The Vibe Shift and the Decline of Double Standards

How the rehiring of a controversial DOGE staffer reflects America's changing approach to cancel culture

An all too familiar scenario was playing out. The media reported that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE staffer, had posted things like “Normalize Indian hate” on X. He resigned, and his future employment prospects looked dim.

But something unprecedented happened. After a wave of pushback from online influencers, Vice President JD Vance said he should be given a second chance. Trump himself agreed. Elon Musk ran an X poll asking if Elez should be rehired and 78% voted Yes. Elez got his job back.

Nothing shows the much discussed “vibe shift” more than this incident. There’s no way that Elez would have been rehired during Trump’s first term, or been rehired into even a GOP-aligned organization say three years ago.

Democrats are of course horrified, but the Elez rehiring cannot be understood apart from two parallel situations involving leftists.

In 2018, the New York Times announced it was hiring Sarah Jeong to be a member of its editorial board. It quickly surfaced that Jeong had made hateful tweets about white people, posting, for example, “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?”

The Times stood by Jeong, going ahead and hiring her onto its editorial board.

Also in 2018, it was revealed that director James Gunn of the successful Guardians of the Galaxy franchise had made inappropriate tweets suggestive of an interest in pedophilia. These comments are of such a nature that I cannot reproduce them here. Gunn said they were jokes, but acknowledged he was wrong to have posted them. Disney fired him. But they quickly reversed course and rehired him, though didn’t announce this for several months to let the heat die down.

To be clear: We shouldn’t be making negative or hostile statements about people of any race (or jokes about pedophilia). Elez should not have said what he did.

But this needs to apply to everyone, not just members of specific groups. The real vibe shift is that the double standards are going away. Or certainly declining a bit. It’s become far less tenable to argue that it’s ok to say even the most horrible things about whites, but that people should have their lives destroyed over an ill considered joke implicating minorities. Or when people on the left like Gunn can be forgiven anything, at least if it is conservatives who are the ones trying to cancel them as was the case with him.

It’s not just tweets about race. We are also seeing this in the major culture shaping institutions of society, including the Supreme Court. The court just ruled against affirmative action, saying that it is not legal to discriminate against Asians in order to benefit “BIPOCs” or whomever. In other words, no discrimination on the basis of race means exactly that.

Another pending case looks similar. Oral arguments suggest that there’s broad agreement on the Supreme Court that there cannot be a separate, higher standard that “majorities” like white people or straight people have to meet in order to prove they were discriminated against. The same standard must apply to everyone.

Every kid instinctively understands when something is not fair in a way that disadvantages him. It’s probably a human universal. But particularly in American culture the idea of fairness and fair play is a deep cultural value. Although in decline, it still has a big hold on society.

Double standards strike Americans as deeply unfair, which is why they produce such pushback. Even a unified elite with full spectrum institutional power cannot easily impose double standards on the population. And in November 2024, the American public make it clear they did not want this continuing.

Of course, we have a choice of how to handle eliminating double standards. It’s not necessary to level down by now allowing even more people to attack even more races. We could, and should, instead level up by not doing that for everybody.

But this should not be handled by the old cancel culture rules. We don’t want a society that rewards the worst sorts of people doing their Stasi like routines of trolling through people’s social media archives and life history trying to find something to destroy them over.

Rather, we should seek to restore something of a sense of moral norms and decorum—a code of manners if you will. There are some things we just don’t do because they are unseemly or in poor taste. People who violate these kinds of rule - like don’t speak ill of the dead - don’t necessarily get fired from their job. But they probably don’t get invited to very many parties.

Another problem with a rules rather than norms-based society is that it encourages looking for loopholes in the rules. But good behavior can’t simply be reduced to a set of rules. In a rule of norms, it’s unseemly for a CEO to make 350 times as much as his average employee. In a world of rules, there’s no law against it, so game on. There are rules that a gentleman should abide by, but being a gentleman isn’t just following a set of rules.

The sociologist E. Digby Baltzell talked about the collapse of norms as one consequence of the loss of the old Protestant establishment. As I wrote:

As Baltzell observed, “What an establishment means is that a society is led by a class of men who act according to an agreed-upon code of manners. Certain things are not done.” Without an establishment, anything can, and ultimately will, be done in a country where “money talks, echoing in a moral vacuum.” Without class codes of conduct, only public scandal constrains, and often now not even that. This erosion of norms and standards goes beyond the political arena as well. Baltzell argued that “One of the major functions of an upper class is that of creating and perpetuating a set of traditional standards which carry authority and to which the rest of society as­pires.” In the absence of an upper-class establishment, those standards would inevitably decline.

How to reproduce a “code of manners” in today’s society isn’t obvious. But we ought to work on that if we don’t want a society that operates on odious practices like doxxing.

Beyond the decline of double standards, another way to think of the vibe shift is as a widening of the aperture of acceptable opinion. Over the past ten years of the woke revolution, there was a narrowing of the aperture of dissent. For example, in one infamous case, Cisco fired some employees for pushing back against BLM by saying “All lives matter.”

Today, corporate CEOs can publicly oppose DEI or even announce that they are getting rid of DEI in their companies. They could not have done this easily even two years ago. Many leaders and institutions are working with Trump today in a way they would not have done in his first term.

In general, widening the aperture of dissent is a good thing. It certainly benefits Christianity in a Negative World era. But that doesn’t mean everything that’s now allowed is good. There’s a spectrum of dissenting ideas, some of which are good, some it’s not clear or they are a matter of indifference, and some are bad.

We should avoid treating our liberty as license. Just because something is legal or socially approved of or allowed in some sense doesn’t mean we should do it or say it. In fact, there’s probably an ever growing list of such things we should avoid.

Instead, we should use the wider aperture in the pursuit of discerning and aligning ourselves with the Truth, and seek to flourish for themselves, then for their families, posterity, and communities.

Cover image: James Gunn by Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0