The Vibes They Are a-Shiftin'

I'm taking that title from Matt Yglesias' latest column. He's right, and that's good.

Let's be clear, I really really don't like Trump. And while I think Elon is brilliant and his tech has done, is doing, and will do much good, I also think he's looking nuttier than a fruitcake. I think this new AI technology is wonderful, I also think we're looking at this 21st century technology through an imagination that's still mired in the 19th century and hasn't yet managed to break free. That's not good.

Still, on the whole, the vibes are somehow good.

Does that mean that at long last the techtonic plates are beginning to shift? I sure hope so. And if they're shifting, it remains to be seen just who'll be guiding them into a new configuration. That is not at all written in stone.

From Yglesias, who names Tyler Cowen as the one who first identified the shift:

I liked Ezra Klein’s exploration of this theme on January 19, which he glossed with the observation that Trump’s narrow popular vote win (smaller than Biden’s in 2020 or either of Obama’s or even Hillary’s in 2016) feels like a kind of psychic landslide. And Klein rightly notes that the vibes, in this sense, are badly misaligned with the actual vote count in Congress. I find Trump to be a hard figure to predict. But looking up the size of his House majority is easy, and it would be deeply strange for a majority this thin to generate a large quantity of highly partisan policy change. And yet, the vibes! It feels like American culture is primed to turn decisively to the right.

The vibes they are good.

 Later:

There’s been so much attention paid to the apparent realignment of a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires that I don’t have much to add to this.

What I actually think is more important with regard to “vibes” is the strong realignment of the youngest cohort of voters toward Trump. Trump did strikingly better with voters under 30 than he had in his prior two races, winning young men by a large margin.

YES!

There's more in the post that's publicly available, and I assume there's much more behind the paywall. But if I paid for a subscription to every Substack written by a smart person who every so often writes one I really like, if I did that, then I couldn't pay the rent. Sigh...