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The ‘vibes shift’ as a preemptive declaration of hegemony

This from the consistently excellent John Ganz (highly recommend his book) captures something I’ve been struggling to articulate since Trump’s victory. Why has there been such a rush to frame this in hegemonic terms when there was a 1.5% difference in vote share between the two candidates? There’s clearly an elite recomposition underway, with tech capital taking the leadership role for the first time, which is starting to produce substantive outgrowths. Watching JD Vance’s speech I immediately found myself thinking about how Bush era leaders would have talked about issues relating to the oil industry:

The richest people in the world with unprecedented control over the media and communications realign politically and then—coincidentally—there is a “big cultural shift.” Why? “Can’t say for sure, but probably has something to do with how annoying liberals are.” Come the fuck on. They are already putting pressure on the media to soften coverage. It’s not that things are just happening, they are doing things. And the media is already bending or being taken over by regime-friendly oligarchs. It’s not a mystery what’s going on—we can still read about it in the newspaper—so let’s not mystify ourselves.

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/vibes-cartel

One last thought. What this insistence on a new order—the vibes—remind me of a lot was the hysterical run-up to the war against Iraq. The sense was created of an unstoppable momentum and there was relentless, insidious sidelining and castigation of critics and dissent. Even if people did not think they were warmongering, they helped the regime’s cause by attacking those who objected as fuddy-duddies, hopelessly out-of-date, and unfashionable. Obviously, we were in a New Era™ after 9/11. Obviously, the administration had the winds of history at its back. It wasn’t conservatives and right-wingers who did a lot of this work, but liberals who rationalized and justified what was a series of absurd lies and ultimately a catastrophe. This is what I was trying to get at when we were moving into a Vichy era: a lot of people are just going to go along to get along. But not all.

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/vibes-cartel
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