You may recall that back in 2023 President Joe Biden’s White House was pushing hard on the idea that Bidenomics had been great for the country and consumers mostly seemed not to be buying it. This eventually led to a popular discussion about what was called “the vibecession.” Simply put, it was the idea that the numbers showed the economy to be good but the failure of the public to agree with that assessment showed they were responding to something else, something irrational. It was bad vibes all the way down.
And there were some folks who took that argument a step further who said the real cause of the “vibecession” was conservative media which, by refusing to give Biden credit, was creating an alternate reality in which people felt bad even though things were objectively good.
Lots of people, myself included, were skeptical of this argument at the time,…
