online news). RFK understands that most of the concerns of the working classes below the PMC are much more rubber meets the road kinds of problems than the high minded “let’s build the future” vibes that the major parties are putting out. The political class is baffled by the fact that most people think the economy is bad and that inflation is a major problem. They keep jabbing at random graphs and saying “look the numbers are going in the right direction!” And the people look up from their kitchen tables where they’re trying to squeeze their budget even tighter because rent, groceries, and gasoline went up again unimpressed with those graphs. Trump and RFK get that. They also get that people want things like safer streets, schools focused on the basics, etc.
The political class isn't baffled. Maybe journalists are baffled because they're high on their own supply, but this isn't a case where the numbers say one thing but the feeling on the ground is different. The numbers are in fact mediocre. Unemployment is increasing. Job growth numbers were recently revised downward big-time -- and this was pretty much expected. Inflation was obviously terrible over the past few years and is still above that 2% benchmark. Yes, various flacks have been pushing the idea that the economy is doing just fine, but they're mostly not honestly wrong; they're lying. For the Democrats, this is their best strategy because they're stuck with responsibility for the economy.
Even this analysis has a problem in the fact that the numbers aren’t telling the full story here. The cost of necessary household goods, groceries and gasoline have gone up much more than that 2.9% and because you feel the effects of this very strongly because it’s directly impacting QOL even more than the 2.9% number would suggest. Eggs were $2.02 in 2019 and $2.86 in 2022. The graph doesn’t go to 2024, but going from $2 to nearly $3 is a big hit to the budget. (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/egg-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/). If you’re seeing those kinds of new prices, especially if rent and other bills are increasing faster than your paycheck, it’s not good.
And I just don’t see the party in power especially taking it seriously. Trump and RFK get it because they’re talking to ordinary people who struggle to afford things. I know lots of people who are constantly taking formerly normal things off the table. No more name brand stuff, staycation instead of vacation. No more meals out. Make clothes and shoes last longer. And as this continues, the appeal of candidates and media outlets that at least get it will be more popular. And unless the ruling elites start to get it, vibes don’t work as a bandaid. Kamala has a weakness hear because she doesn’t seem to actually get how the cost of living has changed since the Trump days.
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I'm usually on team "the economy isn't really hat bad actually" but I'm baffled how people can misread the sentiment like this. It's obvious that what people who think inflation was too high want is for prices to go back down. the inflation number is a second order leading indicator. The previous years were 3.4%, 6.5% and 7.0% so around 17% over 3 years. And spread unevenly among the indexes so there were items in the basket that stayed relatively flat and other items that saw much higher price hikes, human cognition is such that those price hikes are the main thing people notice and do feel like the kind of thing that ought to be able to be put back in the bottle.
The leading indicators of how the economy is going to feel in the future have done decently over the last 6 months is just not really a compelling argument.
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So, as usual I'm somewhat limited in what I can back up with my own to eyes from where I sit, but what do you make of gimmicks like this?
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Nobody's comparing to all years since 1990. They're comparing either to the Trump years, or at least to the post-GFC years. Unemployment was declining from the end of the GFC to Covid. Now it's rising. Inflation remains higher than any pre-Covid time later than 2011. Real wages are roughly flat.
Picking longer timeframes to make things look better doesn't fool anyone who doesn't want to be fooled.
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Wait for the downward revision…
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Many here were dumbfounded. I argued the job numbers were obviously phony looking at 1) the divergence between establishment survey and household and 2) the unlikely amount of one sided downward revisions.
The response was “sometimes shit moves funny.”
You'll notice the market didn't react, so at least the people with money weren't surprised. And the job numbers (which are based on a model) weren't matching the unemployment numbers (based on a survey). Anyone fooled was either not paying enough attention or was fooling themselves.
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If some/all of the movement's core assumptions are incorrect, that would poison the entire edifice - e.g. Marxist thought might be the largest published corpus of philosophy or economics ever amassed, but it wouldn't be hard for one person to be more correct because the Marxist edifice is chained to fatally-flawed premises.
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