Will 'The Vibe Shift' swallow Anthony Albanese?

The 2025 federal election will be about more than just the cost of living.

I hope you've had a nice Christmas. Just before Christmas Niall Ferguson published an article on The Free Press that's since been reprinted worldwide. It's an important piece. 'The Vibe Shift Goes Global' is about how culture and politics are changing.

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 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. [And now it looks like Justin Trudeau might quit.]

One catchphrase sums it up: It's like Trump's already president.

If the vibe shift is about founder mode versus diversity, equity, and inclusion committees, the global vibe shift is about peace through security versus chaos through de-escalation. It's Daddy's Home - not the fraying liberal international order.

Ferguson took as his starting point a Substack post written in February last year by Santiago Pliego, an American writer and business analyst. Pliego wrote,

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 - championing of - Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition…

The Vibe Shift looks like ditching childless civilizational nihilism and saying, yeah, having kids is good, actually… The Vibe Shift is the rejection of reality denial and instead embracing that men and women are unique and different. The Vibe Shift is the refusal to subordinate yourself and your family to the whims and anxieties of activists and bureaucrats and relearning to trust your eyes and ears… The Vibe Shift is taking off the ironic veil that aims to cover the festering wounds of despair and putting on the vestments of seriousness instead… The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete…

The Vibe Shift is living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth - whatever the cost.

You can read the whole piece here. Pliego credits much of the change to Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, which gave normal people a platform to say what was previously censored and unsayable. Millions of people realised millions of people thought like them. Musk himself gained a ready-made platform, too. His post from January last year - 'DEI, because it discriminates on the basis of race, gender and many other factors, is not merely immoral, it is also illegal' was seen 33 million times.

There's a lot to consider in Pliego's remarks. With my background in education policy and as the father of three children, his comment that 'The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete' struck a particular chord. Schooling is now so focused on the 'therapeutic' and ensuring that students always feel good about themselves that the consequences are the opposite of what was intended. Young people have no understanding of what is authentic and concrete and what real life is like. A few years ago when I was umpiring one of my daughter's cricket games, the competition organiser instructed me not to keep score and to say to any child who asked what the score was - 'our focus is on having fun.' Last year the AFL introduced new rules for its junior football competitions. In its Under 8 to Under 11 competitions, the rules are: 'Scoring - No scores, ladders of finals; Results - No recording of best players or goal kickers. No individual player awards.' Of course, it's not as if every child (and parent) doesn't know the score anyway. The only thing the AFL’s rule achieves is to deny the reality that even seven year-olds can see for themselves.

You know my views on the ALP and the Coalition joining forces to ban social media for children under 16. It undermines the role and authority of parents, and it shuts down alternative sources of information and opinion for young people. Politicians are happy to ban social media because it was easy for them to do, and it satisfied the demands of the legacy media who campaigned for the ban against their competitors - the social media companies. When he announced the ban, Anthony Albanese said it was a response to concerns about 'children's wellbeing, their mental health, their confidence and sense of self.' He claimed social media was 'a driver of anxiety'. If the prime minister was truly worried about these things he wouldn't start by banning social media. He'd begin by reading the National Curriculum which mandates what every child in Australia learns up to Year 10. The National Curriculum presents an unremittingly negative and hostile perspective of Australian history, the history of the West, and of liberal democracy. The philosophy of the National Curriculum encourages, in Pliego's words, ' civilizational nihilism' and 'festering wounds of despair'. It's in the classrooms that Anthony Albanese should look to first to find the 'drivers of anxiety' among young people. Young Australians today learn nothing about 'greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.'

I don't know whether Peter Dutton has read the Pliego or Ferguson pieces, but it sounds like he might have. On the weekend he was quoted in The Australian as saying,

I think there is a groundswell of revolt at that level [in the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne]. I think it is an issue at the election. I think parents have had a gutful of kids coming home preached to and indoctrinated in all sorts of agendas except maths and English.

The response from the ALP and the teacher unions was all too predictable. Labor's education minister Jason Clare accused Dutton of reigniting 'the culture wars' while Australian Education Union president Correna Haythorpe said Dutton was being 'divisive'.

Here in Australia we've already experienced 'the vibe shift'. We witnessed it on 14 October 2023. The Voice referendum was an example of precisely what Pliego was talking about. 'The Vibe Shift is the refusal to subordinate yourself and your family to the whims and anxieties of activists and bureaucrats and relearning to trust your eyes and ears.' Australians understood that the creation by activists and bureaucrats of a separate system of political representation for indigenous Australians was not the way to overcome the disadvantage or build social cohesion.

A closer look at the Voice referendum as an example of 'the vibe shift' reveals the shift is two things happening simultaneously. The first is that people are now willing to say what they believe, and the second is that those beliefs are becoming manifest in culture and politics. It's important to note that the shift in the vibe in culture and politics has more often than not been enforced on the cultural and political elites via democratic votes. In the privacy of the ballot box, people can express their honest thoughts. (Which is why the major parties will never let the public vote on 'Net Zero'.) The Voice was defeated, not because its supporters eventually realised that overturning equality of citizenship was a bad idea, but because 60% of Australians voted against racial separatism being embedded into the Constitution.

According to pollsters the 2025 federal election will be all about the cost of living. That's true - up to a point. But elections can be about more than just one issue. The Voice result also means something, as does Woolworths announcing the reversal of its ill-fated policy not to sell Australia Day-themed items, as does the decision last month of Geelong City Council in Victoria to reinstate its celebrations of Australia Day on 26 January. The vibe shift hasn't registered with The Sydney Morning Herald yet. After Peter Dutton said that if he's elected prime minister, he would stand in front of only the Australian flag, the newspaper editorialised that Dutton's 'bogus flag-waving is more of the same disgusting, divisive short-term politics, unworthy of a man who would be leader of our nation.'

Recommended reading

I'll mention two books I read at the end of last year. One I most definitely wouldn't recommend, and one I would absolutely.

The first book is Max Boot's recent biography of Ronald Reagan, 'Reagan: His Life and Legend.' I wrote about it for The Australian Financial Review last week. This is some of what I said:

George Orwell knew that truth can take many forms. There's truth that can be proved, truth that people want to believe, and truth that people can be forced to believe. At the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith traces 'with his finger in the dust on the table: 2 + 2 = 5'.

And there is emotional truth about something that might not be strictly true but reveals a truth nonetheless.

Writing during World War II, Orwell complained that in the drive to collect scrap metal, the government had enthusiastically torn down the fences of parks and squares in working-class areas, while those in upper-class locations were left untouched. When told he was wrong and such a thing had not happened, Orwell replied, 'Anyway, it was essentially true'.

In his new biography, 'Reagan: His Life and Legend', Max Boot makes much of Ronald Reagan's seeming inability to distinguish fact from fiction. Boot recounts how Reagan would tell the story of the 'rear gunner'.

A damaged B-17 bomber was returning from a mission over occupied Europe and about to crash. Most of the crew had parachuted to safety, but a wounded gunner in the rear turret was trapped in his seat, crying out, knowing he was sure to die.

'The pilot stayed behind and comforted him saying,' Never mind, son. We'll ride it down together.' Reagan often insisted that the pilot had been posthumously awarded a Medal of Honour, his voice breaking as he said it. But if the pilot and gunner both died, who told the story?'

The story most likely derived from the 1944 film Wing and a Prayer starring Don Ameche and Dana Andrews. Yet even telling the tall tale for the umpteenth time four decades later, Reagan would still get 'so choked up' he 'could hardly finish...

Boot might be one of America's most accomplished war historians and a columnist at The Washington Post, but he's mystified that anyone could be taken in by a story that Reagan so obviously invented.

Which is one of the problems with Boot's 'Reagan'. After more than a decade researching Reagan's life, Boot is a Reagan expert, but Boot writes as an expert and an intellectual, and Reagan was neither. Reagan was ideological and idealistic, traits that Boot has trouble understanding…

Boot's effort to make Reagan a proto-Trump helps explain how a biography of a Republican president could be a New York Times book of the year for 2024.

Reagan had a moral clarity about democracy, freedom, and the United States, which is almost entirely absent from the worldview of intellectuals. Experts and intellectuals hated it when Reagan labelled the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire' and 'the focus of evil in the modern world'. Likewise, they tried to stop him from standing before Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and declaring, 'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'

Orwell said, 'the common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped'. 'Reagan' proves how right Orwell was.

On a more positive note, you should definitely consider for your summer reading list William Hague's, 'William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner'. Last year after reading Nigel Biggar's 'Colonialism', I wanted to find out more about Wilberforce. Every empire in history has had slavery, but the British Empire was the first to abolish it. I went on Amazon and bought some books about him. I've now read them and Hague's is the best. Max Hastings’ review in The Times in 2007 when the book was first published, neatly captures much what I enjoyed (and learned) about Hague’s Wilberforce.

At 4am, on February 24, 1807, the House of Commons voted 283 to 16 for the second reading of a bill to abolish the British slave trade. In an almost unprecedented gesture, nearly the entire house rose to cheer one of its members, who, for two decades, had been ignored, abused or violently opposed for making the promotion of this measure his life's work.

William Wilberforce, the Yorkshire MP, was 'completely overpowered by my feelings' and sat with tears streaming down his face. His campaign had been extraordinary. He made himself perhaps the most influential back-bencher in British parliamentary history. A remarkable man espoused a great cause to the point of obsession, and thereby achieved greatness for himself…

Even after Wilberforce's triumph in securing abolition of the trade in slaves, he battled on until his death in 1833 against the institution of slavery, which Britain ended only in 1834. He died broke but beloved, applauded for his rhetorical genius, warmth of heart and nobility of spirit. He was recognised as a national treasure, and buried in Westminster Abbey…

A sceptic might say of Hague's Wilberforce, as was suggested of his Pitt [Hague has also written a biography of William Pitt] that it is not notably original. But the author has produced a splendid read, for which he deserves the utmost credit. He tells Wilberforce's story with such enthusiasm and narrative skill that, in this bicentennial year, his book seems assured of bestsellerdom. I put it down liking Hague as much as I was moved by his tale, one of the most remarkable in British political history.

Thank you for your support.

kind regards John