Behind the vibe shift

“The vibes have changed.”

Many have made this observation in the days since Trump’s reelection and reassumption of office. Yahoo has said it. Ezra Klein and Joe Berkowitz have said it. Bill Maher has said it (profanely enough not to warrant a link). Regardless of one’s political leanings, it’s impossible not to notice how different things feel after the second election of a man who has, until recently, struggled to top a 47% approval rating. Why is that? What are the substantial changes behind the change in energy?

Klein suggests that vibe changes are the result of a few things: corporations have tired of hamstringing themselves with D.E.I. ideology; Trump is riding a masculine pushback against an overly feminized culture; and Biden’s weakness made Trump more appealing to voters.

On the surface level, I think Klein’s cultural and political answers to the vibe-shift question are accurate. But on a deeper level, I think there’s a better way of understanding the vibe shift. The “vibes” that people are noticing, I contend, are not just emotions. Rather, there’s a spiritual component to all of this, a sense in which “vibes” are not just how we feel about certain politicians but how we view the relationship between political anger and righteousness. The vibe shift, therefore, is a change in what people think political anger has to gain them. It’s not just that people have concluded that Trump’s policies are more likely than Democrats’ policies to benefit them. It’s that they’ve rejected the hard left insistence that hatred of your political opponents is how you become an honorable person.

After Trump’s election in 2016, the left’s response was evocative of Scripture’s wailing prophets. Like Joel imploring his people to turn from their sins in order to get God to relent from the upcoming disaster, Hollywood celebrities implored electors to be faithful by becoming faithless. Like Jeremiah weeping over the destruction of Jerusalem, protestors screamed with religious lamentation as Trump was sworn in. Even if normal Americans didn’t share the intensity of these reactions, many of them seemed to share the underlying presupposition: if you’re not angry, you’re not close to God or goodness.

That’s why normal people wouldn’t push back as their unhinged friends insisted Trump was always one tweet away from ending civilization. It’s why right-leaning folks felt the need to offer a long preamble decrying Trump’s personal sins before even the most tepid praise for his policies. When Biden was elected in 2020, a friend of mine aptly described the result as voters “choosing to turn down the noise.” But in a shouting match between Trump and the rather unhinged left, why was Trump the one who needed to go away? The Old Vibes were clear: he’s bad. And the way I get a life of peace and tranquility is by opposing the bad man.

But after four years of being told that it’s heresy to suggest a wretched economy and a listless president were blessings compared to another Trump term, many voters began to question that assumption of the Old Vibes. Likewise, watching the Trump Hating Prophets refuse to reevaluate their rhetoric after his near assassination—and downplay its seriousness—helped make clear what many were already sensing: The more religiously devoted people are to hating this man, the more bereft of peace and joy they seem. The more miserable they say Trump is, the more miserable they are. Loving Trump may not bring me closer to God, but hating him certainly doesn’t either. And look at all those enthusiastic people over there having fun with the Trump dance and the Trump memes. They seem much closer to peace and tranquility. I think I’d rather join them.

While there is a policy-based explanation for much of the vibe shift phenomenon, on a spiritual level, the shift doesn’t have much to do with Trump himself. It’s simply a recognition that the religion of rage so many people have tried to push on them for the last eight years has failed to deliver on any of its promises. In a sense, it’s a real-time, politically scented acknowledgement that St. James was correct when he told us “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”

This doesn’t mean, of course, that those now vibing with President Trump have figured out what actually does produce the righteousness of God, namely the blood of Christ. A rejection of the false prophets of anger doesn’t automatically place one into the arms of the God who revealed Himself through the true prophets and apostles. But if we wish to see Americans of all political leanings place their trust in Christ, it’s encouraging to see people increasingly losing their trust in political anger.