IN the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, there has been much anguished discussion among the commentariat about the supposed change in the cultural winds.

“Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory,” wrote the New York Times’s Ezra Klein in a recent op-ed. “The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout.”

Other (and in my opinion, savvier) commentators have homed in on a subtler point. In their view, what matters is not that the content of the vibes has changed – if there even is such a thing as a vibe – but that there has been a significant shift in focus, away from the gritty business of politics and to the vagaries of feelings.

Our era “favours ‘vibe’ and ‘mood’ over anything conceptual,” journalist John Ganz wrote in a prescient Substack post nearly three years ago.

I can think of no better characterisation of the curiously anti-political politics of a president who makes a show of his populism even as he empowers the world’s richest man to gut the social safety net.

But how did we go so fully from policy to performance, from strategy to symbolism? The libidinal energy of a Trump rally is flashy, but it obscures the decades of unsexy organising and politicking that made the frenzy possible.

As journalist Katherine Stewart writes in her new book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, “a stadium crowded with resentments would not add up to a political program without a tremendous amount of financial and organisational support.” In other words, the vibes don’t shift themselves: It takes a lot of politics to render politics obsolete.

Much of Money, Lies, and God is an attempt to debunk the myth that Trumpism is an organic movement, a product of a spontaneous outburst of disaffection.

Take the case of Moms for Liberty, one of the most powerful groups in the MAGA universe. Although its founders are in the habit of pretending that they are just “three conventional suburban moms”, Stewart writes, “the Moms had high-level connections to the Florida GOP from the beginning”.

Indeed, one of the group’s nominally relatable........

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