On Tuesday, April 1, the Blue Ridge Center hosted author and journalist Megan McArdle for a conversation on social media and politics. Professor Gerard Alexander, president of the Blue Ridge Center, introduced McArdle, highlighting her 2014 book The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success.
Today, McArdle is a Washington Post columnist and has written for The Atlantic, Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, and Newsweek. She entered the world of journalism from the World Trade Center site following the September 11th attacks and described the 2001 blogging scene as “glorious chaos.” In her nearly 25-year career, McArdle has witnessed several “vibe shifts” in popular culture and on social media. She outlined them, and their relationship with politics, for the student audience.
McArdle explained that when she was a college student in the 1990s, it was socially acceptable for people to have different opinions and argue about various issues. By 2020, that was no longer the case. Several high-profile cases in the preceding decade illustrated the first “vibe shift” toward a “tighter orthodoxy.” Justine Sacco, a communications executive at IAC who was very publicly fired for an inappropriate tweet in 2013, represented the first famous case of “cancel culture.” Thus began a leftward shift in terms of how companies did business and talked about popular culture. Reactions to President Trump’s first term exacerbated the “vibe shift,” as did the influences of Rose McGowan and the #MeToo movement.
Social media apps like Twitter (now X) started to give people real-world leverage inside liberal organizations, and according to McArdle, the algorithm particularly enables young people and women. Historically, corporate and institutional culture was determined by older and better-networked employees. But the advent of social media upended that precedent, offering young people—who tend to be more progressive—a tool for peer-to-peer networking and applying social pressure. Further, McArdle believes that women are differently aggressive from men, but no less aggressive. Women often rely on indirect and verbal aggression and are more likely to speak with their friends and spread rumors than engage in one-on-one fights. This scales well on Twitter, and women—who are also more progressive than the general population—have been able to mobilize political coalitions to punish offenders.
Offline, several developments mirrored the shifts seen on social media. McArdle discussed the 2019 Democratic primary, which consisted of candidates who had “moved so far left” since 2016. Throughout the debates, they were asked about policies like using federal funding for trans prisoners’ gender-affirming surgeries or undocumented immigrants’ healthcare. “Regardless of your opinions on the issue, this is a 90/10 issue,” McArdle stated. To her, it was plain and simple: most voters do not like to spend money on prisoners nor undocumented immigrants. But many Democratic candidates were quick to raise their hands in support of such policies, believing they were on the right side of the debate.
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, liberals controlled almost all institutions. Many of them believed conservatives were “confined to the South” and would struggle to win future elections. In response, conservatives panicked. Enter another “vibe shift.”
McArdle contextualized the recent recession of the liberal “wave,” saying, “Dylan Mulvaney brought this issue to light.” In 2023, Bud Light partnered with Mulvaney, a trans influencer. Around the same time, a brand manager publicly spoke about wanting to make Bud Light more feminine. Together, these actions led to a conservative boycott, and Bud Light sales are still down 25%. President Trump’s recent political comeback can be viewed as a side effect of the “vibe shift” as well.
When considering today’s social media and political landscapes, McArdle looks beyond Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter. She explained that the journalists, politicians, and companies who used the app between 2010 and 2022 developed “Twitter brain” and began to see tweets as the real-world reflections of public opinion. McArdle described social media users as “political prisoners of the algorithm” and stated that our evolutionary brains are not wired to have access to all of humanity via the internet. Musk’s moderation policies on X have only exacerbated “Twitter brain,” and progressives’ mass departure from the app has led to further groupthink.
McArdle believes that while Twitter/X itself has gotten worse, social media is in a better place overall. Acknowledging the increases in spam, “bad crypto scams,” and open racism and antisemitism on X, McArdle is pleased that “bad things don’t exert hegemonic mind control over institutions.” In other words, there is a clearer distinction today between social media and the real world. However, a new danger has presented itself: revenge.
“Republicans became obsessed with what was happening to them on social media, and now, they want revenge,” McArdle remarked. Many conservatives wish to exert the same kind of power liberals had on social media, using that power to punish people for what they say. But because there is no longer a central social media platform to do so—a net good, according to McArdle—they are instead using the government—a net bad.
McArdle hopes that Americans will work together to create “antibodies” against the social media algorithm, understanding that the internet is performative and cannot be a proxy for public opinion. Quoting Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith, she said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation” — but not eternal ruin. We have figured out how to disagree and live together many times throughout history, and we will again. McArdle hopes that rather than catastrophizing and doomscrolling, concerned Americans will engage in political and civic action to propel the country through these dark times.
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