(2024-11-12) Monahan Vibe Shift America

Sean Monohan on Vibe-Shift America. (Presidential Candidates 2024) The story of this election begins in 2020. During the initial stages of the pandemic, I pitched a client on a content series called “Every Day is a New Reality”—because what was happening, why it was happening, who was lying, and who was telling the truth was genuinely hard to discern. That sense that the media’s grasp on reality was slipping culminated with the total censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story. We now know who clicked the switch. It was the FBI. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly apologized for bowing to pressure from the intelligence services and later the Biden administration. That’s my personal story of media distrust. Oh boy

The general vibe of doom that bled into 2021 only accentuated it. There were National Guardsmen sleeping in the halls of the Capitol.

When I wrote the first ‘Vibe Shift’ article in 2021, it was six months into 2021: the COVID regulations were ratcheting back, people genuinely did not want to talk about politics anymore, and it was clear that Millennials had exited their role as youth culture arbiters

Wokeness as a cultural force peaked in 2020. When Biden won that year, people were voting for a return to normalcy. Instead, the Democratic Party misread the public mood and thought they had a mandate to institutionalize progressive ideology. As a result every institution (except notably the police) has declined in trust under the Biden administration. See the Gallup polls here.

People associate the Biden administration specifically and the Democratic Party generally with three big things:

• Increased transfer payments and wages for the poorest Americans (the poorest decile of Americans saw the biggest increase in wages)
• De facto open border policies
• Criminal justice reform

This is the DOOM people voted against.

The electorate’s dislike for these policies wasn’t overwhelming

The End of History era Millennials grew up in where the arc of history bends towards more liberal victories is over

The vibe shift this time is a story about progressive Millennials realizing that when they declared total victory for their politics in 2020—it was a Pyrrhic victory. They aren’t out of the running, yet. But they are going to have to think much more pragmatically about the trade-offs involved in their policy preferences.