Vibes Aren’t Everything. They Are the Only Thing.

Incomprehensible political views aren’t something to be understood as much as they are to be felt. 

The total nonsensical politics of the median American voter in the third decade of the 21st century are, of course, downstream from the social media-fueled destruction of  reality, the wholesale rejection of an agreed-upon set of events as witnessed and processed by human beings. It’s not that a singular reality has been broken up into two versions of events, or even five or ten or fifty. 

Thanks to all those who support BFT. Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip!

There are as many realities as there are people alive today, tapping at our reality-generating devices until it offers us comfort and vindication and confirmation that we were, and always have been, right about everything. We are all Donald Trump wearing his Trump Was Right About Everything MAGA cap. Mother Algo soothes: Fret not, my sweet child, reality is exactly as you always believed it to be. Now work that thumb. Scroll for further soothing. Let me engage those dopamine receptors. Algo will make it all better. Scroll now. Scroll. I will flood your brain with reassurance.

Today's nonsensical politics manifests in a lot of ways that might make you look strongly into Simulation Theory: Voters who supported Trump in 2024 because they believed Joe Biden has outlawed abortion; bad-faith leftists backing Trump because believing his bullshit about being the peace candidate bolstered their personality-defining superiority complex; voters unable to decipher left-wing populism from all-out fascism; Americans who were so mad about the price of eggs in 2022 that they had no choice but to support the candidate whose economic policies were designed to crash the global financial system.

Notice all of these deeply confused political beliefs favor the fascist candidate, an anti-fragile politician who benefits from chaos and disorder. Notice how all of it filters people away from the traditional politician and toward the guy who ran on vibes and vibes alone. He tried to overthrow the U.S. government, sure, but he also did that funny pre-election bit as a McDonald’s drive-thru worker and drove around in a trash truck. Trump's vibes are weird and off putting and unsettling, but at least he has them. Democrats – most Democrats, anyway – have none. 

Insurrection Or Non-Event? It’s Up To You.

The history of January 6 cannot be muddled. We saw what happened and we won’t be gaslighted.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Reality melting away has been a big fucking boon for the international fascist movement, which has seized the algorithms that control our lives – local elections, national elections, the rise and fall of empires – and mainstreamed their radical views within existing conservative parties that have faced a choice: Radicalize or perish from the earth. The end of a world that makes sense, meanwhile, has driven the left insane: Exasperated liberals jab at charts and graphs and facts and figures and pretend any of it matters anymore. After a decade of being Leslie Knope lost in the jungle facing down the Predator, left-leaning parties still think there’s a way to engage in good-faith talks with the Predator if it would only ingest enough data quantifying what is and is not real. 

Sometimes the undoing of a common reality manifests itself in a guy wearing a MAGA for Mamdani t-shirt and hat, an expression of overwhelmingly incoherent politics that would not have been possible even ten years ago (although the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline foretold this MAGA socialist). Our brains are fried now, fried enough to enthusiastically support the outspokenly democratic-socialist mayoral candidate in New York City and the authoritarian, anti-constitutionalist menace occupying the White House. Why? Because both of them seem like cool guys on our various timelines. That these two men support polar opposite visions of the United States – and, more generally, of how human society should be conducted – does not matter to the MAGA for Mamdani fella. It doesn't matter to a lot of people.

Mamdani, like the fascist president threatening to punish New York City for exercising its right to self governance, tickles MAGA for Mamdani Guy's vibes receptors. That's all that matters.

Way back in summer 2024 – you may be old enough to remember the time – I wrote a lot about the supremacy of vibes-based politics and why I was heartened that Kamala Harris’ early campaign had fully embraced vibes-centered messaging while rejecting the technocratic bullshit no one cares about. Harris and her campaign surrogates laughed off mainstream media fretting about how her administration would pay for this or that – something that is never asked of a Republican candidate – and said we're going to do cool stuff when we're in power and you don't have to worry about how. That's a winning message – one that was compromised and then replaced by the hyper-fragility of a traditional Democratic presidential campaign in the final sixty days of the race. I still believe today – even as I get weekly messages mocking my bullishness for the early Harris campaign – that Trump had no path to victory against a similarly vibes-based opponent.

So it's vindicating – maybe that's Mother Algo talking – to log on one day nine months into Trump's second nightmare term and see the MAGA for Mamdani Guy posing for pictures on my Bluesky timeline. MAGA for Mamdani Guy surely doesn't give a single shit about tax policy or foreign policy or environmental policy. He probably doesn't spend much time thinking about the separation of powers as enumerated in the constitution. I'm guessing MAGA for Mamdani Guy hasn't pondered our current Article I crisis. Probably he likes the idea of economic populism – a little more for the working schmo, a little less for the billionaire – but has no idea how this might come to pass.

His entire world is centered on vibes. There is no analysis. Maybe there's no thinking. If MAGA for Mamdani Guy can vibe with you, you get his vote. There's nothing else to it, and there's no way to quantify it. And in these dwindling days of the year 2025, we live in a country of 350 million MAGA for Mamdani Guys.

The Key Is To Stop Thinking

Zohran Mamdani has vibes to spare. It’s why he’s going to cruise to victory on Tuesday along with Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey. The opposition is faring quite well in our new and awful environment of competitive authoritarianism.

Mamdani a cool, young guy who relates to young voters and has the energy to get out there among regular folks and do regular people things. Yeah, he has policy ideas, some of which he details, some of which he leaves to a voter's imagination (I prefer the latter over the former, as you may know). Right-wing propaganda mills splash Mamdani's ideas to make your life slightly less bleak across your TV screen like a threat. He nods and says yes, these are the goals I will pursue.

Mamdani's approach in his underdog bid to become New York's next mayor – a bid made possible by the city's wonderful publicly-funded campaign system – is very much anathema to the bloodless wonkishness of Democratic Party members and supporters who want to abandon the act of Doing Politics and instead ask what people like, support those things, and abandon vulnerable populations to the right-wing wood chipper. It's called popularism and it's a direct path to permanent minority status, the crowning jewel of the political loser. It's the direct opposite of the Republican approach to politics: Telling their voters what is good and what is bad and bending their base to the will of its powerbrokers. Perhaps this is easier for a party filled with people obsessed with in-group dominance, but the phenomenon shouldn't be ignored by those who oppose fascism.

A bunch of well-meaning liberals recently gaged what might make for a viable popularist platform. These folks – desperately seeking a path back to pre-Trump normalcy – drew upon thousands of election results, hundreds of public polls and academic papers, dozens of case studies, and surveys of more than half a million voters conducted since the 2024 election. They concluded that defeating a fascist political party that has abandoned all precepts of a functional democracy requires Democrats to focus on "the economy, the cost of living, health care, border security, and public safety," and to ignore "climate change, democracy, abortion, identity and cultural issues."

This report, Deciding To Win, is a call for the Democratic Party of the mid 2020s to transform itself into something ancient, a nightmarish amalgamation of the Clinton-era party and the pre-Newt Gingrich Republican Party. Deciding To Win urges the Democratic Party to become Monstro Elisasue from The Substance.

There are a dozen ways in which this report is an amoral failing. Let's consider just one way: Abandoning abortion rights – basic bodily autonomy – after a half century of the right wing dismantling access to the medical procedure. Most Americans no longer have real access to abortion care after the captured Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade and these politics knowers want Democrats to de-emphasize restoration of abortion rights. The report explicitly calls for the party to give up on reproductive rights, to concede the victory to a movement that strives to control Americans' fertility. If the Democratic Party is not up for the fight to restore nationwide abortion access, it doesn't deserve to exist.

Deciding To Win – a roadmap to losing everywhere all the time – is a Knope-esque plea to become boring in an age of dopamine overload, to ignore the conversion of politics into content to be consumed by a populace with no understanding of its own history. It operates under the assumption that Americans are citizens when we are not. We are consumers of goods and of content because that's all we were ever taught to be. This report is for a world that no longer exists. It belongs to the world that ended when Hillary Clinton's campaign collapsed under the weight of a new world populated by anxious, depressed MAGA for Mamdani Guys.

The act of doing politics requires one to convince people to support a certain agenda, not focus grouping people until you have a spreadsheet of ways you can pathetically pander to their fleeting interests and concerns. When someone tells you they do not prioritize protecting LGBTQ rights or undocumented people, you try to convince them they are wrong, not by shaming – that never works – but by showing some courage and being unafraid to do what's right. Mamdani has done just that in his mayoral campaign without sacrificing a hopeful economic message for working people in New York. He has said no, we will not be sacrificing trans folks and immigrants in order to maybe – possibly – gain the support of some wishy-washy independent who vacillates between backing fascists and small-d democrats.

Mamdani has not flinched on so-called cultural issues – a euphemism for "basic human rights" in the Deciding To Win report – while pledging that under his leadership, New Yorkers might not get their skulls crushed beneath the wheel of capital.

Do you know what it's called when a politician stands tall and refuses to back down in the face of pressure to do a politically convenient thing? It's called vibes. And while those vibes might alienate the independent voter who has lived at the center of the Democratic Party imagination for fifty years, it's wildly appealing to the non-voter who – with some justification – sees both major parties as the same on big issues. A vibes-based politics drives unlikely voters to the polls: We've seen this three goddamn times with Trump, the only living Republican who can motivate unengaged voters to haul their asses to local polling places on Election Day. When Trump's vibes are not on the ballot, Republicans get wrecked. It's going to happen Tuesday in Virginia and New Jersey and New York and Pennsylvania, just as it happened a few months ago in Wisconsin.

Likewise, Mamdani's vibes have invigorated parts of the New York voting population that would have never been enthusiastic about a replacement-level Democratic candidate who begged folks to get excited about their campaign's latest economic bar graph, now with a vibrant blue hew. Vibes inspire. Vibes motivate.

People don't want to think; they want to feel. To survive in our new political environment, Democrats must stop thinking and start feeling.

Following the edicts of the Deciding To Win report necessarily means Democratic candidates will be on permanent defense against their opponents (Republicans, Wall Street, billionaire tech fascists, the entire media, Elon Musk's fascist-making machine). It means the party and its candidates will be more hyper-fragile than ever. It means they will be even more unable to absorb the shocks and chaos of our incomprehensible political environment. Deciding To Win was written for another era.

Nothing Makes Sense Anymore

The left owns sports. The right owns electric cars. None of it makes sense to a millennial.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

I write a lot about the role of vibes in modern politics because I know the traditional way of doing politics – the way the Harris campaign operated in September and October 2024 – opens yourself up to bad-faith attacks from a radicalized right wing steeped in nihilism. Detailing policy stances is a path to nowhere when you're facing opposition that cares about nothing and no one. Sidestepping the wonky shit of traditional politics and embracing a feeling safeguards you against bad-faith attacks and puts the right on its back foot, as we saw in August 2024 when one word (temporarily) broke the fascist fever.

What exactly would a vibes-based Democratic campaign look like? It would not have an official platform, that much is for sure. It would nod enthusiastically at ideas like healthcare for all and a national family leave policy and universal pre-K without a single detail about the cost of such programs. It would vigorously defend immigrants against the ethnic cleansing machine taking hold in power centers across the country. It would paint opponents not as misguided or misinformed, but as irredeemably bad, a malignant force that contrasts starkly with you and your backers. People want simple narratives. Nothing is simpler than Good vs. Evil.

Republicans haven't had a platform since Mitt Romney was their presidential candidate. They've done just fine in the intervening years. They've coasted to total dominance on a sea of vibes.

A vibes-based Democratic campaign would redirect all policy questions toward emotional appeals to the Democratic base – whatever that is today – and those who may have backed Bernie Sanders but chose the fascist instead – folks like MAGA for Mamdani Guy, who wants a splash of socialism along with his nationalism. MAGA for Mamdani Guy, like all voters, is not a rational being. People have never been rational, and with fifteen years of social media brain poison transforming the human experience, we are less rational than ever. To reject this is to accept that you will never, ever win again. To reject this is choosing to lose.

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