The Rationality of Irrationality
How “Politics as Vibes” is actually pretty much all politics
I have a record coming out this week, but instead of talking about it I figured I’d just yell about something else.
Pre-save it here: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/tearingup/super-reverb
I’m late to the funeral, but RIP Brat Summer. It is now time for us to seasonally reject modernity and embrace tradition by giving ourselves unto Christian Girl Autumn, a time of melancholy and shame where we reflect on our decisions.
Brat is dead. Long live Brat.
Charli XCX officially declared brat’s passing last week, but I think most of us saw the meme entering hospice care the moment Charli declared “Kamala IS Brat.” What exactly makes Kamala brat anyway? Is she legalizing recreational ketamine? I haven’t even read any of her platform, but that’s beside the point. Kamala is brat because she’s a (comparatively to Trump) young woman who carries a certain je ne sais quoi, an X-factor, an - if you will - vibe.
The focus on Kamala’s vibe has been good news for Democrats, and it has also been one of the main criticisms of her campaign: “What does she do?” “Can you name one policy?” “What has she accomplished?” While it may sound like I’m joking when I say this: none of these criticisms really matter in terms of electability. While they are definitely rational considerations, they certainly didn’t matter when Trump ran on policies like: “Build the Wall,” “Drain the Swamp,” and “Make America Great Again.” The same reason that there were voters who voted for both Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 is simple: both were practicing a politics of vibes— or, academically — a politics of affect. While policy is undoubtably key in any political campaign, one dismisses its vibes at their peril.
One of the main critiques of the irony-laden, so-hip-it’s-fucking-cancerous podcast Red Scare is how critics see the politics-as-vibes approach of hosts Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan as vapid and shallow. Initially claiming to be progressives during the 2016 Sanders campaign, they once featured guests like Slavoj Zizek and Adam Curtis. Since then, they’ve made a hard reactionary shift and featured guests like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and “race realist” Steve Sailer. While a fairly niche podcast, those of you who managed to eke out a brat summer may already be familiar with the general temperament of the hosts considering Charli XCX claims the song “Mean Girls” was written as an ode to Dasha. This is a bit weird right? How does an artist so beloved by the queer community manage to sing the praises of a woman who’s entertained the blood-and-soil rhetoric of Nazi-sympathizers like Carlson? Listening to the episode where they interview Steve Bannon, it’s clear that he’s aware of who the audience is and is effective at keeping the discussion focused on the failure of mainstream Liberalism without having to get into the details of the crypto-fascist politics he’s helped shift through the Overton window.
This, critics say, is the result of the “politics-as-vibes” approach. It’s the politics of the ingénue. By avoiding discussion of actual policy and focusing on political figures’ superficial qualities, you are willingly letting yourself be played. If the focus is about the feeling a political figure evokes instead of what they actually do, then we’d be perfectly willing to elect someone who was aiding an ongoing genocide, just as long as they made us feel good about ourselves…
Oh, perish the thought…
This doesn’t even stop at politics, vibes are how we make sense of our everyday reality. They’re the difference between the glass being half-full or half-empty. It doesn’t matter how well the economy is doing if most people can only sense make sense of it through the vibe-conomy, as Kyla Scanlon explained. Marxist philosophers like Slavoj Zizek have said just as much about how our own individual feelings and ideologies don’t just influence our reality but actively construct it. While we like to think of ourselves as always-rational actors who make decisions after weighing out the facts, that’s not really the whole story. Case in point:
How many times have you ever heard of a person making a “gut decision,” or a leader who described how they “went with their gut”? How many times have you personally, gone with your gut over your head? Do we celebrate leaders who were rational or ones who were gutsy? Is a gut decision even a rational decision, or is it something else? What are they even based on?
Intuition?
What the hell is that?
A feeling?
Seriously?
What are you, a woman?
I might be guilty of this, but this is the most annoying type of person to discuss politics with: someone who bemoans a voting public that just “doesn’t get it,” and demands they ignore whatever feelings they may have and just look at the “facts.” Look, I’m not anti-facts, but we have to stop pretending that this alone is an effective political strategy. You can’t win on facts alone, you gotta win on feelings too. No bad vibes.
The 2012 movie NO! — a dramatization of the 1988 Chilean Presidential Referendum — is an excellent example of politics-as-vibes. When Chileans were asked whether or not the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet should continue, they were asked to vote. The “No” campaign’s initial approach was one of hard facts and rationality: Pinochet was a brutal dictator. He gave his government supreme power (well, almost), banned trade unions, and tortured and murdered his political opponents. For some, the decision to run negative ads for the No campaign — what you could call an “Anti-Yes” campaign — would have been obvious, but instead they chose a politics of hope: a “Pro-No” campaign. The campaign is remembered by Chileans as a shift from a gray, suffocating environment to a bright and colourful future. You’d think given the opportunity you wouldn’t need convincing to vote against a dictator who throws his opponents out of helicopters, but this ignores how often we resign ourselves to power because it feels safer than the unknown. This is the power of vibes.
So, this is a bit of a roundabout way of saying this but what initially spurred me writing this was how now — in Ontario — you can buy beer in convenience stores.
Coming at a time when Ontario’s healthcare system is in crisis, it seems odd that Doug Ford would focus his efforts on giving the province more of what is — by all accounts — bad for you, but this would ignore the affective power of this change. Now, for the first time in the lives of many Ontarians (myself included) I can buy a tallcan of Lakeport Ice, a pack of Next Blue regular, and king-size pack of Reese Stix all at the same time. I am not joking when I say this change is monumental, not because it is positive, but because we will remember the time before and after it was made, and we will know it was Doug Ford’s Conservatives who did it. The same way we remember how we can’t smoke on bar patios anymore thanks to Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals. This is the same reason Ford needlessly re-designed Ontario license plates and changed “Yours to Discover” to “A Place to Grow.” Like it or not, Ford knows that these are all visual, tactile, and affective artifacts of his legacy as premiere. By being evidence of Ford’s leadership — no matter how small or frivolous — they act to signify strong leadership because almost anyone living in Ontario will be made aware of these changes.
This is the thing Liberals —as well as the NDP — can’t seem to figure out. The dental care and pharmacare programs they keep promising may be beneficial, but because these policies have to be means-tested and gate-kept as a way of keeping costs down, very few Canadians will feel their implementation. They won’t know about them unless they’re dangled directly in front of their face (and even then it might take some time). Means-tested policies that control access to social welfare programs are supposedly made to protect them from bad actors, but this always comes at a cost of preventing access. I am still paying out-of-pocket for my medication and my dental because (thankfully) I can afford them both, but this does not feel like care. If it were to feel like care, these would be available to me for free simply because I need them. I could walk into a pharmacy with my prescription and have it filled without any money changing hands because the point is to give people access to the medication they need, full stop. Adding on more layers, more steps, more paperwork is just a way of making it so that those who have less means than someone as privileged as myself will have greater difficulty in accessing the things they need. Though this may sound childish, people feel cared for when they feel as though they are being paid attention to, not when they are nagging or asking for a service. Care and obligation are not the same thing.
Logically (and rationally) the Liberals and the NDP support policies that are helpful to the working class, but tend stop short of doing so in a way that people can feel. The feeling approach has been the strategy of conservatives globally since the 2016 US election, and in many ways, it’s served them very well. It’s the method that allows them to use “pro-freedom” narratives while advocating for the burning of books. It allows them to talk about how white christian men feel as though they’re experiencing oppression. Despite being the “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd, all reactionary politics are rooted in feeling: it’s right there in the name. They know better than anyone else that what we feel isn’t necessarily true, but it still feels true, and the ability to address what people feel to be true is how you make someone feel heard. When done in good faith, it is a practice of care, when done in bad faith, it’s manipulation.
All of this happening the same week that Jagmeet Singh has decided to end the supply-and-confidence agreement the NDP’s had with the Liberal party (a week after Poiliviere goaded him into it) seems so fitting. For a guy who has tried to appeal to young Canadians through TikTok and Snapchat for two elections but failed to seriously move the needle on the NDP after 7 years, this does not strike me (or a few others) as a shrewd political move. As an NDP voter, this feels like a bad decision on Singh’s part. The fact that Singh does not realize that - for whatever reason - his vibes are off, does not bode well in his ability to connect to voters. If Liberals or NDP have any hope of preventing a Tory majority government — they’re going to have to figure out how to make people feel something again. The one glimmer of hope through of all of this is that while Poilievre has been very good at tapping into working class anger, it’s also doubtful that he’s unaware of how godawful his own vibes are.
Anyway, thanks for reading, hope this made sense, I’m off to buy six Miller High Life at the Hasty Market.
Once again, here’s the record I have coming out on Thursday:
Pre Save is here: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/tearingup/super-reverb