Politicians and commentators alike appear to agree that we are currently experiencing a “vibe shift,” and not the kind Kamala Harris was hoping to ride to political victory last year. A “vibe shift” is defined as “a significant change in a prevailing cultural atmosphere or trend,” and while politics is certainly part of it, the populist victories we have seen in many Western countries over the past several years are as much a manifestation of that vibe shift rather than the actual source, although the relationship between the two—especially when it comes to Donald Trump—is frequently difficult to disentangle.
Most journalists don’t even try. In a widely mocked piece by Brock Colyar in New York Magazine titled “The Cruel Kids Table” (subtitle: “Among the young, confident, and casually cruel Trumpers who, after conquering Washington, have their sights set on America”), Colyar focuses on the young, dissident culture of the alt-media scene and MAGA world. Colyar’s analysis is limited by his focus on the inaugural parties; interviewing cocky, victory-drunk, and boozy influencers is going to produce very specific and somewhat predictable reporting. Still, he’s on to something.
Mana Afsari’s brilliant feature for The Point, titled “Lost Boys at the Beginning of History,” is a far deeper and more insightful dive into a subset of the same culture—the young, predominantly male movement turning to the Right. Afsari focuses on the yearning for meaning and rich interior and intellectual life that these young men crave. She writes about the emerging movement that centers around gatherings like the National Conservatism Conference (a trend I’ve written about for The European Conservative). Her description matches my own observations:
Young men like Lucas and Alex make up about 90 percent of an informal group of conservative Hill staffers, think-tankers and young professionals who host debating parties around the city. Between NatCon and the election, I attend several of the debates. The young men give eloquent, sometimes sophomoric, but always earnest speeches, at whatever venue they can find, and they do it all for free—they even chip in to keep the parties going. The men wear tailored two- and three-piece wool suits and matching pocket squares, and the (few) women wear cocktail dresses; there’s apparently nowhere they’d rather be on a Saturday night.
These young intellectuals call themselves—like pitch-perfect nineteenth-century romantics—“sensitive young men.” At the after-parties they discuss metaphysics. Despite this being a D.C. social event, I don’t know where they work. It’s obvious, however, that some of the best congressional offices on the Hill, several conservative magazines and the D.C.-area universities are well represented. I do know, though, what they think about free will and contingency, ancient history and EU regulatory disputes. Among them I’ve heard discussions of twentieth-century espionage and historical intrigues and quotes from Kissinger, Freud, Kierkegaard, Homer, Virgil, Montesquieu and the Federalist Papers. They revive the best parts of their undergraduate curricula and try their best to cultivate serious intellectual lives. They also impose strict rules, among them a complete prohibition against phones on the debate floor.
Afsari notes, importantly, that although most of these young men are Trump supporters—some are fervent fans—the movement is not primarily political. It is far deeper than that. These Gen Zers are digital natives and grew up in a world shaped by social media, pornography, and a culture hostile to the inheritance that they are now reaching for with longing, aspiration, and a not insignificant measure of desperation. It is young men like this who are going back to church and buying Bibles. What does it mean? It is too early—and they are too young—to know for certain. But some aspects of this “vibe shift” are now observable.
The contrast between this new subculture and previously cringeworthy conservative attempts to astroturf a “cool” youth scene is stark. I attended CPAC as a university student in 2010, and the GOP was desperate to prove that they could appeal to kids. Their solution was a parallel event called “XPAC,” which was accompanied by the irritating but ostensibly cool subtitle “Epic Nites,” hosted in a large conference room featuring Guitar Hero and other video games. It was run by radio host Kevin McCullough and Stephen Baldwin (Alec Baldwin’s brother, Justin Bieber’s father-in-law, etc.)
It was…really bad. “I know you don’t hear the word ‘gnarly’ too much in conservative circles,” Baldwin told us. “But you’re gonna start hearing it in the future!” We took it as a threat.
Most students looked excruciatingly bored, grabbed free food, and left. A few speakers showed up; Sarah Huckabee (current governor of Arkansas, daughter of a former governor of Arkansas), and a rapper named Politik reeled off painfully partisan lines. The only people enthused about XPAC were the middle-aged strategists who planned it. As it turns out, “uncool” people attempting to invent a right-wing version of the Obama youth movement is as awful as it sounds. Instead, a much older culture—suits, fat books, debates, elegant dresses—became cool again, in part by virtue of becoming the counterculture. The thing about vibe shifts is that you can’t predict or facilitate them.
As Afsari writes of the young crowds swarming to NatCon:
Somehow, the National Conservatism conference—home to a movement emphasizing national loyalty, marriage, civic responsibility, religion—had tapped into energies that felt, to many, fresher, freer and wilder than the once-natural home of soulful young men and women—the left or liberalism. The NatCons addressed questions of the heart, recognizing that the young need ideals and aspirations—and most of all, a vocation.
Epic Nites, indeed.
The Political Vibe Shift
The vibe shift is more significant than a few think pieces on a few young men. For the first time in my lifetime, the Democrats are uncool. Their “disapproval” rating is at 57%–one of the highest ever recorded.
“What’s distinctive about this moment is that the Democrats didn’t just lose an election,” Ross Douthat of the New York Timestold Jonah Goldberg. “They also lost a culture war, and they’re really not used to losing culture wars. That’s not how the world is supposed to work. You lose some elections to Republicans, and that stinks, but except for this brief 9/11 moment, there’s never been a moment where the Democrats have felt like they are losing the culture wars, and now there is.” Goldberg interrupted: “That’s the real vibe shift.” Douthat concurred: “That’s the real vibe shift, but it bleeds into political battles.”
Those political battles have woken progressives up to the reality that their hold on culture may be slipping. This realization that came late due to the vast institutional power they possess, a phenomenon referred to colloquially as “the Deep State” which allows them to shape policy and maintain a truly vast “soft power” through the finances dispensed by government departments such as USAID—which essentially function as independent entities—and the ubiquitous implementation of internal government regulations on LGBT ideology, DEI, and other progressive passions.
We saw the internal apparatuses of the federal leviathan go to war with the first Trump administration, and his determined attack on these apparatuses now constitute, as Mary Harrington put it, an internal “color revolution.” Harrington’s description sums it up brilliantly: “Heavy howitzer fire continued in the American Blob, as the Trump administration’s DOGE team set about regime-changing the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.” She’s not kidding, either. As one USAID employee described the chaos in a press interview: “DOGE was in the building. We started taking down our Pride flags, I took out any books I felt would be incriminating, no one was talking…”
Progressives became complacent about the culture because they owned it. The entertainment industry disseminates their worldview with extraordinary propagandistic power, ensuring that the cultural lens through which people view the world was their lens, deriving their views on sexuality from sitcoms and unconsciously humming along to Lady Gaga songs pumped out of supermarket speaker systems. Big Tech enforced both their narrative and their terminology, designating the truth about biological sex and the LGBT agenda “hate speech” and evicting dissidents from the digital public square. The mainstream press, as we saw with the tidal wave of often overtly deceitful coverage after the fall of Roe v. Wade, usually functions in lockstep.
So, what changed? Where did the “vibe shift” originate? Donald Trump was obviously a significant part of it. The press dubbed him the “chaos candidate”; after the first few weeks of his second administration, it is probably more accurate to call him the “catalyst candidate.” Trump was an independently wealthy outsider with a TV star’s uncanny ability to read the room and the personal charisma to lead the room; he is a businessman who prizes both loyalty and revenge. When the “American blob” reacted to his first election like the invasion of a foreign object and attempted to expel him, it largely crippled his first administration. But the American people sent Trump back, and his war on the “Deep State” is now deeply personal.
It turns out that many people were sick of being constantly racialized. They were tired of being told to recite their pronouns and check their privilege. They liked many aspects of the nanny state, but didn’t like the wealthy, hectoring harridans in charge of it. When they resisted, they were cancelled, demonized, and frequently destroyed (consider what the press attempted to do to the Covington kids at the March for Life). Just five years ago, in the wake of the George Floyd riots, “anti-racist” workshops, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programming, and relentless self-loathing were all the rage. Now, Black Lives Matter has collapsed as a cultural powerhouse; corporations from Meta to Target are eliminating their DEI programs, and Donald Trump is purging DEI from the federal government.
Many cultural debates were simply never had—they were enforced from the top down. Most Americans do not believe there are 72 genders. Most are appalled by the systematic mutilation of gender-confused minors in the name of an ideology that never gained popular support. (The gay rights movement, on the other hand, did change public opinion—but even that story, as Darel Paul details in his essential bookFrom Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage, is more complicated than it seems.) The narratives and language surrounding these debates were enforced by Big Tech, but when Elon Musk purchased Twitter and inaugurated a free speech regime, the effect was immediate. Mark Zuckerberg at Meta is following suit. With the censorious curators banished, the vibe shift can be seen on social media, too.
Then, of course, there were the twin catastrophes of Covid and the Black Lives Matter riots. As I wrote in The European Conservative:
The overnight curtailing of civil liberties and the often-vicious government response to dissent was a political and cultural inflection point that most politicians have not yet begun to understand, much less grapple with. The societal fault lines already made visible by the growing success of populist movements around the world turned into canyons as people radicalized in response to the realization that their governments had far more power than they had ever imagined—and that this could impact every aspect of their lives.
For millions of people, the state response to COVID was a revelation. We had no idea that the government could, overnight, confine us to our homes. We didn’t realize they could prevent us from flying, visiting family, going to church, or attending funerals—even in open-air cemeteries. We didn’t know that the government apparently possessed the tools to shut down businesses and have pastors arrested for following their consciences and keeping their churches open. Irrespective of your views on COVID, vaccination, or the motives of individual politicians—and these understandably and reasonably vary widely—most of us had no idea that freedoms could be removed so abruptly, with so little recourse available to ordinary people.
Many could have accepted the rationalization that the risk warranted the response. But then came the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the bizarre hysteria that swept the globe. The very same establishment who told us to stay indoors and practice social distancing joined mass rallies to take a knee and justified mob violence. In fact, TIME magazine published a report in 2020 explaining that even though we couldn’t attend funerals or visit loved ones, BLM protests were different, because: “Racism is a public-health issue that long predates coronavirus” and “protest is a public health intervention.” You couldn’t have crafted a narrative more devastating to establishment credibility in a lab.
If I had to select a single image to represent the implosion of public trust, it would be the now-famous CNN shot of a reporter standing in front of burning cars and torched buildings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with the chyron beneath it reading: “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests After Police Shooting.” The phrase became an immortal meme within days.
The Democrats have been left bewildered by the vibe shift and panicked by Trump’s ongoing attempts to root out their institutional influence; the New York Timesrecently published a report detailing their desperation. But triumphalism would be a mistake. It is true that the Trump administration is rooting out gender ideology and attempting to reorient the federal leviathan. But it is very, very early, and Trump’s capacity for error and misjudgment, not to mention his incurably thin-skinned nature and capacity for personal pique, are as legendary as his political accomplishments. Not to mention the fact that the collapse of establishment credibility creates as many problems as opportunities, a subject that would take an entirely separate series of essays.
But still: the vibe shift is real. Democrats are uncool. Progressives have lost a culture war. Perhaps the “American Blob” will reassert itself, but Trump has shown us where the fight must be had.
The Metaphysical Vibe Shift
A second—and perhaps far more significant—example of this “vibe shift” is the concurrent collapse of the New Atheist movement. Justin Brierley described that phenomenon in his recent book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again (which we discussed in an interview here). As I noted recently in First Things, the brief New Atheist moment has given way to a renewed interest in God and a steady stream of high-profile atheist defections. Well-known examples include Jordan Peterson’s ongoing “struggle with God” and Richard Dawkins’ begrudging embrace of the term “cultural Christian.”
There are others, as well. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a member of the New Atheist set, stunned her fellow unbelievers in 2023 by announcing she had become a Christian. Attempts by Richard Dawkins to persuade her otherwise—including an open letter—failed. Her husband, historian Niall Ferguson, followed suit last year, revealing in an interview that he had become a “lapsed atheist,” gotten baptized, and joined the Anglican Church. Hirsi Ali and Ferguson had their children baptized, as well. Other agnostic intellectuals, such as Tom Holland, Charles Murray, and Douglas Murray have also become unlikely defenders of Christianity. If I had to guess, I suspect that Mary Harrington and Louise Perry are on a similar religious trajectory.
Cultural shifts often begin with the intellectual classes. What is indisputable is that we have come a long way from the near-universal anti-Christian sneering of a few short years ago. It used to be cool to bash Christianity. Not anymore. Joe Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster, recently noted the moral vacuum left by atheism and concluded: “We need Jesus. For real.” Rogan once mocked Christianity (although never with the virulence of the New Atheists). Fast-forward a few years, and Rogan is discussing the historicity of the Resurrection with a Christian apologist on his podcast. Does he believe any of it? I doubt it. But he’s interested, and his massive audience is interested, and that is the definition of a vibe shift.
There are a handful of other encouraging signs, as well. Bible sales in America went up 22% in 2024, with many attributing the surge to increased social anxiety and a “desire for meaning.” Additionally, we are witnessing the reversal of a longstanding trend—young men are now attending church in greater numbers than women (although, as Aaron Renn points out, this is not without its problems). This openness to religion isn’t just limited to America. Carolyn Morris-Collier recently wrote an essay for The Gospel Coalition titled “The ‘Surprising Rebirth’ at Oxford: Perspectives from a Graduate Student.” She explains that she was initially anxious about discussing her Christian faith, having been warned about the hostility she would face. But she was surprised to find the opposite:
Instead of aggressive antagonism, I experienced unexpected spiritual openness from my friends and classmates. While this thousand-year-old institution houses a highly secular and progressive student body, its architecture can’t help but subtly remind inhabitants of its deeply religious heritage. The cultural mood might just be shifting. Conversations about faith, once taboo or marginal, now feel relevant. Over this last year, it seems that religion has become a trendy topic for lively discussions at seminars, lectures, and pub chats around the city.
Morris-Collier attributes this phenomenon to a number of “cultural variables,” including an almost universal distrust of institutions, a longing for community, and a desire to buttress deeply held beliefs that many once thought were “Western,” but turned out to be Christian. Atheism, she notes, has been weighed in the balances and found sorely wanting—and that has left many people seeking something else. Others, including Australian pastor Mark Sayers, have been saying similar things. I attended university at the height of the New Atheist craze. This is openness is new.
Indeed, the New Atheists were self-professed anti-theists, who stated that God didn’t exist, and that this was a good thing. Christopher Hitchens’ famous subtitle, “religion poisons everything,” summed up their credo. That thesis has aged badly. Now, atheists like Douglas Murray, Tom Holland, and others take the precise opposite approach: Christianity is essential to the civilization they love, even if they cannot believe it. Indeed, one of the internet’s most prominent atheists, Alex O’Connor, frequently says that he wishes that Christianity were true. In an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in which she described her newfound sense of personal peace, he told her bluntly that he was jealous of her faith.
During a recent discussion with Justin Brierley and Freddie Sayers, Sayers asked O’Connor if, ten years hence, he might be a Christian. “God willing,” O’Connor replied. Everyone laughed. He didn’t. He was serious.
Some Necessary Provisos
Having looked at the positive aspects of the “vibe shift,” a few provisos are in order. We are in a strange historical moment. The old world, known as Christendom, is dead. We do not yet know what will come next, but it will be radically different. My latest book How We Got Here: A Guide to Our Anti-Christian Culture deals with that subject in detail, and so I will include just a few cautionary observations.
If the “New Right” becomes pro-abortion, or even pro-choice, it will ultimately fail. As I noted for World Magazine, it was encouraging to see GOP leaders appear at the March for Life this year during inauguration week. That said, some of the new MAGA coalition’s greatest stars are pro-abortion, as is most of the Trump family (as I detailed in First Thingshere, here, here, here.) Trump himself has moved the GOP significantly away from the party’s prior pro-life commitments and is personally pro-choice. I readily admit that this view is in part religious for me. I do not think that a culture that kills a million babies a year is going to experience some sort of long-term resurgence because some stupid DEI programs got cut. We don’t get to butcher babies and expect God’s blessing.
Social recovery is impossible if a majority of the culture consumes pornography, which primarily features both deliberate degradation and sexual violence not as a minority fetish, but as mainstream content. Our sexual economy cannot even begin to heal until this tap is turned off. Porn transforms the mind and wires arousal to sexual violence, and it is the invisible hand behind many of our current trends (including the much-analyzed “gender wars,” the manosphere, and Andrew Tate). If we do not address this unprecedented social crisis, our society will experience no revival. Any examination of the young male movement and their disillusionment that ignores the fact that they have been absorbing what amounts to hyper-sexualized hate propaganda against the feminine since pre-pubescence fails. The silver lining here, which I detail in Chapter 3 of How We Got Here, is that the public consensus is slowly becoming anti-porn.
It is one thing to observe that the pendulum is swinging back; it is another thing to determine why and how far. Politically speaking, the hubris of progressives—which led to the alienation of even liberal allies such as J.K. Rowling—is responsible for much of the backlash. We may be witnessing the high tide of the transgender movement, but the Sexual Revolution itself remains firmly entrenched. The US State Department may be giving us an example of the limits of this pendulum swing; it now refers to “LGB” on various websites. As far as the MAGA political operation is concerned, “LGB” is fine—recall that Trump hosted a victory party at Mar-A-Lago to celebrate a federal law enshrining same-sex “marriage”—it’s just the “TQ” that goes too far. The pendulum swing, in other words, is rolling the culture back to…2010. It must be noted, as well, that the transgender movement is by no means beaten. The victories are real. So are the challenges, and this culture war is far from over.
Finally, the West is still definitively post-Christian—and in most countries, increasingly anti-Christian. The problem with “vibe shifts” is that they come and go. Some vibe shifts are a historical blip rather than a herald of culture shift. We do not know if this shift heralds a more permanent change, or if it is merely a temporary backlash in a decades-long decline brought about by the Sexual Revolution, secularization, and our own personal choices, like the backlash of the 1980s. We should push back against tribal instinct and remain true to our own principles, even when that involves making wildly unpopular statements about rising populist movements that share some of our instincts and values but often have differing goals in mind. In the meantime, however, it is good to celebrate when we see victories that protect the vulnerable—and to pray that this “vibe shift” turns into something more.
