Vibes, culture, and the stories we tell
I’ve got bonus content for you this week, because I realized I have more thoughts and feelings!
I used to teach a course called Storytelling for Business. It was, quite honestly, a lot of nonsense about using narrative to develop a brand and marketing strategy. I’m not proud of this, but I justified it by emphasizing the importance of a company’s actions aligning with their narrative and the values they purport to believe in. The class had a distinctly mission-driven bent, and my goal was to make sure students understood that they should be telling a true story about doing good things in the world. This is cringe and naive, but I tried my best.
Ever since Harris became the nominee, the Democratic Party has suddenly been telling a new story, one about fun, joy, and good vibes. It’s certainly a much better story than the one we had about Biden.
I’ve been a firm believer in the value of storytelling to bring people together and to effect social change. I think culture - from music to memes, movies and television, art and stories in all their forms - is really important to help us develop an understanding of who we are and how we want to move through the world. Culture, values, political imagination and storytelling are all intimately connected, reinforce one another, and are powerful forces in our society.
But lately, I’ve had a crisis of faith in storytelling as a tool for social change. I’ve been grappling with a lot of questions. What happens when the most powerful figures in our culture break the cardinal rule of my storytelling class and tell us a story that’s a half truth, at best? What happens when the vision the Democrats share with us - which is a beautiful one of an equitable, compassionate, joyful world rooted in respect for all people - turns out to be about good vibes, not their principled commitment to making it a reality? Does storytelling still have power to create meaningful change when it functions as a facade for a system that’s deeply corrupt, a system that kills to protect itself?
And how do we take and use what’s good and powerful about the stories we’re being told, while vigorously holding accountable the people telling those stories when they start to become lies?
I’ve written plenty about how disturbing I find our collective tendency to put so much power into cultural and political figures who are mere representations of our values, hopes, and dreams. Too often, it feels like we just want to be told a good story by someone we look up to.
I remember very vividly being in Grant Park in 2008 when Obama won. What an electric and joyful vibe it was, surrounded by thousands of people, all of whom worked together collectively to bring about something that felt deeply meaningful and monumental.
What was very much not on my mind at that time were the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis violently killed as a result of our invasion. (A recent report from Brown University estimates that the total death toll in post-9/11 war zones, including indirect deaths as a result of many of the same things that are killing Palestinians in Gaza right now, is 4.5-4.7 million and counting. This is an astonishing and harrowing statistic.)
They were not on my mind in part because I was honestly too provincial and myopic to give it much thought. But also, because that was what the other side did. Republicans were responsible for that, not my team.
Then, a few years into Obama’s first term, I came across Jeremy Scahill’s reporting about Obama’s expansion of the Bush-era illegal drone strike program. I thought: Wait… he’s killing more people than Bush did. He’s killing American citizens? He’s killing American children?! Then I found out his record on immigration. He’s deporting more immigrants than any other president?! The son of an immigrant?! That’s not the story he told us. That’s not hope and change. That’s not who we (Democrats) are.
But it is. The story was an illusion. It was always going to be an illusion, no matter who was telling it - Obama, Clinton, Biden, or Harris. And this is the crux of the issue. Tim Walz seems like he is a genuinely awesome dad. Harris may truly be a warm and empathic person. I desperately want to love the Obamas as much as I used to love them because there’s, well, so much to love about them. But, even these folks who are probably good people, or at least not any worse people than any of the rest of us, step into the political machine of this country and somehow only end up making very incremental positive change. And much more alarmingly, always seem to end up making terrible, deeply unethical decisions that often kill or harm enormous numbers of people. I don’t honestly know how to grapple with this, but I know I’m tired of having to accept it.
The story is a facade. A cover for political institutions designed to protect the interests of a nation-state and the privileged few who run it. And a nation-state doesn’t exist without the violence its borders necessitate. Sure, governments have an incentive to keep their people happy enough. But all our leaders, when they step into our political institutions, even if they’re deeply principled and good people, are suddenly under overwhelming pressure to continue treating as sacrificial all the things that our state has deemed sacrificial in order to grow, expand, and accumulate wealth: poor and vulnerable people around the world and in our own country, and the planet itself.
I care deeply about building a better world. I actually care quite a bit more than I did when I was 25, celebrating Obama’s win. I’ve worked for nearly 20 years in all sorts of different ways to bring about change through this country’s most powerful institutions: government, business, and academia.
But the need for transformational change is growing ever more urgent. And I’ve lost faith in our political institutions to effect meaningful change at the speed and scale necessary, because that’s not their purpose.
So I no longer have a political home in this country.
For me, the hypocrisy has become unbearable. I can’t keep downplaying it or saying it’s all the other team’s fault. And what I worry about is, when we’re riding high on vibes and good stories, and then the leaders to whom we give so much power fall short (often tremendously so, by, for example, arming and funding genocide), how do we course correct? If we keep electing folks who tell us a good story about what they’re gonna do, and then they don’t do it, and we keep electing them anyway because their story is at least better than the other guy’s, doesn’t this just further calcify what is clearly a dangerous and corrupt system?
The reason that Grant Park in 2008 was such an incredible feeling was because I found myself in this huge community of people who worked together to help make our country better. It’s easy to ascribe that feeling to Obama himself, because that’s what we do with our leaders in a highly individualistic society. But it wasn’t actually about him, charismatic as he was. It was about the solidarity and camaraderie with the people around me. I wasn’t, nor will I ever be, in community with Obama himself.
So how can we properly identify what feels good about engaging in politics - working with other people toward a common goal of building a better world - and extricate that from the political candidates and the political institutions themselves?
They don’t bring the good vibes. We do.
I think a lot about community-based organizations like the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords. These were among the most creative and transformative social movement groups in American history. And I don’t think they were out there hyping political candidates and vibing at rallies. They correctly recognized our political establishment as antagonistic to their goals of collective care and liberation. If they were vibing, it was vibes created by them for them. If they were using culture and stories to create solidarity and change, it was done from the ground up and rooted in substance and action, not rhetoric.
May we all be so principled and so committed to each other, not to our political institutions and leaders, and the stories they weave. I still believe in the power of stories, culture, and yes vibes, to create change. But not without principles.
I’ve never felt so profoundly fraught about an election as I do about this one. I understand the stakes. I wrote about Project 2025 back in March, before it had infiltrated the zeitgeist. I had been aware of it for months before that. I take the threat of right-wing fascism more seriously than most people I know, because I don’t believe that “it can’t happen here in America.”
I know that, for once, we are facing the most important election of my lifetime. I also know that, if Harris wins, we’ll be facing the same threats again at the midterms and in 2028, and that I’ll likely need to be prepared, once again, to suck it up and vote with a metaphorical gun to my head. Trumpism doesn’t begin and end with Trump. And I’m so sick of having to make these awful choices.
I happen to live in a state where my vote is meaningless (yay, American democracy!). So I have the privilege of perhaps voting for Jill Stein if I feel like it. If I vote for Harris, ultimately, it’ll be a single issue vote - solely because of climate change. Trump and the Repubs will truly be catastrophic, accelerating warming and the degradation of our air, water, and ecosystems, killing a lot of people a lot faster. The Dems will do it, too, but slower, giving us a fighting chance to save more people and have more time to adapt.
But the story they tell about the world they’ll build will still be a lie. It’ll still be just vibes. And I’ll still be looking to myself and my community, not a political party or my president, to make those stories a reality.