Honestly, I'm gonna be honest, watching what Forward is morphing into, it's a joke, it's a total joke. They took literally the worst aspect of the entire party (the moderate framing) and they then made it the whole party.
Watching what these guys are talking about now, they're upset over Biden daring call out the MAGA people for being domestic terrorists, and they're going on about how Forward isn't for OPEN primaries, they're for "nonpartisan" ones.
And again, everything is "we need to appease the moderates, ermahgerd, moderation, moderation, moderation." It makes me sick.
Andrew, I don't know what you were thinking when you made this deal with the devil, but I've literally lost all faith and confidence in you over the past month. You have based ideas a lot of the time, but this current framing of needing to moderate and appease the Trumpers is just...ugh.
I think you forget why most on the left at least wanted third parties. It has to do with the democrats' dysfunction. We can't have nice things because the democrats...are obsessed with moderation. Oh, you want UBI? Gee, that's too bad, you can't have that, you need to compromise. How about we give you 1/10th of what you want, and then add tons of arbitrary means tests and bureaucracy to it instead?
Like...wtf?! Who LIKES this crap?
Some of us just want solutions.
But Forward is no longer for actual solutions. Everything is this weird circlejerk of centrism to the point that Joe Biden is actually looking relatively good. As Biden starts embracing the "dark Brandon" persona and is getting at least some things done and finally getting to the point of calling out the right (something I've been calling for since 2014 when Obama lost the senate due to HIS moderation), suddenly forward is crying.
Like, dude. I don't like Biden much either. He's still too moderate for me. But wanting something even MORE moderate just isn't doing it for me. I want politicians who actually stand for things and have balls. And Yang could have been that person. He supports UBI. He supports Medicare for all (in theory at least). He supports human centered capitalism. Like, wtf, how do you go from being the guy who seems to get it even more than BERNIE FREAKING SANDERS for me, to screwing up this badly?
I just can't any more. I didn't join forward for the centrism. Heck, I originally interpreted forward as being basically like, a left wing organization with centrist framing. I mean, the centrism thing works on culture war issues at least because the two sides ARE too polarized there. One side is going all in with fascism and conservative christianity's worst impulses, and the other side is basically doing this obnoxious postmodernist crap with being obsessed with identity politics. And that isn't helpful.
But....it comes off to me, what centrism means in this context, is actually center left. A lot of Yang's weird centrist framings on issues seemed to just be reinventing the same "third way" positions the dems have held since the 1990s. We need a middle ground between no abortion at all, and abortion until birth. And while I support abortion until birth, primarily as a defense mechanism against the nuts, a lot of what this middle ground Yang was talking about seemed to be seemed to be toward reinventing Roe v. Wade. Same with guns. We need a middle ground between gun confiscation and not having any gun laws ever. May I interest you in some mild gun regulations that preserve the right to bear arms but instead focus on keeping guns out of the wrong hands? Stuff like that.
Like....when you come to the middle...you get....the centrist wing of the democratic party. And I more or less am a bit of a centrist these days on social issues. But centrist generally means "center left" in practice. Like, you lean left, you just have more moderate opinions on the issues. We're just rejecting the extreme absolutism the culture warriors on both sides wanna impose on us. And if Yang could reinvent standard center left social policies under the framing of centrism, we could basically "win" the culture war, without having to fight it. We disavow the crazies, we embrace sane moderation, and we deescalate this mess.
All while then pushing further left on economics with UBI and stuff, which also is looking kind of moderate given some factions of the left seem to be running full steam toward outright support of socialism. Ya know, the original form of centrism in that sense was actually social democracy? And Yang really just offered an updated 21st century version of that that addresses the problems in a 21st century way. Instead of relying on jobs and full employment and GDP, Yang kind of realized that jobs aren't working, and we need a UBI.
But then he blew it and now his movement is embracing full on "enlightened centrism", where we need to be moderate for moderation's sake and avoid doing anything that pisses off anyone ever (unless they have convictions). It sickens me. How could this guy fall so far is baffling to me. I don't think he's a grifter like some on the left do, but he's certainly fallen in with the wrong crowd.
Really, I don't think I'm gonna be supporting this movement from here on forward. I might support some candidates, like if Yang runs and busts out UBI again, but other than that...I'm just done with these guys. I can't stand to even look at what this movement is becoming any more. It literally makes me sick.
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