Time’s Up on America’s Vibes-Based Order

A bunch of monkeys in a room of typewriters, given infinite time, eventually write Shakespeare: a bunch of humans in a bad democracy, given a few hundred years, eventually get rid of democracy.

There’s this concept in international relations (stay with me…) of the “rules-based order,” the idea that countries have, following the formation of post-WWII international institutions and agreements, largely interacted under and been constrained by rules, structures, laws, and norms that bends them towards liberalism, cooperation, openness, and democracy. As the name suggests, it’s really the “rules” that matter here compared to an international free-for-all that had existed and could otherwise exist. These international rules and institutions can be inequitable, flawed, and flimsy – and as the ongoing genocide in Gaza illustrates, openly mocked – but their relative failures and successes have, at least, definitively proven that the quality and power of these rules and institutions really matters. It’s good to have good structures but, at some point, a bad structure might be just as bad, or worse, than none at all.

America has perceived itself as a kind of rules-based order. The constitution and its separation of powers, the Bill of Rights’ individual protections, our bicameral legislature, our electoral and federal systems – these are rules and institutions that have been responsible for the formation and continuation of democratic norms and processes for hundreds of years.

Unfortunately, the truth is that these rules suck. While they may have seemed revelatory compared to the absence of such rules in the mid 18th century, the US has fumbled along as a democracy structured by anti-majoritarian institutions like the Senate, anti-democratic schemes like the Electoral College, winner-take-all elections, and a monarchical high court. Combined, those rules operate a system where it’s been extremely difficult to update our outdated constitution, but quite easy for an unelected court to fundamentally alter it (say, by legalizing unlimited money in the political system).

If our rules are so bad, you object, what has allowed the US to persist with relative democratic order? The answer is vibes.

Founding mythology, aspirational if broken institutions, World and Cold War rivals – and the cultural vortex that spins from these sources – have been enough to perpetuate a vibe sufficient to at least aim towards democracy. It has been the democratic aspiration largely (but not exclusively) driven by the disenfranchised – not the increasingly corrupted institutions themselves – that has allowed the country to surpass anti-democratic status quos, to weather anti-democratic crises, and to become an actual democracy after 1965. The truth is that we have advanced democracy despite our rules as much as because of them.

Instead of a rules-based order, we have depended on a vibes-based order. This order has depended on the willingness of participants to obey norms and customs, to fill support the body politic with democratic muscle that our aged skeletal system does not itself provide. This is not at all to suggest that there has been consensus on democracy, nor to endorse that common myth, in the words of Osita Nwanevu, that we’ve been on “a path towards progress that our leaders ⁠– Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative ⁠alike – were leading us down with a common purpose.” Rather, it’s to say just that the vibes have, on balance, been able to maintain enough support, win at enough critical junctures, remain installed in the right places at the right time, to keep it all from falling part.

And now we are seeing what happens when the vibe of a vibes-based order changes.

While our vibes-based order may have seemed to shift away from democracy throughout our history – think about intransigent segregationists – the last few months suggests we now have a vibe shift of a completely different magnitude. This time “the call is coming from inside the house” – but “the call” are tweets-breaking-institutionsof-government-and-attacking-the-press and “the house” is the White one. We are seeing just how reliable our separation of powers is when the people in power don’t actually care about that separation; we are seeing how “representatives” can pass drastically unpopular bills and budgets when they know they are protected by an anti-democratic system; we are seeing how little power the courts really have to “check” the executive when the executive decides it no longer believes in a system where courts check the executive.

What these months have proved, particularly in comparison to the very recent case of Trump’s first term, is how weak rules are and how dominant vibes are in our system. The very purpose of rules and structure, in fact, are to regulate vibes — our structures and rules are wholly insufficient to do that well.

Moreover, it’s no surprise that a vibes-based order where anti-democratic energies are empowered is mirrored by an interpersonal vibe ascendant in the population living under that order — a vibe defined by isolation, individualism, cruelty, irony, nihilism, and provocation. Both emerge from the persistent reality of a democracy that has not really been “of the people” nor “for the people,” consistently depriving majorities of what they want and need.

So if we can’t rely on our broken rules to save us, how can we escape this Vibe Death Spiral?

The short-term path away from a vibes-based order will unavoidably have to be through vibes themselves. Politicians and organizers will have to offer an aspirational articulation of our values and attack theirs – and bank on the fact that cruelty, selfishness, and domination are not yet the actual ideals of this country and the people who live her. The fascists should be exposed for what they are – weird, small, uncool, toxic, false, and ridiculous. That vibe contest has to be paired with vocal recognition that the current structures and rules have not and do not work for America. The Democratic Party has thus far failed on both these aesthetic and analytical fronts — but we have no alternative, currently, but to improve their performance.

In the longer term, nothing short of vast reforms to our rules and structures will do. Without a modernization and reinvention of our fundamental systems, we will find ourselves here again. Daniel Ziblatt notes, even if we win some elections, “unless we reform our democracy, we will remain in this fragile position where every national election is a national emergency.”

That is a really bad vibe, if you ask me.