The Corpse You Can't Stop Dancing With

cluster b, the vibe shift, and politics without inputs

The Seven Years’ War ended in 1763, and then the British government started trying to figure out a way to make its colonies pay for their own very expensive defense. They came up with the Stamp Act, which went into effect in 1765, which went poorly. Then a decade of confrontation followed, with ratcheting effects, until some idiot came up with the clever idea of breaking the ability of the colonists to engage in political resistance by sending a column of troops into Concord to disarm the militia. Then it was ON like Donkey Kong, ladies and gentlemen, and April 19, 1775 was the day a decade of political conflict turned into an open battle.

The denouement! The showdown!

And then: an eleven-month siege, ending with success as the British army abandoned Boston. The next political step came more than a year after the first urgent moment of armed confrontation, as the colonists formally declared their independence in July of 1776, hurling down the gauntlet at the feet of the British king. The denouement! The showdown!

And then: five more years of hot war, ending with the final confrontation at Yorktown in 1781 — and the mass surrender of British troops to the former colonists who had defeated them. The denouement! The showdown!

And then: the victorious Continental Army went into camp, waiting until 1783 to receive word that the treaty had been signed to actually end the war and acknowledge the independence of the new nation that had been declared to exist in 1776.

Showdown, victory, waiting. Showdown, victory, waiting. Showdown, victory, waiting. Showdown, victory, waiting. Showdown, victory, waiting. Showdown, victory, waiting. And so on. The British struggle with American colonists over the limits of political power at the center, 1763-1783.

Speaking of slow political developments, I learned this week about an essay written in February, Santiago Pliego’s “Vibe Shift,” which Tucker Carlson correctly celebrates as the declaration of some good news:

The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled.

Fundamentally, 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.

And that’s absolutely true, yes. But don’t think the problem is solved when the first Stamp Act tax collector runs away in his coat of tar and feathers.

In California last week, the parent-activist Erin Friday engaged in the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, telling a legislative committee that women give birth to babies. She championed reality, in the plain and direct style she always favors. You can watch the legislative freakshow respond to that claim here, and I have to say again that watching the California legislature always reminds me of a George Grosz painting. Confronted with a plain discussion of obvious reality, California legislators engaged in the responsive act of “stating the obvious,” explaining in tones of high derision that men and non-binary people certainly give birth.

Cluster B society dresses mental health crises in political clothing; it’s the world in which, Christopher Rufo writes, “the old narcissism has transformed into hysteria, moral theatrics, emotional volatility, self-indulgence, and outbursts of violence.” It doesn’t respond to arguments. You can speak truth to it, much as I can wander out into my back yard and reason with the squirrels. They don’t hear you. They’re not going to hear you. Truth is not going to penetrate. We’re not going to talk them out of it.

Which doesn’t mean they’re winning, or that they will win. Human experience is cyclical; everything rises and falls. And as I wrote very recently, our current cycle of bizzaroworld flowerdicked gender bolsheviks is nearing the end of their mental health cul de sac. But don’t underestimate the ability of stupid crazy people to persist at being stupid and crazy. If you doubt me, watch ten minutes of any session of the California legislature. Or five minutes, if you’re already having an unpleasant week.

My sense, reading the news these days, is that nothing is happening; we’re all just watching the usual suspects chant their usual slogans. By the way, I learned from the television this week that Donald Trump is very bad — had you heard? We’re all waiting for an event, for a break in the chanting of the woke catechism. It’s like watching some unpleasant form of experimental theater in which the long first act is repeated fifty times.

The people on the other side of the vibe shift — the people the vibe is shifting against — don’t hear the changing response, or themselves, or the sounds of the natural world outside of their heads. The law professor and former federal prosecutor Harry Litman SLAMMED Judge Aileen Cannon this week, charging in the pages of the Los Angeles Times that she’s engaged in serious judicial misconduct. Ready to find out what that misconduct is? Here:

Along with much of the country, the special counsel has no doubt watched in frustration as Cannon has repeatedly indulged silly arguments from Team Trump while eating up weeks and months that prosecutors — and voters — don’t have. She has taken a cut-and-dried case based on overwhelming evidence and made it a long shot to be tried this year, when it matters most.

She’s considering arguments filed by the defense, that bitch! Who doesn’t have time for her to do that? “The voters.” That’s the purpose of a criminal justice system, you see: We file criminal charges against people to signal voters. And it’s judicial misconduct to fail to signal the voters in a timely manner, which is why we have judges.

You can’t write these sentences if you hear yourself. At all. You have to be completely lost inside your own psychological corn maze. How do you debate someone who has crawled right up his own ass, sealing the entrance behind him?

CAN YOU HEAR WHAT I’M TRYING TO EXPLAIN ABOUT THE VIBE SHIFT?

How much does it matter that you have a vibe shift in which people speak truth to lunatics, if the lunatics don’t process any of the truth?

Three things are going to happen, now, slowly and mixed together. First, a decaying cultural and political system is going to gradually kill itself from within, poisoning itself with its own hysteria and illogic; second, the people who live outside that decaying culture are going to build parallel systems, speaking to and among themselves; and third, the thing that’s dying inside will gradually be pierced and entered by the parallel culture, which will prevail because it’s healthier. All of that feels both inevitable and not particularly imminent.

Don’t expect a battle that changes the political culture. The battle at Lexington and Concord happened ten years after the Stamp Act, and the surrender at Yorktown happened five years after that. Be persistent, be steady, speak plainly, and expect to be frustrated. Find things to enjoy along the way. Speaking of which, I took this picture from a front porch on the remote coast of northern California this week:

Try to get some of that, from time to time. It seems to help.