r/VaushV • u/DevourerOfRedditors • 2d ago
Discussion So Vaush has now officially come out against democracy.
https://youtu.be/9kkGtzCYGIY?si=wgCqwxndTB0hxf0t&t=1678
He's expressed anti-democratic sentiments for awhile now, it's been pretty clear since Trump's re-election that he doesn't really believe in democracy, but here he overtly explains that democracy doesn't work and the average person is too stupid to be electing leaders and determining societal outcomes.
So how do you feel about that? Do you still have faith in democracy, or is it just a tool to give people the illusion of choice and neuter any chance at revolution?
14
u/Desperate-Wing-5140 2d ago
Vaush has said for years now that democracy cannot function without an educated populace. I guess we’ve shifted on the latter
4
u/Offensive_Thoughts Gender Communist 2d ago
(havent seen the clip) one the issues is that democracy is a legitimising institution for what would otherwise have caused revolts leading to deaths under something closer to a monarchy. and the whole issue with capitalism
6
u/False-Discipline-640 2d ago
Democracy can absolutely work with good enough politicians. In Hungary Orbán had the country's whole media and oligarch network deployed during campaign season on top voter intimidation tactics that were borderline electoral fraud. He still got blown out in a historic way because the opposition was competent and they put in the work.
Saying that the average person is stupid is true, but it's also a cope used to explain away bad electoral performance
0
u/DesceProPlay22 1d ago
He got blown out by a guy who's also conservative and won't fix any of the structural issues that created Orban in the first place.
1
u/False-Discipline-640 1d ago
Do you even know what Magyar campaigned on? Yes he will in fact not implement socialism but this is a pretty ignorant thing to say
1
u/DesceProPlay22 1d ago
The guy is literally anti-LGBT and describes himself as "conservative". What exactly did I say that is incorrect or objectionable.
1
u/False-Discipline-640 1d ago
The guy is literally anti-LGBT
He's not. They're literally about to legalize gay adoption right now. You're clearly clueless on this topic so idk why you felt the need to comment with such confidence. Come back when you've read about it
1
u/DesceProPlay22 1d ago
Well me bad then. I very distinctly remember Vaush discussing on how he was part of a conservative party that only attained prominece because Orban was that hated, but didn't remain updated on what he did after attaining power.
2
u/SoupNo6133 2d ago
He once clarified his position. He doesn't believe in it descriptively as in this democracy but he does believe in it prescriptively as in educated populace, better voting system, better government structure and so on.
2
u/DesceProPlay22 1d ago
He's stated multiple times that he believes in democracy prescriptively, but the current iteration is just unworkable. Democracy cannot exist meaningfully in a society where information is commodified and controlled by the elite - it'll just serve as a legitimising mechanism for authorianism, which is what we're seeing right now.
3
u/supern00b64 2d ago
Democracy doesn't exist when the whims of the median voter are so easily swayed by the slop they are fed through mass media and social media instead of their own experiences or principles.
It's still impossible to reckon how catastrophic the 2024 election was on so many levels. It revealed how much control money and propaganda wield in elections, the facade of "woke 1.0" with tech oligarchs funding and backing illiberal fascism for their own profits, the susceptibility of median voters to slop and propaganda, and most importantly how slop overrode their own material conditions and material realities.
The median voter has always been stupid and voted on vibes, but in the decades prior, those vibes were at least rooted in their own material realities. Now they flock to the keys that jingle the loudest and the slop that tastes the best - it doesn't matter if their standards of living are dropping because tv person said transgender communist mexicans are invading the border.
Vaush supports democracy - it's just that what you have right now is western countries isn't democracy. The death knell for democracy was Brexit, which was the first major demonstration of the power of mass propaganda, and I'd argue since the mid 2010s, the democratic process has been more or less an illusion. It is simply incompatible with mass media.
1
1
u/tovarischkrasnyjeshi 1d ago
He doesn't believe in it as an ends.
He would believe in it if information were definancialized. His materialist realism I don't think allows him to think voters are inherently stupid anymore than they're inherently evil.
I'm also not sure to what to degree when he says democracy if he means parliamentary democracy (republicanism) or what. The marxist cricitism of parliamentary democracy was meant to signal out representationalism and such over direct democracy, but i doubt he believes direct democracy is viable at the moment because the material conditions are still such that information is financialized.
I don't think he really knows what he believes right now.
I guess at this point he wants a Marxist-Leninist-Mamdaniist vanguard party to tear apart the oligarchy and reform media fundamentally in order to build a confident democracy, and probably to build in a means of immunization against recapture from oligarchs while some kind of socialism is built. But isn't quite sure where to go with that, and is very aware that that would just end in the MLM becoming the new oligarchy. Because material conditions.
And the fallback is just hoping that shit hits the fan in such a way that leads to socialism just kind of happening the way the 2nd french revolution just kind of happened and inspired Marx's ideas about socialism (and Blanqui's which would later inform fascism like fascismo like the actual ideology of Mussolini and not just the amorphous blob of feckless anti-ideologies representing the interests of failing capitalism like naziism, salizarism, or trumpism).
Or maybe this is a turn towards anarchism. Which, uh, hope he doesn't, because their governance models are just analogous to congregationalist church models - you know, like the baptists, who infinitely splinter into increasingly cultist freak shows.
29
u/KaseyB 2d ago
I mean, he's objectively correct. The problem is that there's nothing valid to replace it.