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The vibes are a shiftin'
MAGA experienced a wave of euphoria from Trump's election until about around the time of the trade disputes. They felt like they were on top of the world, and that nothing could stop them. They notched a few wins against wokeness, but their major victory was in the realm of vibes.
It's increasingly seeming like those days are over. Scott Sumner's article details who's up and who's down over the past few weeks:
Who's Up:
-Neoliberals
-The experts
-TDSers
-The elite media
-Chinese and Canadian liberals
-Deficit hawks
-Principled conservative free speech advocates
-Integrity hawks
-Rules hawks
-Critics of bullying
Who's Down:
-Mercantilists
-The populists
-Anti-anti-trumpers
-Fox News
-Non-US nationalists
-Deficit doves
-Unprincipled conservative free speech advocates
-Issues people
-Autocracy advocates
-American exceptionalists
Edit for more opinions per moderator request: I agree with this article that the vibes have definitely shifted, as it's been clear in my (adversarial) conversations with MAGA that the mood has changed from combative (pre-election) to triumphalism (post election until a few weeks ago) and then back to combative with a hint of disillusionment (today). Any opposition movement is going to have principled believers and cynics, e.g. people who think we should have free speech as a general rule and people who only claim to like free speech but really want to censor their opponents when they come into power. Winning means these splits that could be swept under the rug get blown out into the open, and the pendulum starts swinging back the other direction. Hopefully we don't swing back to crazy wokeness, but I'd pretty much take any alternative at this point. A decade ago I would never have seen myself cheering for The Experts or The Media, but I've seen the alternative now, and it's just so much worse.
As an aside, I think it has generally been to capitalism's detriment that people tend to conflate business, finance, and economics when these are three different fields. Businessmen make terrible ambassadors for capitalism.
To paraphrase something I once saw in an econ textbook: "'Pro-market' is not the same as 'pro-business'"
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Vibes are very hard to measure, but I do think there's something to the idea that the tariff shenanigans have damaged morale on the right, even if only by causing a rift between Trump supporters who support the tariffs and Trump supporters who see them as entirely self-inflicted suffering. I personally think they'll cause enough economic hardship such that it will actually meaningfully negatively affect Trump support in the long run, but, well, only time will tell.
But this kind of post about vibes just reminded me of a comment I made last year after Harris became the Dem nominee. There was all sorts of talk about how there was some apparent "shift" in the vibes, that Democrats were coming together and becoming energized, and that we were owning the Republicans by calling them "weird," and I thought it all looked like transparent attempts to shift the vibes by declaring the vibes as shifted. I think my skepticism of that turned out to be mostly correct, and I think such skepticism is warranted here. I don't know much about Scott Sumner, but he doesn't seem like a Trump sycophant or even a Trump fan. And only someone who's at least neutral on Trump, if not positive, would have the credibility, in my eyes, to declare "vibes" as shifting away from Trump and towards his enemies, because someone who dislikes Trump would have great incentive to genuinely, honestly, in good faith, believe that the vibes are shifting away from him.
Another issue here is that I don't really see Democrats as being in a good position to capitalize on this apparent vibe shift. People being demoralized on Trump will almost certainly help the Dems, but people can be fickle and vibes can shift back, unless Dems manage to actually lock in the demoralized former Trump fans through some sort of actual positive message.
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FWIW, as a Trump voter in a state where it didn't matter, my vibes were somewhere between skeptical/cautiously optimistic, but mostly skeptical because I fully expected the GOP House and Senate to be useless.
Since then, it's mostly bad. DOGE has been a bigger clownshow than anticipated. Deficit hawks have nothing to be happy about given that the Johnson House is just continuing previous bad budgets. The trade war has been far bigger and dumber than anticipated. Biden's signature win might well have been running up the national debt to the point that any attempt at reform gets the Liz Truss treatment. Senate Democrats want to increase old people UBI spending, so maybe they'll manage to deplete the Social Security trust fund in ~2030 when AOC is President. LOL at spending more time and effort deporting anti-Israel academics than the mass of illegal immigrants. My expectations were low, but this is a fucking joke.
Fuck me, I wanted DeSantis.
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OK, we've lost some money from dumb economic policy. I've lost money, you've lost money. Stocks down. Schizo tariff policy is dumb.
But is this really worse than what the experts were cooking up in terms of DEI, mass immigration and green economics? Australia has been in an economic meltdown, GDP per capita fell bigly. Housing is massively unaffordable. No politicians have any answers except more plans to pump housing prices even higher, subsidizing first-home buyers. The ponzi marches on! The European economies have been wrecked by the EU. Britain is still being wrecked. Canada has been stagnating, universities turned to degree-mills, massive immigration, houses unaffordable, wages inadequate...
Why is it that schizo tariff policy is worse than deliberate, considered, orderly wrecking of the economy? Is it that famous quote from the Joker?
And I haven't even mentioned the social problems caused by these policies! London is what, 30% English? Isn't the capital of England supposed to be English? Isn't Birmingham supposed to have garbage picked up, it's supposed to be a rich industrial city, not a shithole? Aren't Western countries supposed to be high-trust societies? Isn't it bad when Biden brings millions of migrants into the US?
Trump is not perfect and he probably can't solve many if any of the challenges the US faces, while likely making many things worse. But the other side is fully committed to making things worse, they've worked hard on it and see it as virtuous. I consider DEI, expensive energy and mass migration as core policies of the mainstream right and left, everyone besides Trump and Trump-adjacent figures. As far as I'm concerned, these are bad policies.
Respectable, moderate, reasonable, orderly German centrists are working to raise the price of petrol and diesel and make workers poorer: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/incoming-german-government-from-hell
That's a sufficiently low bar that we (not you, all of us collectively) ought to be ashamed of it.
I recall Cheney and Bush being excellent on domestic energy production, such that the fruits of their policies were felt well into the Obama administration on lowered natural gas prices.
If only there were some other party with which the CDU could have formed a coalition.
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Yes but the notional balances of retirees accounts has gone down which is a great evil, whilst all these other evils were good for the amount of 0's on the spreadsheet and could be justified by magical thinking in other spreadsheets about fungibility of human labor.
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Is there any reason beyond the words of random partisan hacks to believe that those allegedly "up" are indeed up and that those allegedly "down" are indeed down?
Are you calling Scott Sumner a random partisan hack?
I'd hadn't heard of him before today but the top result for the name "Scott Sumner" in my search bar was "Economist at the University of Chicago and Vocal Critic of Donald Trump".
If his opposition to Trump and Tarrifs is notable enough to show up in his academic profile and Wikipedia I think its safe to say that he is not an unbiased observer.
He has strong opinions about Trump. That doesn't make him partisan or a hack. He's also not a random person but one of the most famous economics bloggers.
As i said, i hadn't heard of him before yesterday, but based on the first page of search results he's notable as much for his politics as for his work in economics. And as @Dean says, being popular doesn't mean he is not "a hack".
Now if his description had been "Economist at the University of Chicago and Vocal Libertarian" or "Vocal Socialist" I might not have come away with the impression that the article was written with the sole intent of trashing Trump and his supporters, but it didn't and I did.
I didn't say he wasn't a hack because he's popular. I said him not liking Trump doesn't make him a hack.
You admittedly knew nothing about but called him a hack. If you want to know if he's a hack, you need to become familiar with him. You're currently in no place to be making the judgment, which shouldn't be based on your impression from a two second Google search.
He's not even an economist at the University of Chicago.
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That makes him a statistically uncommon person. Statistically uncommon people come up in random person pulls all the time.
It certainly isn't a counter-argument to him being a partisan hack. Being a hack would go a long way to explaining why a notoriously dry, convoluted, and highly technical subject matter is keeping enough non-expert attention to justify a claim of fame. Another famed economist and partisan hack was Paul Krugman from the NYT. Krugman wasn't the NYT's go-to economist because of his economic insight and objectivity- he was the go-to economist because he would reliably tell the readers why [current democrat thing] was good and smart and why [current republican thing] was dumb and evil.
Krugman was certainly an uncommon partisan hack, but he was indeed both a partisan and a through that partisanship a hack. What separates Scott Sumner in nature, if not scale of popularity?
You're obviously not familiar with Scott Sumner. He criticizes both sides. He plainly isn't partisan.
His being famous for writing about economics doesn't need explanation just because you find the subject boring. Many people don't find it boring.
Did I misremember him being anti-populist?
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It's been a loooong time since I followed him, but I don't think he's as bad as Krugman (who is?). As far as I remember he's a pro-establishment libertarian-lite, who will occasionally side with either party, so strictly speaking not "partisan" (though deranged on the issue of populism).
Given how populism has been handled in western media over the last decade, I would absolutely consider that a partisan flag, even if it's a partisanship that's willing to shoot members of a broader policy coalition. Establishment partisans are still partisans.
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Most leftists agreed that they were in total turmoil just a few months ago, but that soul-searching is pretty much done now. This article doesn't present a lot of evidence that any of this is true, but it matches what I've seen anecdotally. If you think it's wrong and that MAGA is still feeling as triumphant as they did on election night and that leftists are still just as dejected, feel free to make the case.
This site is a lot more bearish on Trump than it was a few months ago, but that’s because people on this site hold an unusually large amount of stock, unlike most Americans. Unless there start to be actual bread-and butter negative effects on the economy that the middle and lower classes participate in, no one is going to care. It’s the reverse side of the coin of all those “why are the people living in cardboard boxes and eating rats so unhappy about the great economy?” articles you saw during the Biden administration.
My portfolio is only down a couple percent since Trump took office. "Stonks down" is not a substantial reason for me to be bearish on Trump. But prior to Trump taking office I held a sliver of hope that Trump actually meant what he said about making America great and making government efficient and effective, and then his actions so far have just been tearing down the few institutions and policies that still were contributing to making America great one after another. Mostly my increased bearishness is just that sliver of hope being extinguished.
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That’s the conflict theory view, which doubles as a zero-sum, ‘cosmic balance’, perfect information narrative. The stock market and the “elites” lose money, while the regular man will likely prosper in all the new tinsel factories. The ‘debate’, if it can be called that, is the vocalization of each side’s interest.
The mistake theory perspective is that people are often wrong and so act against their interests. The stock market is just a reflection. Trump was wrong about the effect of his tariffs on the stock and bond market, and on his trade partners and allies, and soon he will be wrong about its effects on the economy.
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It's a funny tactic isn't it. "Hey, so these 'vibe' things let you control people? Then we can 'vibe' too, just like we learned how to meme!"
The Kamala joy strategy was certainly a vibes strategy. However, the general sentiment calls to mind the recent talk from the American left about how they needed to create their own Joe Rogan to compete with the American right. The issue isn't a lack of signal or signallers in the media sphere- it's that pushing a vibe-message doesn't make the vibe occur.
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I do appreciate the strategy involved in using an article about a vibe shift to attempt to shift the vibe here though.
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I’m…not sure there’s enough here for a top-level. What did you take away from this? Do you think this guy is right? Is that a good or a bad thing?
I added another blurb to the end, hopefully that's sufficient.
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Your link is already quite content-light. It just claims that $X is "up or down".
While I might share some political sympathies, I would argue that the linked article would not cut it as a top level post. This comes across as boo outgroup, yay ingroup. (Tabloid newspapers sometimes have a "loser of the day" or "winner of the day", and this is basically the same. Let us try to do better than them.)
Of course, you turned that content-light article into a mostly content-free list by cutting even the most shallow rationales from the article.
What are the factual claim? If The Economist has twice as many readers as it had in 2024, by all means tell me about it. What is the policy argument? "pro-globalization good" has been argued much more persuasive here in the past few weeks.
(Also, what the hell are Chinese liberals? CCP members who want China to become slightly less draconian? Or human rights lawyers rotting in some jail?)
I am somewhat curious about this, too. I imagine ~all of them live in the West to begin with, and as such don't have a lot of influence on the Chinese state. Similarly, I imagine the Maoists are not the least bit mollified by Trump's actions.
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There's a rumor Scam Saltman is making a social network ..
Here's the news article.
If you are a bit paranoid and connect the dots obviously what is going to happen he's gonna get EU to ban twitter as extremist whatever and simultaneously roll out that and get people hooked on something that's much easier to police and functions better.
Remember: it's vibes
These people are all out of touch, with the exceptions of maybe Chinese. The perception of being 'up' or 'down' doesn't mean anything. In the long run, reality reasserts itself.
Surely a critical mass of left-wing Twitter has moved to Bluesky now. There's no one left to tempt over to the Shiny New Guaranteed-Fascist-Free Twitter unless you find a way to kneecap Bluesky.
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The tariffs were a big mistake.
It was probably a mistake applying them to everyone (including our allies) at once. But the two overarching policy goals (reindustrializing the US and isolating China) are good. And neither are likely to happen without a major kick in the ass to force people to move in that direction. So I'm hesitant to just flat out call the tariffs a mistake.
If you wanted to isolate China, you wouldn't immediately tariff their neighbors, you'd try to woo their regional neighbors to join your own aligned bloc. Ideally you'd do it in a group fashion to present a unified bloc and get more leverage -- a kind of organization of countries in the area.
I would call it the Across Asia Organization -- or AAO.
Interesting proposal, except the obvious counter-point that the parties involved would have obvious incentives to expect bribes in various forms in the name of being wooed, but then defect against a common tariff front against China in exchange for Chinese bribes. 'Play both parties off eachother for personal gain' is not exactly a hidden policy preference.
Breaking this defection option is why the EU makes surrendering trade sovereignty a precondition of the unified block, uses coercive instruments regularly against less powerful constituent members to punish/deter cheating, and is generally understood to be dominated by the more powerful members and regularly advances reforms to further centralize power to the net benefit of those central leaders.
Perhaps your read is different than mine, but I see no particular reason to believe the asian countries in mind are inclined to be bribed into a trade conflict with China, or into a EU-style trade block.
They all signed the TPP and we didn’t …
The TPP did not include anti-defection options for a common trade war block.
It was the anti defection option
If you ignored what it could or could not compel the participant states to do or not do.
Unless you care to cite the chapter and section providing the punishment mechanisms?
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Tariffs are a tool, not a policy. The policy that was being implemented by the Trump tariffs was not a policy to reindustrialise the US and isolate China.
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Given the how much the form theyve taken will lower the odds of sticking, and poison the well going forward, I think they are flat out a mistake.
Worse than a mistake, they are a blunder.
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I correct myself - Tariff implementation and execution was a mistake.
I think it would have turned out ok if he'd stuck with them though, or at least not backed down the way he did.
It was kind of a retreat, but look at financial markets - they are very clearly saying that the April 2 tariff annoucements and their negative impacts are largely still in place. April 9 changed the country, but it did not change the fundamental policy misconception by Trump.
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The bond market was starting to act up. Nothing good could have come from that.
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