Vaush as Faux-Radicalism

An influencer bubble of passive resistance...

Around 5 or 6 years ago, the YouTube algorithm led me to a particular political influencer by the name of Vaush. Similarly to when I first encountered Heather Cox Richardson on Facebook and followed her page, and then found her content to end up being pushed on me virally by the algorithm and for me to quickly become rather suspicious with how mainstream and conventionally liberal her content is, a similar phenomenon happened with Vaush. He has a similar role to her on YouTube.

I may very well have initially liked something from Vaush. As soon as I followed his channel, my YouTube feed became virally spammed with his content, and he does seem to release a video just about every single day, if not sometimes multiple times per day. Vaush identified with the left, specifically tagging himself as a libertarian socialist and, initially unbeknownst to me, previously having made some sort of claim to anarchism, and he seemed to be riding the wave of “alternative left” media that had risen in the aftermath of the Bernie Sanders moment in American politics.

But it fairly quickly became apparent to me that Vaush’s narrative is a fairly mainstream type of liberal pragmatism, not all that different from that of Heather Cox Richardson. And he has nearly half a million subscribers and makes a well above average living from YouTube as a careerist influencer. I came to actually mostly “hate watch” Vaush, just like I came to “hate read” Heather Cox Richardson. Both of their content seemed to be virally pushed by the algorithm above other content, and both had an audience that treated them as gurus and hung on their every word. Vaush’s audience clearly has a parasocial relationship with him, and he projects authoritatively, but without the academic professional background of Heather.

When The Alternative Is Mainstream Anyway

Unlike Heather Cox Richardson, however, Vaush has the pretense that he is doing some sort of “alternative politics” or that he is coming from a more radical position to the left of mainstream liberalism. Some of the people in his comments section make references to anarchist identity, which I found puzzling as someone who came out of an anarchist milieu myself well over a decade before I ever heard of Vaush. Vaush refers to himself as a libertarian socialist, which could be considered, if not a euphemism for left-wing anarchism, at least a more moderate position with a relationship to historical anarchism, yet in my perception it would seem that what Vaush calls libertarian socialism is philosophically and generationally removed from what that term signified in the past, even relative to online discourse a decade prior.

What I found striking is that, if Vaush is supposed to be someone coming out of anarchism, I’ve never heard him particularly talk about anarchist theory or history, or reference much in the way of either classical or contemporary anarchist thinkers/figures such as Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin, or Murray Bookchin, Paul Goodman, and David Graeber. From time to time, he references Noam Chomsky, though he actually more often than not has taken stances that are critical of Chomsky in a way that makes him more moderate than Chomsky. If I were to recommend a YouTube influencer as a reference for anarchism, it wouldn’t be Vaush but someone like Zoe Baker, who actually engages with anarchist theory and history as an authentic advocate for anarchism.

From what I have gathered, Vaush perhaps at some earlier point before I started following him used to identify as an anarchist, but quite quickly gave up the label. This in and of itself is not a sin. But he would appear to still have followers who adopt his politics while still considering themselves to be anarchists, and a lot of people who are well-read in anarchism, especially from previous generations, would take issue with that. Vaush also did continue to make rhetorical or semantic based references to anarchism, and both him and his followers engage in little tongue in cheek moves and in-jokes that could be considered an appropriation of anarchist references for their own purposes. This included the usage of “anarcho-Bidenism” during Biden’s 2020 election. This appears quite cynical. What’s the point of clinging to the pretense or label of anarchism if you’re going to reduce it to a joke or morph it into liberalism?

In a sense, one could view Vaush as a natural heir to Chomsky. Chomsky is the most famous and mainstream figure who technically is associated with anarchism, and yet he has not actually publicly presented as an anarchist for a long time. Rather, Chomsky has functioned as a liberal social democrat for many years and has actually been on the receiving end of criticism from both Marxists and anarchists for this. Likewise, Vaush’s version of “libertarian socialism” appears to reduce to liberalism and social democracy. But among the chief things that Chomsky is famous for as a radical has been criticism of US foreign policy, while Vaush has quite consistently taken a very US centric perspective on foreign policy that at times could be straight up called neoconservative (with the one exception being his take on Israel).

Indeed, Vaush’s perspective is so US centric and conventionally liberal that he denies just about any and all criticism of what the US government did during the cold war, despite the fact that this is more often than not based on information that has long since been declassified or that always was out in the open. In the process of this, he has made a pattern of persistently condescending to and misrepresenting the views of non-Americans that he has debated with. This includes anti-colonialists and even former victims of the US’s interventions in the middle east. This gets awkward.

While it is true that there are some people out there who genuinely are apologists for foreign atrocities or who defend whatever modern day Russia or China do even when they clearly are taking up socially authoritarian and right-wing nationalist policies, Vaush has been incredibly sloppy about distinguishing that from the statement of inconvenient facts about the US’s role in the back-history and escalation of foreign conflicts. It is perfectly possible, for example, to oppose Russia’s actions toward Ukraine, while also accounting for questionable actions by NATO and the foibles of the cold war pre-history that involves US intervention. But Vaush quite clearly went full-in for the mainstream liberal narrative that accuses everyone and their sister you don’t like of being under the influence of Russian propaganda.

As a result of this, Vaush has created an environment where his followers abuse the word “tankie” in a way that has no reference to its original meaning and is a generic smear on anti-war people and anti-imperialism in general, and he lacks the nuance to be able to parse apologism from complex takes in which people account for the ugliness of geopolitical conflicts. Once people are calling Chomsky, a good chunk of anarchists, anti-war social democrats who are competing pundits, and even right-wing libertarian anti-interventionists, “tankies”, this should be a clue that the word has lost meaning. Yet, suddenly, when the topic shifts to Israel, Vaush is himself an anti-imperialist in rhetoric and tone. Make it make sense.

The other thing that’s disconcerting about Vaush positioning himself as a libertarian socialist is that he has quite consistently taken a position in favor of an electoral strategy where voting for the Democrats is considered to be the only viable option. He completely opposes and clowns on 3rd parties and their candidates with the exact same rhetoric used by mainstream liberals and opposes the idea of creating an alternative party structure. He even went so far as to abuse Marxist theory against its actual original intent and meaning, in order to disingenuously argue that Marx and Engels would have favored voting for Biden. While it’s not necessarily bad to have unorthodox views, when virtually everyone from a political camp you don’t explicitly belong to is telling you that your interpretation is wrong, maybe shut up and learn.

Not only did Vaush argue in a reaching way for voting for Joe Biden, in the process he led his followers to the ideologically incoherent clusterfuck of “anarcho-Bidenism”, which may have appeared at first as a tongue in cheek thing, but ended up effectively being taken seriously and turning into Biden apologism after the election. Indeed, despite originally giving rhetoric about “holding their feet to the fire after the election”, he quite consistently was a Biden stan during the Biden administration, giving little to no substantive criticism, only up until recently when it became a public scandal that Biden is in cognitive decline and there were calls for him to step down from the current election. This is why a lot of leftists consider him “just a liberal”.

This isn’t to say that I dislike or disagree with everything Vaush says. His niche market that he does best at is when he’s clowning on conservatives. I often don’t find much of such content particularly disagreeable. But this is also incredibly easy to do, considering just how much American conservatism is a cesspool of blatant irrationality and malice. I tend not to engage such content because it’s just choir preaching for me, and it is notable that Vaush usually goes after low hanging fruit that is pretty dumb or objectionable on its face. I also think there are others who do this in a smarter way, with more intellectual rigor, such as Matt McManus or Ben Burgis.

Vaush has also on some occasions taken up left-wing ideas that aren’t half-bad, such as worker’s co-ops. What’s frustrating though is that in the big picture, he quite explicitly takes a very long term, futurist, incrementalist position in which “true socialism” is literally something we might get in 1000 years, while in the meantime he promotes a strategic view that favors Democratic Party electoralism and just tinkering at the edges of capitalism with social democratic stuff. Given what we know about environmental catastrophe especially, this just will not do. While the “immediatism” of expecting an overnight revolution into a radically different society may be naive, a politics that says we can get real change in a millennium while shouting down everyone all that much to the left of the center isn’t transformative.

The other thing that is frustrating about hate-watching Vaush’s channel is that he seems to keep his followers in a state of docility within the overton window. He sometimes hints at more radical ideas but has a clear pattern of bringing his audience back to the center. He punches leftward at more radical Marxist and anarchist positions, poisons the well of foreign policy discourse by framing everyone who disagrees with him as a nefarious tankie, sometimes tone polices the “cultural left” while simultaneously presenting himself as a kind of white male savior, concerns himself too much with trivial concerns about “optics” and ends up providing a “vibes” politics of enthusiasm for Democrat politicians during election season while hyperbolically slinging mud at their critics and people who advocate for alternative political strategies that don’t just amount to liberal pragmatism.

There are apparently a number of more personal scandals around Vaush that I would prefer not to get into. My focus here is on his ideas and his influence on the online discourse of the ostensible “left”. One might argue that it is pointless for me to focus on criticizing Vaush, but he has enough of a following and influence that he begs for it. Many leftist intellectuals who put deep time into studying this stuff and forming their positions get half or less as much traction as he does, and he has shown himself time and time again to be against educating himself further. I am myself someone who does this stuff outside of academia, and I do think there are problems with academic elitism, but I also precede Vaush’s presence in online politics by over a decade and take political education more seriously than he does.

The Debate Bro, Click Baiting, Careerist Style

Another thing that is perhaps importantly revealing, which I did not learn until looking into him more, is that Vaush originally entered YouTube in association with another YouTuber named Destiny. And I would describe Destiny as an “enlightened centrist” type politically, who also falls into the “debate bro” style of politics in which it’s more about “winning” than “learning” or the truth per se. His association with Destiny may help explain the centrist “pragmatist” bent that shows itself and his need to project himself as a guru who doesn’t really modify his positions. To be sure, Vaush and Destiny have ended up disagreeing and debating about a variety of things. But their temperament and style are similar. And Vaush *does* play an enlightened centrist kind of role, though perhaps in a more left-center context than Destiny.

It’s hard not to notice that Vaush’s approach to YouTube is in the vein that has become standard practice for a lot of demagogic influencers. He frequently makes use of click baiting titles for his videos, often with a two or three word attention grabbing bit of text in the video’s cover/still, with a background that is a goofy, unflattering, cartoon-like image of a person. This is just the internet/video version of tabloid news. And Vaush does appear to be a media junkie who feels compelled to automatically comment on every single event that happens within minutes. This certainly is a way to maximize content and by extension, revenues. It’s shock jock politics. Jimmy Dore, who Vaush has been critical of, does much the same thing.

This is in contrast to a more educational pursuit where one has well put together video essays, or an intellectually oriented talk show where you bring on guests, who you may not perfectly agree with, but who you have an intelligent conversation with. Vaush could be said to occasionally have dabbled in the latter, but more often than not he does “ownage” videos either by himself or with his interlocutor. I remember when I was on YouTube myself in its earlier, pre-Google days, and this same culture existed, except people couldn’t monetize it yet. The environment got quite nasty, and even back then, people had fandoms wars. And Vaush definitely has a fandom. If one could say that Jimmy Dore’s fandom these days is dominantly conservative, often conspiracy-theory wielding types, Vaush’s fandom is mainstream liberals, or millennial and zoomer aged people who are new to the left, who get stuck in his narrative bubble.

This works a lot like how I experienced Heather Cox Richardson’s comments section on Facebook. Dissent or pushback, even if presented with qualifiers or couched in the politest of terms, was quickly mobbed by her followers, who automatically had pre-cooked ideas about what the beliefs of those who disagree must be and who hung on her authority as inscrutable. Vaush’s comment section is similar to this, except perhaps with its pretenses being a bit more left of center. But they all live in a very specific narrative bubble, are at war with opposing fandoms, and dissenting comments are definitely jumped on with fanboy fervor.

Contrast this with the format of, say, C Derick Varn. Varn identifies as a Marxist, but he is an unorthodox Marxist who does not play the clickbait/tabloid game, focuses on deep dives on intellectual topics and is explicitly well read on political theory, history, and economics, and he brings on guests often from a wide range of political persuasions. He does not do “ownage” debates or strictly preach to his own choir, and he sometimes takes positions that are quite against the grain of the popular sentiment within his own political associations. Due to this, Varn has a way of keeping his viewers in check by challenging their common assumptions. Varn does not primarily make a living from his YouTube channel as a career either. He is a teacher for a living.

This also leads us into another aspect of Vaush. Not only is being a YouTube pundit Vaush’s career, it has been reported/revealed that he is at this point a millionaire or not far from it. While it is not inherently a sin to be a millionaire and Vaush does not make his money from the labor of workers in the way that a capitalist typically does, there is a degree of cognitive dissonance or irony that should be involved in being a self-proclaimed socialist who builds such a lucrative career. In Marxist terms, this makes Vaush “petite bourgeoisie”, and in economic status or class strata terms, it makes him “rich”. Not “rich rich”, but “rich”. This naturally makes some people a bit suspicious or sour towards him, fitting the stereotype of the “champaign socialist”.

The style and the form of Vaush’s content could be said to be reflective of the incentives of trying to maximize revenue on the platform. This makes Vaush what we call a “careerist leftist”. More sucessfully so than even quite a lot of academic leftists are. Unlike most “careerist leftists”, though, Vaush has not written a single book. Usually, leftist intellectuals inhabit a cottage industry where they’ve written at least a handful of books. Vaush, however, is not a leftist intellectual. He’s strictly a pundit. The issues with academic elitism and cul-de-sacs aside, actually being an intellectual does command a certain level of respect that should not be reserved for a pundit.

This plays back into why his parasocial personality cult following is cringey to watch. They are investing in the authority of someone who does not have intellectual pedigree, even by “self-taught” standards, while Vaush has made a pattern of pitting himself against people who actually are long-standing leftist intellectuals, ranging from Chomsky to Zizek. While it may sound elitist to say, why should you put stock in the opinions of a Vaush over a Chomsky or a Zizek? Certainly, professional level intellectuals can be wrong about things. But Vaush’s intellectual rigor rarely extends much beyond Wikipedia research and following news headlines.

Some people may argue that they initially got into left-wing politics by discovering Vaush and then later on they got into more radical positions or did more deep diving research. This may be fair to a certain extent, but then in such a case one has moved “beyond Vaush” and should not necessarily feel inclined to defend him against people pointing out that he has significantly botched the framing or interpretation of important left-wing ideas. There are definitely plenty of better, more well researched people to be introduced to the left through. And more often than not, it would appear that Vaush serves a role of scaring people off from such an investigation, by framing everyone to the left of him as complete loonies. In this context, he may as well be Rush Limbaugh shouting about “the loony left”. The liberal Rush Limbaugh.

While one can easily disagree with Marxist-Leninists and the variety of people who actually probably do meet the definition of “tankies”, Vaush’s critics (which includes serious anarchists as well) are not at all wrong to point out that he is effectively a liberal. And my view of liberalism is itself mixed or complex. At this stage of my thinking, I think that liberalism is both good and bad depending on what sense of liberalism we are talking about. Liberalism was always split between its egalitarian/socialist wing and its elitist/propertarian wing. Liberalism in the general sense of support for liberty is a good thing as a rule of thumb, though half-baked concepts of liberty can easily lead us astray, as is evidenced by the ideological foibles of American libertarianism. And I would describe myself as generally being “socially liberal”. I’ve never liked social/cultural conservatism. Liberalism in its contemporary form is also complicated by technocratic elitism, association with the centrist Democrat political establishment, performative moralism, and “rainbow capitalism”.

But when we say that Vaush is a liberal, we mean that he is someone who defers to the centrist Democrat political establishment too much, engages in performative moral posturing, who perhaps plays into “rainbow capitalism”, takes up anti-communism to a fault and has internalized McCarthyism without thinking more deeply about the matter, and buys into a sort of whitewashed, friendly interpretation of US hegemony. Vaush can sometimes be a wildcard who will swing into more radical sounding positions when you least expect it. But his overarching narrative bubble is liberal.

Thum Thur Libruls!

Alex In Vaushland

I don’t actively seek Vaush’s content out most of the time. I occasionally take a peek at his channel. Once in a while he has a good take. The YouTube algorithm favors him in my feed, so I usually have to deliberately ignore his content. But when I do check in, I’m often annoyed by him. Consider this a form of masochism or self-torture. But someone has to do it. I like to keep tabs on people from a variety of political factions, even ones I don’t exactly agree with or like. To me, that’s part of a healthy media diet. But I’ve written enough about this particular specimen. I must now go to bed. Hopefully, Vaush does not haunt me in my dreams. Goodnight, folks!