What Should We Do With Vibes-Based Analysis?

The Vibes Ain't Nothing But the Vibes.

There are many reasons that I am not an op-ed columnist, the most important of which is that no-one in their right mind would hire me. I think I can write reasonably usefully about a quite specific set of topics and issues, some of which (the consequences of AI for society, the intersection between technology and politics, the geopolitics of global networks) are interesting to a broad community, and some of which decidedly are not. But keeping harping on about a narrow set of issues is not what a columnist does. Each columnist, of course has their particular hobbyhorses, but they are supposed to ride those hobbyhorses to battle against the Prevailing Questions That Everyone Else Is talking About This Week. And when the hobbyhorse is unsuited for the week’s issues they’re expected to abandon it, in favor of a more equanimous steed. Doing this well is a very hard job, which I am intellectually badly equipped to do.

But there is another problem, which is nearly as fundamental. I am a proud and open Vibes Atheist. You can’t be an op-ed columnist and be a Vibes Atheist - at most, you can be a quiet Vibes Agnostic.*

Talking about the prevailing issues, week after week, is another way of saying that your job is to contribute to the Vibes. You are supposed to talk about the Vibes, but more importantly, if you are e.g. at a place like the New York Times opinion page, you are supposed to shape the Vibes in a particular direction. And I, being a political scientist by way of intellectual genetics, even if I don’t do much straight political science these days, am not interested in the Vibes in the right kinds of ways.

Back in the early days of the Monkey Cage, my friend John Sides used to regularly write pieces throwing cold water on whatever the hot generalization on the hot topic was among excitable political commentators. We used to jokingly call him Cold Take Sides. I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school - it was a very valuable social role! Vibe-slingers have a pronounced tendency to get carried away with themselves, over-estimating the general importance of this immediate twist or that particular turn, while forgetting that much of the truth about politics is structural. Not all the truth. Sometimes, the fundamental framing of politics actually shifts - and this can have enormously important consequences! My colleague, Hahrie Han, who does a different kind of political science, has a lot to say about this. But it shifts far less often than commentators would have you believe.

This does not mean that the Vibes are unimportant. They are rarely consequential in the ways that commentators claim they are, but when they are, they are very consequential indeed. And they may sometimes be consequential in significant but not worldshaking ways. But - being a sort-of political scientist, I think you need a good working definition of what “the Vibes” are and are not, in order to make progress.

Here’s mine. “The Vibes” are no more and no less than a given political elite’s theory of public opinion. This theory provides some information about public opinion, when the political elite is not completely disconnected from it. It usually provides much more information about the beliefs and ideology of the relevant political elite - what they think the public believes, what they want the public to believe, and (more rarely, since few of us are given to deep self-reflection), what they don’t want the public to believe but have to accept that it does.

This means that the Vibes provides real information. But on average they tell you much more about a particular elite’s beliefs and priorities, than about the underlying state of public opinion itself (there is variation. Some people are more careful about marking their claims to external evidence that might correct their impressions, and about taking counter-arguments seriously).

Vibes are also important to understand as weapons in battles between different factions of elites. Elites sometimes play a quite important role in politics! They have many resources - financial, intellectual, coalitional - to bring to bear, and their beliefs about the public can most certainly shape how and whether they deploy those resources, who they ally with, and who they ally against. You should absolutely pay attention to battles to shape what John Kenneth Galbraith famously described as the “conventional wisdom.” But you shouldn’t treat the sorties in these battles as bald evidence of what the public thinks.

And that - after a very long wind-up - is how I think Tyler Cowen’s piece this morning, titled “the changes in vibes - why did they happen” ought be understood. I don’t find it a compelling analysis of public opinion as such. Of course, there may turn out to be elements - perhaps even substantial elements - of what he is saying that are right. But how could you possibly know from his post, which makes assertions without at all backing them up? When Tyler says:

I had been thinking  it would be a good cognitive test to ask people why they think the vibes have changed, and then to grade their answers for intelligence, insight, and intellectual honesty.

it leaves lots of questions being begged! What are the specific reasons we should care? Whose vibes are we talking about? To what extent are the vibes the product of circumstances, and to what of a secular shift? What is your actual evidence that they are (as Tyler mostly seems to think) the latter rather than the former?

My answer to most of these questions, as the subtitle to this post suggests, rests on a dictum of that great thinker Barry Adamson. The Vibes Ain’t Nothing But the Vibes.

If I wanted to apply my own cognitive test, it would be to ask readers if they can discern how Tyler’s set up conflates two very different things, (1) elite views of what public opinion is, and (2) actual public opinion. Tyler is actually talking about the former - at least, if he has evidence of what actual public opinion is, he doesn’t link to it. In re: (1), he can reasonably point to triumphalism among various factions of the right wing elite, and a broad sense of confusion and despair among various factions of the liberal-to-left wing elite. But his actual claims concern (2): what the public believes rather than elite dynamics. He seems to be saying that there is a deep shift happening in public opinion - but he provides no real evidence, or even detailed analysis to back it up. Again - perhaps he will turn out to be right about some of this! I don’t have any crystal ball myself. But I would like to see actual evidence to evaluate, rather than a series of contentions thrown out there in a vacuum.

I do think that this post provides evidence of a broader intellectual shift that is happening within the Silicon Valley right, an elite that Tyler talks to a lot, and influences and is influenced by. From my own - frankly partial - perspective this shift seems to me to be somewhere between an unmooring and an unhinging, an abandonment of the values of the open society that many people in this faction used to claim they supported, and that some doubtlessly believe they still do.

Tyler’s contentions are in order (I simplify but try not to do so tendentiously) that:

1. Social media is the ballgame.

2. The Trumpian right is where the real intellectual action is.

3. Deindustrialization has changed America.

4. MAGA messages work better in a world of negative contagion (see also 1)

5. The Democrats thought wrongly that it would be politically astute to raise up Black people.

6. The feminization of society is driving men into the arms of Republicans.

7. Obama represented the dominance of the intellectual class.

8. Democrats and leftists are unhappy people - and that is unattractive.

9. Egalitarianism is unpopular.

10. Woke is unpopular.

11. Trans people are unpopular.

12. Immigration is a crisis.

13. Higher education is going down the tubes.

14. The Democrats should never have gone after Big Tech for Girardian reasons.

15. Various things went wrong for the Democrats that might or might not have been their fault. “Crypto came under attack.”

16. The Democrats have done a lot to make themselves unpopular. Also, Defund the Police, rising anti-Semitism on the left and other stuff.

I’m not going to get into fights over the particulars of these claims. What I do want to point out is how generic they are.

I’m not going to do the research - if anyone else wants to, knock yourself out. But I would bet with great assurance that you could find at least a dozen of these claims, and very likely all or nearly all of them in any of the recentish Twitter feeds of half a dozen prominent Silicon Valley Right opinionators like Sacks.

What Tyler is presenting here is no more, and no less than the conventional wisdom of the Silicon Valley Right about Why The Democrats Are Losers And Why We Are Correct to Support Trump, with a side-helping of Have I Mentioned Rene Girard Yet? and some temptingly delicious ‘you should never have gone after crypto. If you swing at the king, you’d better not miss’ for dessert. People in Silicon Valley such as Marc Andreessen like to complain about what they call The Current Thing - the generic talking point topics that everyone has to talk about and have the correct opinion on.** What Tyler is presenting us here is the Silicon Valley Right’s Very Own Current Thing, in a class of a purified reduction.

This is an exercise that has some genuine intellectual value. It tells us quite a lot about what the Silicon Valley Right hopes and believes is true about American public opinion. But as to what it tells us about actual public opinion? Your guess is as good as mine. I would personally be startled if it turned out that everything that the Silicon Valley Right believed*** about the American public turned out to be absolutely right. I would also be quite surprised if it were completely wrong - some things that the Democrats are associated with, including things that the Democrats ought be associated with, are liable to be unpopular.

So I think there is some value in reading this post. It will give you a very good sense as to what a particular faction of the US economic-political elite wants to be true about public opinion. It will also give you a sense of their distorted view of American politics, and in particular their belief in their own outsized self importance, and the world shattering relevance of their particular obsessions (viz. cryptocurrency). Here, I think that Tyler faithfully reflects a more general perspective, though you might reasonably want to see less reflection on his part and more critical engagement, if you were me, with my values.

Reading this will also give you, by way of omission, a sense of the things that people in this faction prefer not to think and talk about - democratic stability, the open society, abortion rights, long term economic stability, tariffs, etc. These might or might not be relevant to Actually Existing Public Opinion (I would personally guess that abortion rights are, and democratic stability may be becoming more so; open society not so much; so too tariffs and economic stability until and unless they become actual visible problems). But these are all issues that many of the people in this faction would plausibly have cared about, and been concerned with public opinion about, up to a few years back.

Finally, reading this post will give you some genuine sense of the intellectual landscape among elites - who, right at the moment thinks that they have an advantage, and can press it to shape the conventional wisdom in their favor, and who, by implication, worry that they are on the back foot. So there is information in here for sure. I just don’t think that it is the kind of information that Tyler says it is.

Later addendum: I realized that my summary missed, because they came after a ‘you might add to this’ break, the following: 17. Trump is Funny!, 18. Trump Acts Like a Winner!, and 19. The Democrats Are Running At Least As Big A Con Job Over Biden’s Age As Anything By Trump. Also, an aside that you ‘might’ argue Democrats are more respectful of transitions after elections, though that doesn’t convince MAGA people and doesn’t counterbalance the problems in the minds of many Americans. I don’t think any of this materially changes my analysis, but noted for the record.

* Which I suspect some columnists - e.g. Jamelle Bouie - of being.

** If you can explain the profound differences between the Current Thing, and folks like Andreessen and Srinavasan talking about how the “magic is happening” with VR, so that “the world is divided into two groups of people, people who haven’t tried the shipping version of Oculus and think it’s stupid, and the people who have tried it and think it’s the future of everything,” you are clearly more intelligent than I am.

*** To a first approximation - there may be some important SVR bugbears that are missing from Tyler’s list, but I’m not seeing them myself.