When Trump was reelected, there was a lot of talk about “the vibe shift.” It was basically a phrase meaning the end of the woke era and the start of something else.
The woke era was really the feeling of disappointment and despair at the end of the Obama era, which was less transformative than the left had hoped, and actually included many real reversals for them. A lot of it was just an embrace of a certain kind of frank, offensive speech in public again, and in comedy in particular. I think a great deal of it was just people giving up on a project that had begun in 2016, which was a frantic scramble to get new tech companies to re-empower the liberal gatekeepers they had disempowered.
This was an era of censorship and shadow-banning, and newer speech codes. After 2024 it was just accepted: Netflix is going to air Dave Chapelle making jokes about transgenderism. Joe Rogan is going to have an audience of millions, nothing to be done anymore.
I think there’s another mood shift coming, and it might be a larger one. I think the AI and data center panic might be the crescendo of a long doom-and-gloom era of American politics, which began for some in the end of the Bush era and others at the end of the Obama era. Trump was the primary beneficiary. His slogan was Make America Great Again. The first response from the left side of the aisle was more along the lines of “America was never great and still isn’t. It’s poisoned by racism, patriarchy, inequality, etc.”
There are still reasons to believe a kind of populism will endure; I think the strongest is that institutions of elite formation are in such poor shape and leave our elite under-equipped in knowledge and virtue for leadership.
But the mood music is going to change. Someone in our political culture is going to emerge and try an appeal to our better angels. This kind of politics can turn smug, and dismissive of dissent — but it has its power.