So, I tried watching/listening to Yang's podcast earlier, and while I admit I was a bit distracted during parts of it, I did at least get the gist of it. Generally speaking, it seems to confirm, or at least not assuage, my worst fears. That UBI is out, and that this is focused solely around electoral reform.
The fact is, UBI isn't mentioned at all, but what was mentioned is the fact that having too many positions is exclusionary. The guy Yang was on with mentioned he used to be a leftist in college and used to be very purity testy with what he wanted. And he didn't want forward to be like that. Well, as an ex Bernie Bro myself who has turned on them over this stuff, I kind of understand that. Like, one thing I liked about forward 1.0 was it seemed to adopt my position on purity testing. it had SOME purity tests, but didn't castigate people for failing to conform to their position on some minor issue. The fact that a lot of leftists do this is really alienating and offputting. BUT, and this is the but, Forward 2.0 goes the other way. It has NO purity tests. It's too afraid to be exclusionary. It wants to be a big tent to get everyone in. And it really only cares about one thing, electoral reform.
And I get it, the two party system sucks. Electoral reform is somewhere in my top 10 issues, maybe JUST making the top 5, but it's nowhere near my top issue. UBI is. Healthcare is #2. I'd say free college/student debt forgiveness is #3. Climate change is #4. THEN you have MAYBE electoral reform, and only if I can't think of anything that should go there instead. Given the newest iteration of the housing crisis, I'd be tempted to put THAT above electoral reform. So electoral reform, while important, I'm not going to be basing my whole vote on it.
And that's the problem. I had someone ask me what I'm going to do if I don't support forward. Basically what I did in 2020. I'll make a metric prioritizing my top issues, and weighing them, and then I'll grade every candidate on the metric. And then I'll support the candidate closest to my views. It's a purity test, but all things considered, i'll be voting for the guy who is closest to me. I dont expect people to be exactly like me. I mean, no one gets 100%. I even fail my own purity tests by those standards as sometimes I'll even compromise my ideal vision to deal with realities (for example a purity test might include medicare for all, but then I might support a public option due to funding concerns). Still, I can generally expect a good fit for my politics to reach a threshold of 70-80%. last time around my purity test was basically Bernie's platform + UBI. Bernie got around 85% on one metric and 75% on another. Yang got around 70% on one and 60% on the other. And these are the guys I really like, so that's what I expect. Your typical centrist democrat got around 40%, and a republican got 0%.
Here's the thing though. Yang scored high because of UBI. Had he not supported UBI, he would be doing far worse. I think on the metric he scored 60% on UBI was 25% of the whole metric? So without that he'd be at 35%, in line with a centrist dem. Bernie was 75%, perfect score except for UBI. And Yang could've done a lot better had he stuck with M4A. His lack of M4A support toward the end of the campaign really caused his numbers to implode. otherwise he could've competed with bernie.
Now, to be fair, my ideology has shifted away from bernie toward yang slightly as I did some ideological spring cleaning in the past 2 years, but yeah.
Here's the problem with forward. Most voters WANT things. And while yes, the electoral system being broken and reproducing hostile results is one of the reasons we cant have nice things, you can't just run a platform on breaking that. Because you could theoretically break the two party duopoly as it exists just by running a campaign that causes a party realignment. Sure, this would just lead to the duopoly breaking apart and reforming on different lines, but still, it would be healthier for the country.
While the duopoly is the problem, the real issue is that we're at the tail end of a realignment and nothing is working. So we either need a charismatic figure with a good vision to come around and win everyone over, our the country spirals out of control. This isn't the first time we've had crises like this. The civil war over slavery was essentially the result of a failed political alignment that couldn't handle the slavery issue peacefully. FDR's presidency was one that rose to the challenges of the time and kept the country united, and is my preferred strategy for change. And of course, Reagan kind of was the culmination of a lengthy realignment period that went badly for the democrats.
Right now, we are heading toward another reagan like realignment in which the left collapses again and the right steers the country further right, this time into a fascist ditch. And the only way to derail it is for the left to actually offer an alternative that keeps people happy, driving us away from reaction tendencies and back toward a healthier alignment in which the left pushes for nice things, and the right tries to keep them in check and make sure they don't go too far.
That's ultimately what my ideal america looks like. A progressive left party and a moderate conservative right party. The democrats as is look closer to my ideal version of the GOP, and the GOP is crazy right.
The mirror equivalent of this would be if we had to choose between a bunch of crazy marxists who want to abolish capitalism and socdems who are very progressive but want to preserve it. Generally you want an alignment where the extremists arent too extreme, but the government is still responsive to the problems. because when the government stops being responsive, that just accelerates extremism and leads to violence. I'd say the ideal overton window is similar to the 1932-1968 alignment period, where the left was very progressive (but not full on leftist) and the right was just kind of sort of for the status quo.
Yang talked a lot about how bad the two party system is right now. And he seems to understand the predicament we're in, despite lacking the political science expertise and nuance I provide here. He talked about how independents see the democrats as preachy, and the GOP as crazy, but people would still vote for a nutcase over a preachy dem.
This is...very accurate. And sums up 2016. Dems spend so much time lecturing and condescending to voters without doing anything and it PISSES THEM OFF. And people would rather risk it all on a crazy person like trump than put up with such smarmy condescension. Dems really do have a marketing problem. They're a better party, but MAN they make themselves hard to support. Even for me. Despite, if we looked at politics in a vacuum ignoring my purity tests I'd probably vaguely agree with dems 80% of the time and republicans like 10-20% of the time. That's what isidewith would tell me at least. Anyway, we already talked about how republicans seem mostly driven by backlash politics and this seems to sum that up. GOP positions are highly unpopular, but people keep voting for them since the other party is so obnoxious it drives people away.
So...that said, I do see the need for a third party. And I've been saying it since 2016. Either we reform the democrats from within, or take them on from without and hope to act as enough of a spoiler to force their hand on the issues we care about.
The problem is...forward....doesn't have a platform, other than ranked choice voting, other electoral reform stuff, and just sitting around singing kumbaya with republicans.
Like, I'm basically an ex democrat. Im also an ex republican from back in the day, but as we know, I full on abandoned ship on that ideology. With the dems, I still kinda sorta agree with them, I just dislike how they do things. My ideology is more left than right, and I make no apologies for it. I can bend on some issues, but as you guys know, and as I keep laying out, I'm VERY firm on others. And those issues are where I struggle with the dems most. The dems don't support UBI, they dont support medicare for all or even a public option worth a darn. They just sit around thinking about how to do the bare minimum to keep their base happy, and often doing it in the most slapshod ways possible.
While I would love a third alternative...the thing is...it needs to STAND FOR SOMETHING. It has to have a vision. No one is going to join a platformless party just to vote for ONE ISSUE that doesnt directly fix their lives. As a wise man once said, before you can get people to care about anything else, you need to get the economic boot off of peoples' throats. And yeah, YANG said that. That was a common 2020 talking point of his. And you know what? HE WAS RIGHT. There's a reason I struggle to care about other issues. It's because I need the economic boot off of my throat and my top priorities would greatly enhance my quality of life. Once those are taken care of, THEN i can care about more abstract stuff.
My interest in RCV and electoral reform begins and ends with its utility to solve the other problems. If the system was working fine, and we had a political alignment where I felt reasonably represented, I would just vote for one of the two parties. Generally speaking the two party system works well enough where the parties have to be SOMEWHAT responsive to their voters. I used to be a passionate and loyal republican. And then I used to be a passionate and loyal democrat. But it seems like every time these parties just keep losing my loyalty and alienating me.
And forward is doing the same thing. It is trying so hard to avoid any controversy and saying "maybe this party isn't for you" by making a party open to everyone across the spectrum, even though they won't agree on anything but RCV.
This isn't appealing. And I'm going to be honest. If UBI is out, so am I. As you guys know, without UBI, yang drops at best down to centrist dem territory for me. And without any other positions at all, he's not going to score very well at all.
With forward 1.0 he would be an obvious shoe in for me given the ideological affinity, but he kind of just threw that all away. Sorry Andrew. My support for this new party is about as tepid as the platform (or lack thereof) it is based on. I can't support this. I do have purity tests. Purity tests arent a bad thing in and of themselves. The only problem is EXCESSIVE purity tests. And Yang is just so afraid of excluding people that he left the party open to literally everyone. Which makes is just as unattractive as if it had too many purity tests and was overly exclusionary. There's a middle ground, forward 1.0 hit it, forward 2.0 doesn't. Bleh.
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