Vibe Shift

There's a reason things feel different

It’s been hard not to notice that 2024 is not 2016. While Trump’s victory was a heartbreaking disappointment to millions of Democrats, there have been no riots, no freeway takeovers, not even any street protests big enough to make the news. Your neighbor with their In This House We Believe lawn sign did not move to Canada. Our collective Thanksgiving table did not become the powder keg that ignited the next civil war. We celebrated Christmas as we always have, and New Year’s Eve will be no different. It almost feels like a normal presidential election.

That weird feeling of normalcy might be the most radical disruption the election has effected from the pattern of the better part of a decade. Normalcy was supposed to be Biden’s gift to America four years ago, but between the President’s advancing senility and Trump’s intention to run again, the political melodrama of the Trump years continued under Biden like a bad sequel, and this year’s election became both the most unusual one in American history and yet another existential struggle for the Future of American Democracy.

The fact that we are not now living in a state of pre-apocalyptic social unrest suggests that nobody really believed the stories they were selling about prison camps and day-one dictatorships. But it also suggests that the cultural engine that mass manufactured the panic and hyperbole that has defined American politics since 2015 has stalled. The election results overturned the ideological incentive structure.