Back in December 2024 the well known historian Niall Ferguson published an article, The Vibe Shift Goes Global, which discussed changes he saw happening globally since Trump was re-elected President.

Amusingly he admitted that as a 60 year old academic the term “vibe shift” was foreign to him but he figured it was the most appropriate description of what’s been happening and he links to several articles using the phrase several years ago, but focuses on a commentator writing in 2024, one Santiago Pliego, who in turn levered off a story about an engineer, James Damore, being fired by Google in 2017 for daring to question their mandatory DEI program. Damore suggested that reality, not misogyny was the reason why there were more men in tech than woman. Pleigo in turn suggested that he could probably do this in 2024 because the culture had begun to swing back against DEI, Woke and Identity Politics, Political Correctness and Cancel Kulture, and he described that blowback as follows:

“Fundamentally,” Pliego wrote, “the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.” To be precise:

  • The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete.
  • The Vibe Shift is a healthy suspicion of credentialism and a return to human judgment.
  • The Vibe Shift is living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth—whatever the cost.
  • The Vibe Shift is directly facing our tumultuous times, refusing to blackpill, and choosing to build instead.

Ferguson reckons this has now gone global, largely because of Trump’s re-election – although he reckons that it’s actually Argentinian President Milei who started it:

The crude way to think about this is just geopolitical physics. The American electorate decisively reelects Donald Trump. Ergo: The German government falls, the French government falls, the South Korean president declares martial law, Bashar al-Assad flees Syria. There’s an economic chain reaction, too. Bitcoin rallies, the dollar rallies, U.S. stocks rally, Tesla rallies. Meanwhile, the Russian currency weakens, China slides deeper into deflation, and Iran’s economy reels.

But he thinks it is also being misinterpreted for some changes, like those in the Middle East:

It’s not the wind of freedom that is blowing through the streets of Damascus because, as is so often the case in the Arab world, the people who overthrew Assad are radical Islamists. Op-eds about a new morning in Damascus seem like they were written in 2011. They completely miss the vibe shift.
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 It began as a revulsion against pronouns and piercings; it is culminating in a global repudiation of the liberal international order that inspired two generations of Democrats.

In that case the shift is the collapse of the Obama-Biden foreign policy for the region, following the earlier collapse of the Bush Neo-Con foreign policy.

But it’s also hitting US domestic policy, witness the screaming about DOGE revealing insane spending projects by the Federal government, Trump firing Federal bureaucrats or pushing them to take voluntary redundancy, with benefits – plus all the screaming that comes with this from the Democrat/MSM complex. Law professor (and founder of the famous Instapundit blog), Glenn Reynolds uses a different and older term for what’s happening inside the USA as a result of Trump’s win:

What happened? It’s like a spell broke. Since November’s election (re-election?) of President Donald Trump, the woke is going away, and all sorts of problems are resolving themselves. But why?

Heh. I like the concept of a magic spell being broken, think of this scene from LOTR:

Except it’s not magic, and it’s been seen before, in communist nations:

In his classic book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, economist Timur Kuran notes how governments, and social movements, do their best to enforce this sort of ideological uniformity. People tend to hide unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment; they stop hiding them when they feel safe. This can produce rapid change:

In totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union, the police and propaganda organizations do their best to enforce preference falsification. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. This works until something breaks the spell and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Kuran calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I believe that’s what’s happening here.

The thing is that as I read this I can’t help thinking that New Zealand has yet to reach this point. Luxon, like Theoden, is still under the spell of the thinking of the last decade or more; he’s had no vibe shift and for sure we have not yet had a preference cascade, as NZ economist and commentator Robert MacCulloch describes as he looks at the same events observed by Ferguson and Reynolds:

Instead National has perverted democracy in the way Vance warned – National tricked its center-right voters by forming a center-left Grand Coalition with Labour on the most important issue facing the country. The Prime Minister’s solution is not to talk about it – instead tell us he’s only focused on the economy – and how China is the enemy – when in fact, as Vance warned, our enemy is not external, but is from within.”
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New Zealand’s political, bureaucratic & academic class have made up their minds, just like in Europe, that the average Kiwi who has to actually get out of bed and physically go into work in the morning, is just too dumb, or too bigoted, or both, to know what is good for them.

Sadly, because we’re Kiwis, it may be that we’d rather live under the control of a magical spell woven by our enemies. The famous philosopher Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies), having lectured here during WWII, said that we were the easiest people in the world to govern.

I don’t think he meant that as a compliment.