The increasing popularity of the “evidence-based socialism” promoted by many lefty YouTubers & streamers is a pretty fascinating phenomenon. It appeals to a v specific demographic (overly online, politically-engaged Gen Z kids) for a few rather simple reasons...

These kids got into politics thru the internet, thru Tumblr idpol, through Ben Shapiro compilations (and vids criticizing him), thru political meme pages. It’s essentially a commodified politics-as-entertainment that valorizes a v shallow form of discourse & “debunkings.”

It’s largely abt seeming correct & clever. Such discourse favors argumentation that can be subject to prompt verifiability, that treats every issue as an easily resolvable disagreement regarding the facts. The easily citable study & monadic statistic therefore become king.

It’s an attempt to beat the “facts and logic” theater of Ben Shapiro by demonstrating that the facts and logic are actually on your side.

Politics becomes a patchwork of distinct policy issues that can be handled simply by reference to studies & social scientific consensus.

Sophisticated theories abt the relation btwn the state & the market, the production of subjects, electoralism’s impacts on the socialist left, etc. are oftentimes not easy to understand or articulate, esp in some internet debate, so they’re seen as irrelevant.

Plus, it’s easier for short attention span, overly online teens to memorize & regurgitate some study than it is to sit down & read about structural Marxism or Gramsci’s musings on the history of the Italian subaltern.

Since theyre confined by a social science rooted in capitalist assumptions abt the subject, productivity, economic efficiency, etc. & bc they cant think critically abt things like wage labor or the nature of the commodity, they typically champion a beefier Nordic social democracy

Empirical evidence def has a place on the socialist left. But w/o a robust philosophical framework or theory of history, you’re prob just going to end up promoting a form of technocratic social democracy manned by supposedly benign elites w some fragile workplace democracy

I also think the social scientific utilitarianism undergirding this tendency pushes ppl towards a rather hollow notion of material betterment, a sort of top-down UBI scheme, where ppl r taken care of by the nanny state but exploitation, alienation & consumerism still run rampant