I apologize. I’m about to put a song in your head that will knock out Christmas carols, Hanukkah hits, and whatever else is there and take you back to a different era. Or maybe propel you back to the future. It’s the Beach Boys’s “Good Vibrations” from 1966.
Are you pickin’ up those “good, good, good, good vibrations” yet? The laid-back, feel-good lyrics and beat have sprung to mind every time I hear or read the word “vibe.” And that has been happening with increasing frequency lately.
The first catalyst was a piece by Jess Cartner-Morley in the Guardian mid-month, titled: “It’s game over for facts: how vibes came to rule everything from pop to politics.” It’s rare for me to recommend a piece in the Guardian in a positive light, and I didn’t think it would be the associate editor for fashion who would make me want to recommend a politically thoughtful piece, but here we are. ’Tis the season of miracles, after all.
The essay starts: “Facts were cool for about 250 years. From the Enlightenment until this century, facts were where it was at. They had a good innings. But it is game over for facts, the end of the line for statistics. These days, what counts is what you feel. In other words, it’s all about the vibe.
“Vibes are everywhere. Disillusioned Labour voters are ‘picking up bad vibes’… The Bank of England gets ‘wrong-footed by a vibe shift in the economy.’ In the US, a ‘vibe-cession’ – a downturn in economic confidence at an impressionistic level – was a key electoral issue. Google Maps will not only give you directions, but ‘vibe check’ a neighborhood for you.
“Of all this year’s hit albums, the one that had a vibe named after it – Brat – won the culture, catapulting Charli XCX to seven Grammy nominations. When a new production of Romeo and Juliet opened on Broadway recently, a US newspaper wrote that ‘the vibe is very “teens hanging out in the Target parking lot,” only with a lot more sonnets and glitter’ – because even William Shakespeare is no one without a vibe these days.”
As Cartner-Morley puts it: “Vibes, for so long a fundamentally unserious shorthand for ’60s nostalgia, are now taken very seriously indeed. Instead of being hedonism-coded, fuzzy through a cloud of smoke, the vibe is now item No. 1 on boardroom agendas worldwide.”
Succinctly, she claims: “Fake news has devalued facts, and vibes have stepped into the vacuum.”
Vibe shifts
THOSE FOLLOWING the new vibe often quote an article in The Cut by Allison P. Davis as setting the current tone. Her February 2022 piece is headlined: “A vibe shift is coming: Will any of us survive it?” It has a very post-pandemic vibe. Davis, like many others, credits trend-predictor Sean Monahan with opening her eyes to the term “vibe shift” and all it entails.
Niall Ferguson, writing in The Free Press, also noted the change in a piece this month titled “The vibe shift goes global.” His opinion piece states: “…to understand politics and even geopolitics, you have to understand culture, which is sometimes – often – upstream of both. And to understand culture you have to understand, well, vibes. Specifically, vibe shifts.”
“The vibe shift hit American politics on the night of November 5. What no one foresaw was that it would almost immediately go global, too,” Ferguson wrote. “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, US stocks rally, Tesla rallies. Meanwhile, the Russian currency weakens, China slides deeper into deflation, and Iran’s economy reels.
“One catchphrase that sums it up: It’s like Trump’s already president,” he wrote.
“If the vibe shift in culture is about founder mode vs diversity, equity, and inclusion committees, the global vibe shift is about peace through strength vs chaos through de-escalation. It’s Daddy’s Home – not the fraying liberal international order,” Ferguson opined.
The rise of the keffiyeh
I’M SO UNCOOL that I googled the words “vibe shift” to read more about it rather than feeding the phrase into ChatGPT. Part of the problem of the international political system is a generation that gets its information via TikTok and social media memes and can’t distinguish between “artificial intelligence” and the real thing.
The vibe shift can be seen as well as felt. And it is through fashion trends that certain changes can be tracked. Since October 7, 2023 – the Hamas invasion in which the terrorist organization butchered some 1,200 in southern Israel and abducted 250 to Gaza – we have seen the return of the “black and white keffiyeh.” This apparel is identified more with the rapists and mass murderers who carried out the mega-atrocity than their victims – Israelis and foreigners of different religions and ages.
Those violent “solidarity” rallies, where keffiyeh-wrapped protesters chanted about globalizing the intifada and eliminating the Jewish state, provided the push for the increasingly violent attacks on Jews and Jewish property, including the firebombing of a synagogue in Australia and the shooting and arson attacks on Jewish schools and synagogues in Canada.
The pope proved fallible when he was seen in a photo next to the Vatican nativity scene which included baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh. It was fashionable but as B’nai B’rith International declared, the display “isn’t just politicization, but revisionism. It presents [only] Palestinians as innocent victims – and Jesus as a Palestinian, not a Jew.”
Another apparel-related shift is also worth noting. Abu Mohammed al-Julani, the Syrian rebel leader who ousted president Bashar Assad, has been transforming his look. First, the turban and robes of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leader were dropped in favor of military fatigues. Then this week there were photos of him in a suit and tie – the metaphorical wolf in sheep’s clothing.
As he worked on his image change, I noticed there were fewer mentions of the $10 million American reward on his head. This has less to do with the fact that his whereabouts are no longer secret and more to do with the awkwardness of reminders of his al-Qaeda past. People know where he is but don’t want to think about who he is.
Julani has been crowned Syria’s savior. It’s also easy to forget that Bashar Assad, a London-trained eye doctor, was once hailed as the great hope of the Middle East.
As Maj. Gen. (ret.) Giora Eiland noted in a Reshet Bet radio interview this week, it’s time the world recognizes that there are terrorist organizations that have morphed into armies – including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. As Eiland pointed out, these terrorists are armed with sophisticated long-range ballistic missiles of the sort that not many state entities can boast in their arsenals.
Those missiles were launched from Yemen on Israel several times this week. This is war, even if the enemy is sitting some 2,000 km. away. The Houthis are not only targeting Israel but are also holding international shipping hostage in the Red Sea and threatening Western military bases and Sunni Arab kingdoms. And the response requires a different approach.
“The vibe shift is, in essence, escalation vs de-escalation,” wrote Ferguson. “Trump made that perfectly clear when he recently posted: ‘Everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire World, in the Middle East… But it’s all talk, and no action! Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025... there will be ALL HELL TO PAY… Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!’”
It’s a very different vibe to President Joe Biden’s, for sure.
After the turmoil of the first half of the 2020s – the pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the toppled and toppling governments, and China’s increasing belligerence toward Taiwan, to name but a few – it would be foolhardy to try to predict what 2025 will bring. But clearly, “The Times They Are a-Changin,” to quote another iconic ’60s’ song.
There is not only a vibe shift, there is geopolitical tectonic movement.