Vibes Are All That Matter Now

We all remember where we were when Kamala Harris took the stage during a late September rally, in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, and announced the policy that lost her the election and plunged us into authoritarianism. 

Harris, standing next to her football-coach-turned-VP-candidate Tim Walz, said football in the United States would be banned on Day One of her administration. Anyone who even attempted to play organized football would be arrested and investigated and would likely face serious jail time. There could, Harris said, be a carve-out for flag football, but only for girls and women. 

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The days of men playing and watching high school and college and professional football, she declared, were over – a relic of a toxic, misogynist, backward past that would be expunged from the national consciousness. Walz nodded solemnly. The crowd went wild. New York Jets faithful, unburdened of their torturous fandom, cried tears of joy. Football enjoyers like myself were forced underground, where we patiently await the nation’s pastime to be resurrected, satiating ourselves with football highlight compilations on the dark web. 

Though this (of course) did not happen, something like it happened in the minds of young men who flocked to Donald Trump in 2024. Maybe because they’ve made themselves repellant to women or perhaps because they have major daddy issues, they supported an explicitly fascist presidential candidate because they believed he liked sports and his opponents did not. 

Years after Trump and his army of MAGA automatons told Americans to stop watching the NFL because a player had quietly protested against police violence, he attended a couple college football games and a bunch of UFC events in 2024 and instantly became sports-loving daddy to zoomer guys who know nothing about the world that hasn’t been told to them by Joe Rogan and his mostly-blackpilled guests. 

I think the below social media post went viral on Bluesky because it so accurately reflected what we heard from young men in the run-up to the 2024 election.

Kamala Harris was a joyless scold who made them feel bad about themselves. Plus, of course, she was a woman. Trump, meanwhile, allowed these guys in their 20s and 30s to wallow in their totally invented victimization. “I feel like Republicans have signaled to younger men that you have a place here. If you come with us, you’ll have fun,” one of the zoomer dudes interviewed by a More Perfect Union said when asked about how America’s two major political parties cater to men. “You don’t have to be polite. You don’t have to be someone you’re not. You don’t have to be restrained.”

Isn’t that what it’s all about? You’ll never have to experience a moment of introspection, a second of critical inner dialogue, if you come with us. Our promise is that you will never have to think.

The world, according to their podcasts and social media timelines, has turned against these guys by giving opportunities to ladies and folks of color. They had been politely asked to take five minutes and think about their place on the hierarchy of oppression and the history of the United States and the poor babies felt so bad about themselves. They were left with no choice but to usher in America’s first king, a weak old man who likes to watch other men beat themselves bloody. 

In no way was the Harris campaign remotely hostile to sports. She picked a former football coach and one of the best examples of American masculinity as her vice president and had support from professional athletes and spoke like a normal person in touch with American popular culture. Despite this, and despite her experience as an attorney general and a U.S. senator and a vice president, zoomer men saw Harris as mommy telling them to make their beds. Daddy Trump didn’t care whether you made your bed, or whether you treat women like people, or whether you have access to healthcare. 

Zoomers guys’ baby-soft woe-is-me mindset has been adopted worldwide, in societies experiencing various degrees of democratic decline thanks to the internet. They’ve been told since they were teenagers that they are victims of a world that longs to take away the privilege their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed. They turn on the TV and do not see themselves reflected in every single character, only most. They don’t consume news as much as they allow right-wing podcasters to interpret the world for them. Central to that interpretation is the unshakeable idea that They – women, people of color, Jews, gay folks, trans folks, Democrats, men whose wives don’t take their last name – want to take everything from you, including, I suppose, football. 

Zoomer Dudes’ Embrace of Authoritarianism Is Worse Than You Think

Recent analysis of 2024 voting data shows just how far down the fascist rabbit hole young guys have gone

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

In a world where elected Democrats were calling for the end of football, you could (almost) excuse their flirtations with fascism. American men have endowed football with a lot of meaning, no different than how men (and women) in every other part of the world endow soccer with an almost religious meaning. If national Democratic leaders were out here telling people they should feel bad about watching football on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, there would at least be some kind of rationale for supporting the odious politics of Trump and his anti-democracy movement. But there’s not, because it’s all a fantasy – a vast unreality – created by fascist media to help these young dudes justify their desire for a more unequal, more inequitable, less free United States – a desire that goes unspoken because it is unspeakable.

Just ask America’s leading monarchist, Curtis Yarvin, about refusing to say the ugly part aloud. 

We Are Ruled By Vibes

The American left, however you define that, seems unable to come to terms with the current state of politics. The realty-shaping forces of social media companies and the right’s total takeover and poisoning of the country’s information environment has plunged us into a post-materialist politics. A culture that has convinced working people that they are the eaters, not the eaten, has neutralized materialist appeals. Wages, jobs, healthcare costs, housing, infrastructure, school funding, college affordability, roads, energy costs: None of it matters anymore. If it did, Harris could have won forty states last November. 

Social media companies engineered the so-called vibecession to ensure Trump's return to power. With no actual recession in the offing – no matter how much corporate America wanted it – the creation of bad vibes were the next best option. Without the vibecession, there is no second Trump term. Economic misinformation, after all, “explains up to 84 percent of the one-month-ahead macroeconomic uncertainty after one year” and “contributes 50 percent of the short-run volatility of the unemployment rate and still accounts for one third of its overall volatility after one year," according to a study published last year by the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Detailed plans on how to improve Americans’ material lives haven’t moved the proverbial needle for at least the past ten years. Go back to the George W. Bush era and you’ll find voters who sided with Bush because they could envision themselves having a beer with him, not because they had particular love for his plutocratic agenda. 

Today – 20 terrible years later – materialist appeals don’t matter at all. Vibes are all that matter. If you don’t have vibes, you have nothing. 

I imagine the pushback to such a claim would include pointing to Zohran Mamdani’s recent win in New York City’s Democratic primary. Mamdani, who like Bernie Sanders and AOC, blessedly does not hide from his democratic socialist label, campaigned on improving the lives of working New Yorkers: Raising wages, improving the city’s transit system, making housing far more affordable, ensuring people have access to decent food with city-owned grocery stores. These are all classic examples of materialist politics winning the day, and I was thrilled to see it happen. What Mamdani’s materialist political success ignores is that my man is a Vibes King without equal.

Mamdani is handsome and affable and light on his feet. He smiles and laughs and speaks in a language of vibrant hope that few American politicians have even considered using in their campaigns. Mamdani has the courage to say the unspeakable in modern American politics: A better future if possible if we want it. He says what he means: I dare you to listen to Mamdani talk about solving problems and tune out. You can't. Mamdani’s vibes, like Barack Obama before him, are outrageously good. Without them, his materialist messaging would never have broken through. He would have been just another Democrat pointing at charts and graphs, pretending human beings are rational.

Vibes first, then materialism. The former makes the latter go down easy. 

I wrote quite a bit (too much?) about the early days of Kamala Harris’ campaign after Biden had dropped out of the race against a candidate who was very clearly constitutionally ineligible to be president. This was before bloodless Democratic Party consultants sunk their fangs into the Harris campaign and sucked out all the fun, all the vibes. For a few glorious weeks in the summer of 2024, the Harris campaign was fueled entirely on vibes. It was extremely online and outright rejected the right’s bad-faith politics and shrinking the fascists down to size with perfectly-calibrated dilemma actions that have rankled fascist movements worldwide. The vibes pulsating from the Harris campaign temporarily broke the fascist fever.

Harris and her surrogates had said nope to the tired Leslie Knope politics of Democratic campaigns past. We had moved on to vibes. I hoped Harris would never make a peep about policy details beyond vague promises to improve the everyday lives of everyday folks. As soon as she did – as soon as her consultants had Harris bogged down in the wonkishness of boring-ass policy discussions – I knew it was over. I coped for a while, but I knew.

Why? Because while Trump and his campaign were up to their eyelids in rancid vibes, at least they had vibes. Trump didn’t give a shit about policy beyond saying he would deliver incalculable pain to the marginalized groups his supporters hate most. His 2024 campaign, like his 2016 campaign, ran on nothing but vibes. When he became the only vibes-based candidate in the 2024 race, it was over. He had won. 

To believe American voters are capable of digesting strictly materialist political messaging is a fundamental, catastrophic misreading of the electorate in this third decade of the 21st century, when social media algorithms tell us what is good and what is bad and take precedence over our human experience, when more dopamine is our only demand. Vibes rule, for better or worse. 

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.