And, like expected, MSDNC (MSNBC) smeared Yang's new party in a crappy hit piece. And this is so bad that I feel like I need to pick apart this article and criticize it. Now, it should be noted that despite basically being pro Yang, I'm not so much so that I can't make an objective criticism of the guy. My blog is full of that. That said, let's actually discuss this. It should be noted Yang's "grace and tolerance" plank doesn't apply here for me, because let's face it I'm a true independent anyway, and because bad faith actors don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Andrew Yang's Forward Party is directionless
Yang's new party is an uninspiring mess lacking vision or purpose.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang on Tuesday announced his new effort to help Americans break free from a stagnant two-party “duopoly”: a new political party he calls the Forward Party.
The name of Yang’s third party is characteristically sunny. But unfortunately it’s not actually clear where this party is going or what problem it would solve.
Uh, didn't he make that clear? I know I kind of made a post the other day about not knowing what yang thinks he's doing with this, but I was bashing the details of his strategy, not the core aim of his party.
In his announcement video, Yang decried the scourge of polarization, which he described as the product of incentives in our media and political systems — especially gerrymandering and the way primaries encourage politicians to cater to their base over voters in the center — and suggested a new party is needed to disrupt a competition-stifling political order. He also cited unsourced polling statistics about how most Americans are dissatisfied with Congress and want a third party.
Now, this is where I'm going to be honest. i think the polarization framing of his party is a bit weak, but, I do think that if we reframed it as "the system is corrupt and people who don't have one of exactly two opinions in this country is screwed", it would be a lot more accurate. He's right about how there's a lack of competition.
Again, the polarization thing is a bit wrong. It's not that, as yang stated, that the 20% most "extreme" people nominate people, it's the 20% most "partisan", as in the 20% that identifies most strongly with the parties. Nothing about the democrats are extreme, outside of maybe their use of social issues at times. But partisan? Absolutely. The difference is one of the difference between what a liberal and a democrat is, or a conservative and a republican. The two terms are associated with the party at hand, with liberals voting for democrats and conservatives voting for republicans, but I dont think, at least on the democratic side the most extreme liberals generally win. If anything, the democrats have branded themselves as moderates for so long that they're defined by being moderate. Of course, this article gets to THAT later, and I have a lot more to say here on that.
Yang is right that there is widespread disillusionment with Congress and our major political institutions. Trust in them has been declining for many years. But his diagnosis of the problems that ail us is shallow: Our polarization crisis is driven by far more than primary-induced partisanship and uncompetitive districts. And there is little reason to believe his proposed solution — a third party with no clear policy vision other than universal basic income and a grab bag of mostly incremental democracy reforms — has a market or could inspire the kind of mass movement a third party would need to become viable.
Um, again, if we drop yang's weird "im the true moderate" thing he's pulling, he's right. Disillusionment is in part due to the two parties being fundamentally unresponsive to most people. A small minority of people in both parties choose the nominees, and everyone else holds their nose and votes for them.
As far as no clear policy vision, again, Yang has tons of policies on his website. And while I have lamented the fact that he seemed laser focused on electoral reform and UBI/HCC, he seems to be trying to cast as wide of a net as possible to focus on the issues he wants to champion. Which is okay, coming from a third party. Third parties don't always have detailed platforms on the say 100+ different issues out there. many of them are brought together to emphasize specific policies. And that's what yang's doing. I wish Yang would cast a slightly wider net on this one, but to act like he has no direction and no policies is blatantly dishonest.
Yang’s rise as an American political celebrity has been swift and startling. A former entrepreneur and political neophyte, he ran a surprisingly popular campaign in 2019 during the Democratic presidential primary race. He found success by leveraging his outsider status and pushing for a universal basic income: $1,000 every month to every American, no strings attached. That kicked off a substantial policy debate and earned him goodwill; Yang was never a candidate with real prospects of winning a state, but his single-minded focus on UBI was respected by the electorate and earned him a cult foll
Yeah. Mostly online. Let's face it, you guys didn't give him a fair shake. You cut his mic and then had Kevin o Leery from shark tank bashing the idea of UBI because....american exceptionalist circlejerking or something. That's the thing, you guys never gave Yang a fair chance to speak. You aren't even giving him a fair chance now. Oh gee, this new party is directionless, what is he doing? What are his goals? *scratches head and ignores his website*.
But when he parlayed that rise in popularity into a New York mayoral run earlier this year, Yang looked less impressive. While he performed shockingly well in the polls for a time, as he came under scrutiny, he also revealed that he had no coherent worldview. The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey summed up his oddball run on a New Republic podcast thusly:
He’s pushing all this new spending and unconditional spending, but then it has a very corporatist streak, and he’s basically said that he wants to cut taxes, has all of these, like, pro-business, anti-regulatory policies, and it’s an unusual and pretty unpopular brand of politics that you kind of only see coming from, like, Silicon Valley. I keep on going back and forth, being like, “Is he really far to the left or really, really stuck in the center?” And I think the answer is “Yes.” Like, I don’t know that you can actually square that circle.
The ambiguity of Yang's candidacy and his lack of political connections to key constituencies ultimately sank his bid. And Yang’s new political project seems to fit more into the kind of confused ideological sensibility and inattention to the political pulse we saw during that race.
Uh, he has a fairly coherent worldview. It's just not one that fits well within the party. He appealed to none of the three main blocs. The moderartes didn't want him because he wasn't a "moderate" and inexperienced. His UBI policy was too extreme and not "pragmatic" enough for those guys. And those guys just want someone who runs a steady ship.
He didn't appeal to the idpol people, who themselves don't have a coherent worldview outside of critical theory and voting for people based on their race.
He didn't appeal to the progressives, the one group that actually seems to have anything remotely similar to a coherent worldview, because he didn't agree with them on literally everything.
Yang's problem was he had no electorate in the democratic party. That's not to say that the democrats have a coherent worldview. I would argue, epistemologically, that the democrats are a weird mishmash of a bunch of different factions with competing and contradictory worldviews to each other. Which is the problem. They're this big tent, but at the end of the day, the moderates who betray the core ideology the progressives have win, and it's simply a matter of demographics, not policy.
yang might not be polished on every topic, I admit that. He's a bit inexperienced and makes a lot of amateur mistakes, but he has a pretty coherent worldview. he even wrote a book about it. And now he has two. So let's get this dishonest stuff about not having a coherent worldview out of here.
And to discuss the Annie Lowery comments, let me say this. I respect Annie Lowery as a UBI advocate, I even read her book and found it to be decent. But let's be honest here. Yang has an ideology that just isn't the democrats. It's democrat-adjacent as I'll get to later when we discuss independents, but it's not the same worldview. yang sees the world in a fundamentally different way than most politicians, and like me, he has a political worldview that fits weirdly on the existing spectrum. it's confusing to the uninitiated, but he's what I like to consider "alt left". Not traditional left on economics. He's neither a communist nor a standard social democrat or progressive, he has a totally different perspective. I've actually spent quite a bit of effort trying to flesh out this perspective on this blog. And while I can't speak for yang directly as I am a bit more comfortable around progressives than he is, people need to understand that his ideology is so new and revolutionary that it can ltierally change politics. It is extreme and moderate at the same time. And that makes peoples' heads spin. But what it really is, is "hey, how do we fundamentally change the system and create a utopia without actually going the communist route of breaking everything?" Ya know? Human centered capitalism is, to me, as radical as what a lot of communists want to accomplish, but it's also very moderate. And while it might not be super into every single niche democratic issue that the democrats focus on, it really covers some really important ground.
First, Yang’s diagnosis of the polarization problem is simplistic. While he spotlights primaries and uncompetitive districts, he makes no mention of the fact that political scientists and journalists have consistently documented how polarization in Washington is asymmetrical. Specifically, the Republican Party has become radicalized, more resistant to good-faith governing and defected unilaterally or disproportionately from majoritarian governance through practices such as abuse of the Senate filibuster and Supreme Court nomination norms. This is not an issue, as Yang suggested, of both sides simply being forced to dislike each other because of how we nominate politicians, but the result of the emergence of a radical right-wing movement and party hostile to governance.
Sure, and that's a bad framing on his part. Still, this is a highly partisan analysis. i would agree democrats have went with a more pro center pro institutional approach. But that's the problem, if you're not a republican and you hate that pro center pro institutional approach, you're not gonna be happy anywhere. Again, he shouldnt be calling it polarization as much as a general lack of options.
Regardless, I will say this, both sides do end up becoming fiercely tribalistic against each other. Just because the democrats are "moderate' doesnt mean they arent tribalistic. Try being...well...me. If you disagree with the democrats of a litany of issues, you will be considered an outsider and they will assume you're either a closet trumper or some foreign agent from russia spreading propaganda. Democrats really dont like alternative perspectives, despite claiming to represent half the country.
Yang also fell prey to a common analytical error about the nature of polarization when he pointed out in his video that more people identify as independents than Democrats or Republicans — and suggested that’s a sign that there’s hunger for an alternative party. The problem with that line of thinking is that the overwhelming majority of independents lean consistently toward one party, and that “true independents” hover somewhere around 10 percent of the electorate. Even among that set, there is little sign that they’re ready to flee the two-party system. Consider that in 2016, a race between the two most unpopular major party candidates for president in the modern political era, resulted in just 6 percent of voters casting ballots for long-established third parties
Yes, and you know what? yang probably LEANS democratic. But, he's not really a democrat. Which is why you guys never give him the time of day, and why he goes unheard. A lot of us lean a certain way. if I had to be forced to choose between the two parties, I would CLEARLY "lean" democratic.
But....do you guys represent me? NO! I hate you guys! I write nonstop about how much the democrats suck! Just because you aren't the sociopathic psychopaths the GOP is, doesn't mean I LIKE you. Independents are people who, while leaning one way due to their internal ideologies, aren't really happy with either party. Because maybe two choices isn't enough, and maybe you can't realistically claim to represent half of the country when there's such a wide spread of opinions there. Democrats are the party for basically anyone who is center right to far left. It's like taking, to use germany's political system, the CSU/CDU, the SPD, die linke, and the greens, and put them all in ONE party, and then ran that party against the AFD. That's what the american political spectrum looks like to me right now. It's a joke. There's no real representation here. My views are very poorly represented. And I know the democrats, after bullying people, love to claim that people who vote for them like them, but most of us don't. We're holding our nose.
That's the real problem i think Yang wants to point out. He's just too nice about it. Because unlike me, he doesn't really want to burn bridges with you guys. The problem is you guys are a poor representative of most voters, despite claiming to represent most voters. And I know, at the end of the day, and this is why I dont buy yang's "grace and tolerance" stuff, that you're actually here to play dumb. You're not saying these things in good faith. This is a propagandistic hit piece. You're trying to make yang look bad while pushing the religion of the democratic party and the illusion that it's popular and that everyone loves it, despite many people holding their nose when voting for it.
Also, I love how these guys, after years of propaganda campaigns bullying people who hate them into voting for them, they point out only 6% of people vote for third parties. Yeah. That's because you propagandize people into stockholm syndrome. You force people to support you, and then you turn around and interpret votes as "hey they love me guys". NO WE DONT. And that's why I actually AM so hostile toward the democrats all the time, and their sychophants.
Yang also seems uninterested in engaging with the broader ideological clashes that underpin the divide between Democrats and Republicans today. The two parties might be incentivized to behave poorly by certain electoral cues, but they're also locked in existential battles over the nature of our republic, with substantive disagreements on how democratic the country should be, how multicultural it should be, and what rich people and the government owe to each citizen.
Because WE ARE uninterested. Look, the spectrum of debate allowed in polite society is very small. And a lot of people aren't represented at all. yang understands this, which is why he's pushing a third party. I understand this, which is why i constantly bash you guys.
Also, let's focus on these disagreements you mention.
Multiculturalism. Darned right I don't care. Identity politics on both sides is awful. Doesn't matter if it's the GOP's white grievance politics or your multicultural circlejerk. heck, what am i constantly saying on this blog? That I'm sick and tired of identity issues dominating everything, that I don't care about them, and that I would rather focus on economics. The fact is, you guys neglect that stuff hard. And while you then turned around and mentioned what rich people and the government owe to every citizen, you guys aren't interested in a serious discussion on that. I constantly mention medicare for all and UBI. My pleas are ignored. And then I'm told to settle for what garbage you guys want to give us or else. So let's not act like there's a real debate there. That spectrum is awfully narrow and people like Yang and I are outside of it. UBI was never taken seriously by the mainstream. it never had a shot at being represented in the democratic platform or administration. And you know what? Since half of your party is closet conservatives on economics anyway, you guys would fight vociferously against it!
Yang’s Forward Party doesn’t offer any serious reckoning with these major questions about the American social contract or the questions that have red America and blue America at loggerheads. In fact, he doesn’t seem to reckon with very many ideas at all. In his top-line bullet points about his party’s platform, Yang listed:
He didn't focus on YOUR concerns. Just like you ignore mine. It's almost like there should be more than two parties. While you focus on mundane BS like identity politics, yang is actually trying to fix a broken system. But you guys profit off of the broken system and exist to divert attention away from substance and back toward the same old political theater. So that's what this is about.
Aside from open primaries and UBI, these are meaningless buzzwords. The intention is to sound non-ideological and solutions-oriented, but the reality is that it suggests Yang has no discernible theory of how society works and what must be done to change it.
Uh, yang actually discussed all 6 priorities in detail. I covered it here. Of course, once again, you're not here to seriously discuss yang's ideas, but to make him look dumb and bad.
Seriously, this is some bad faith argumentation here. yang has no discernible theory? HE HAS TWO BOOKS! I've read one of them, I haven't read forward yet, but I assume forward is a full blown manifesto discussing this stuff just as the war on normal people was a manifesto of his 2020 campaign. The hell are you talking about, no discernible theory?!
The new Forward Party website doesn’t offer much more light. Yang’s vision remains strikingly vague, and most the additional policies listed are experimental but distinctly small-scale democracy reform goals such as limiting lobbying and convening “civic juries” to influence policymakers. Little of what Yang proposes sounds unreasonable, but little of it seems in any way commensurate with the crises facing our nation, from a warming climate to white nationalist politics to skyrocketing inequality.
His site did discuss them in some detail. And again, he had his book. Which I assume you guys didn't read.
Either way, let's focus on what they said. Crises facing this nation. The two party duopoly is a crisis, and yang wants to solve it. I admit I'm not one for his polarization pitch, but I clearly have my own reasons for agreeing with him and can offer an alternative approach to his ideas that don't rely on his specific argumentation. And to me, this is a crisis. Again, you guys just want people to go asleep and focus on your political theater.
To discuss your priorities briefly though. Yang actually had a good climate plan in 2020, it isn't mentioned now, and this is one of those areas in which yang would retain more of his 2020 policies, as medicare for all and climate change are important priorities that should be focused on. But let's look at the other two. UBI would radically reduce inequality. Scott Santens did a piece of this back in 2014, and he ironically did it based on my UBI numbers at the time, as I was experimenting with flat tax proposals back then. UBI would do more than reduce inequality than biden's entire freaking economic agenda. And white nationalist politics? Again, don't really care, don't see it as a priority, but if I were to take a crack at it, imagine a world in which you guys took donald trump as seriously as you took andrew yang. Dude never would've became president. You guys did that for ratings. And Hillary wanted you guys to do that to make her more "electable" by comparison. Which is really just a further indictment of the two party system. What kind of world do we live in in which one political party manipulates another into becoming more extreme so the people on your side are more willing to vote for your side by comparison? HRC was NEVER a good candidate. She was the lesser evil. And we were constantly told we had to vote for her or else. And then Trump won. YOU guys did that. You guys are responsible for that. If you asked me in 2016 what to do about white supremecist politics, I would say give them the bernie treatment. Keep them out of the discussion and the overton window. But no, you guys enabled that for ratings, and to make hillary slightly easier to swallow by comparison.
And then you dare have to gall to ask why we need a third party like andrew yang's.
And it’s noteworthy that a party platform meant to disrupt our political system and make it more democratic has nothing to say about the anti-majoritarian features of our democracy, including the filibuster and the Electoral College. Many of the reforms Yang proposes would be unremarkable for a Democratic candidate to embrace in a local or congressional race.
That's fair insofar as lacking proposals on the filibuster and electoral college, but at the same time, listening to yang recently, he decided it wouldn't be worth putting the effort into abolishing the electoral college. Regardless, as bad as the electoral college is, you guys (democrats) just want to abolish that while leaving us forced to choose between two bad candidates. And while you might win more that way, let's not forget how partisan that framing is. You guys aren't interested in changing the political system for the good of everyone, you just wanna change it for yourselves. If we implemented your reforms, we would still be forced to choose between two evils. And it would just lead to new forms of disenfranchisement. Yang's priorities seem to have more of a lasting reform.
Ultimately if Yang has a few causes that he wants to focus on — let’s say UBI and democracy reform — history suggests he’d be better off trying to create a movement within the Democratic Party than going it alone. A third-party candidate has never been elected president, and third parties tend to fare poorly at the state and local levels in this era as well. There are structural reasons for this, including our first-past-the-post and nonrepresentational system, the extreme administrative obstacles to ballot access for third parties, and the reality that many American voters view third parties as spoilers. But movements such as the tea party and the Democratic Socialists of America and anti-establishment candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have shown that it’s possible to disrupt the party system from within far more easily than it is from the outside.
He tried that. You guys shut him out. You guys, you, MSNBC, you cut his mic on a presidential debate and didn't give him talking time. You ran op eds on people bashing his political vision after he wasn't really given a fair chance to share his. He didn't get votes, in part, because of you. Because you're the media, you're the gatekeepers. You guys talk oh so much about working within the democratic party, but at the end of the day, you guys don't do anything. We end up with worthless sacks of crap like Biden anyway. And for all your ex post facto praising of bernie sanders, he didn't do crap either. I know the democrats are trying to act like one big happy family right now, but at the end of the day, people got coopted into the party, and they're failing their constituents. To be fair, thats what happens when you work from the inside. The inside changes you more than you change the system. Which is why I welcome yang's third party.
Regardless, and you'd know this if you spent more than 5 minutes doing research on yang other than "I don't know what he's for", but yang plans to largely run candidates within the system, as opposed to spoilers. I'd rather he didn't because working within the party is so futile, but at least he's distancing himself somewhat.
The size of Yang's online following and his embrace of UBI, which historically has had appeal across the ideological spectrum, means we can't rule out the possibility that the Forward Party could rack up a non-trivial number of supporters. But it's safe to predict that most voters will pick up on the fact that Yang is offering no serious path out of our political predicaments.
Sure, but that doesn't mean we should just bow down and cave to you guys either.
Yang deserves credit for pushing a serious conversation about UBI into the mainstream in 2020. He should think more carefully about who is being served by a party that nobody seems to be asking for.
I'm asking for it. Heck if anything I wish yang would go more extreme with it and be full on scorched earth, because look at how you're treating him. But that's the thing, you didn't ask for this. Because you're pro democratic party hacks running an interference campaign for them and that involves undermining your competition's support.
Conclusion
Seriously though, to conclude. This is why I don't do the grace and tolerance thing. These guys don't deserve niceness. They deserve to be called out for the frauds they are. This is nothing but a propagandistic hit piece that scratches their head wondering what yang is trying to do, while refusing to seriously read or cover what yang is trying to do. Because let's face it, they don't care. They're not here to seriously cover Yang, they're here to make Yang look bad. Just like they did in 2020. And yes, they love to act oh so much in retrospect like yang and bernie added so much to the conversation, but look at how they do this after the threat of those campaigns were neutralized. MSNBC never gave outsiders a real chance. They always flat out ignored yang. As I said they cut his mic during the debate and then had kevin o leery bashing UBI afterwards. They're a joke.
That said, this is why I rarely listen to corporate media any more. They're a joke. It's all propaganda. Nothing they say is worth actually listening to.
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