The Politics of "Vibes"
How much can be accomplished by a good political mood?
Those of you who just can’t get enough Linker may have an interest in reading my latest essay in The Atlantic, “The Post-liberal Catholics Find Their Man in J.D. Vance.” It’s a close look at how Donald Trump tapping Vance to serve as his running mate advances the ideas and ambitions of a group of prominent post-liberal Catholic intellectuals. I also do some work in the piece of comparing and contrasting these ideas and ambitions to those of the conservative Catholics I wrote about a generation ago in The Theocons. You can read the essay (until August 22) by following the gift link here.
It was only a couple of years ago that I found myself asking out loud on social media what everyone meant by the term “vibes.” I kept seeing it over and over again and found it perplexing.
Of course I knew the colloquial meaning of the term, which I associated with my youth in the late 1970s: There’s a really bad vibe in here. It’s the kind of thing you’d say if you walked into a room where a couple had just been fighting. You didn’t see or hear the conflict, but you could sense its aftermath, like a lingering bad odor, so you knew what had transpired. Then there was the post-hippy formulation that no one older than 22 would dare to express in so many words: Don’t harsh my vibe, man. Meaning: I just did a bong hit, am feeling good, and your uptight attitude is bringing me down.
In both cases, the word means, roughly, “mood.” Sometimes it can refer to my individual mood, but more often it has a collective dimension, describing how we are feeling in this place at this moment. As in: The economic data all show signs of falling inflation in the United States, but bad vibes about the economy persist from the price hikes of last year. Or: As a progressive, I was spooked by the angry vibes at the Trump rally. Or: The vibe among Democrats was really gloomy until Joe Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed Kamala Harris to run in his place. Since then, and especially since she picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate, the vibes have been fantastic!
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