By now, if you haven’t heard the term “vibe shift,” you might just not be paying attention. It’s a GenZ term used to describe a multi-generational cultural reality: The tide of our culture is swinging back toward sanity.
From my vantage point, representing conservative and Christian investors before the largest companies in America, this movement is obvious — from ditching DEI to revitalizing our energy and defense sectors — you’d have to be asleep to not see it. As American culture shifts back toward a more traditional stance (or at least open to tradition), we’re seeing a growing repudiation of gender ideology, rejection of identity politics, and (perhaps most importantly) a growing religiosity among America’s youngest voters and the inheritors of its legacy and institutions.
That’s the vibe shift: so now what? What’s the 2026 roadmap for young conservatives? It’s no accident that, as the Right starts moving culture again, it has also begun to fracture and infight. The greatest challenge of a movement often isn’t overcoming demoralization and defeat. That’s a lean survival mindset that everyone, from entrepreneur to college student, can sort out. The greatest challenge of a movement is often a slow death caused by triumph — or, for you Dark Knight fans, Bane-ification: “victory has defeated you.”
Conservatism and the Right are in a defining moment. Whatever unfolds in 2026 and beyond, young conservatives will be the ones living with the consequences for decades to come. As such, we must forward the healthiest, most robust, pro-growth, pro-wisdom version of the movement possible, and we must be prepared to inherit it.
Our task begins with duty. Participation in the public square carries responsibilities. If this past year, particularly the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, hasn’t shown you that the ideas space is serious business, I’m not sure what will. This isn’t a hobby or a pet interest. Whatever you make of recent conservative divisions, we have a responsibility, as Ben Shapiro recently noted, to speak truth and embody principles, both onstage and offstage.
It’s ridiculously easy to miss this. As a young conservative, it’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing “influence” as escalating bylines, audience increase, and brand growth (to be clear, all of those also matter, and we should be good at them).
But conservatives, even young, tech-savvy ones, are not merely called to be algorithm-maxxing machines. We are to be capable of giving the people who read us thoughts of actual value, intellectual merit, and principled grounding. Anything less is a dereliction of our duty. Saint Francis de Sales, the bishop of Geneva in the early 1600s, wrote as much in his widely-cited ‘Prayer for Journalists’:
May we be bold to confront evil and injustice:
understanding and compassionate of human weakness;
rejecting alike the half-truth which deceives,
and the slanted word which corrupts.
Achieving the task described above calls for wisdom. We have to understand what we believe and be able to explain that to people in a way that’s more persuasive than the average Instagram infographic. We have to read, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the ‘right sort’ of books: anthropology like Rene Girard’s, cultural apologetics like William Carey’s, the stuff that doesn’t generally get cited in the infographic. On the movement side, we need to understand which issues are ‘same-team problems.’
- Questions about what an America-first approach to foreign aid looks like? Same-team problem.
- Questions about the importance of religion to a flourishing society? Less of a same-team problem.
- Questions about whether we should put up with the glorification of Hitler and Stalin? Not a same-team problem.
Many people will say ‘conservative’ things for clicks and likes who have nothing but contempt for our conservative presuppositions about human dignity and a transcendent moral order and are happy to wear Right-coded platitudes like a skin suit. The way we deal with those people in 2026 and beyond will determine where the conservative ship sails in the coming decades.
The “vibe shift” is real. But a genuine culture shift has to run on something more concrete than just vibes. Getting there means taking our obligations to truth seriously. Winning in the public square means we have to understand the values we’re bringing to it. It’s much deeper than based-posting and apple pie, as useful as those things are. And it means that we have to understand that not all of the issues we’re facing are “same-team problems.” Holding our team to genuine standards is the only way we’ll still have a team to win with.
