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Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party

• sebow 5y ago
  [dead]
• jiscariot 5y ago
  I've always looked at Yang as "typical mind fallacy" in action. Coming from SV culture, he assumes if you give everyone 10k/year, we all create startups, learn violin or a second language, volunteer in their communities, etc. Policies that may work for a small, highly-motivated segment of our country do not necessarily scale.
  • spyckie2 5y ago
    The American spirit is giving people opportunities and seeing what they would do with them. That's American history; it's not a product SV culture at all. Only the US has had a vast, rich land that you can expand freely into (ignoring the natives, cough) once cities, communities, and markets mature to the point where you have no more opportunities left for you. No other nation in its history has even come close to amount of opportunity that the US has always given to its people.
• jimmygrapes 5y ago
  Needs to research his positions and messaging a little better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Position
• runako 5y ago
  A person who has never won an election (or even received 15% of votes cast) believes himself the appropriate vessel to dictate the political direction of a nation. Is this persistence or arrogance? Admire the chutzpah, seriously wonder why he isn't using his talents somewhere he might be successful at fixing any of the problems he identifies.
• verkter2 5y ago
  No focus on education in the list of goals, but universal income?
• aazaa 5y ago
  The Platform page lists a selection of positions that I think would not be very controversial. https://www.forwardparty.com/platform https://www.forwardparty.com/platform Surprisingly, the issue that Yang is known for, UBI, is not on the list. UBI is, however, present here: https://www.forwardparty.com/whyforward https://www.forwardparty.com/whyforward I wonder if that was accidental.
  • a_t48 5y ago
    I'm tempted to back them purely for Ranked Choice Voting. Will be keeping an eye on this for the future.
    • tryptophan 5y ago
      Ugh I support electoral reform, but why the obsession with ranked choice? It is the second WORST voting system after first past the post, which is what we have now.
      • yazaddaruvala 5y ago
        Ranked choice seems to be the best one I've read about. Could you help us understand what voting system might be better?
        • kevmoo1 5y ago
          Ranked Choice (IRV) is better than Plurality, but there are better options. Read about the Condorcet Method
          • lalaland1125 5y ago
            The Condorcet Method has a huge disadvantage that it is hard to understand. Being simple to understand is crucial for voting systems and I would argue is the most important factor since an election without public buy-in is worse than worthless.
• rektide 5y ago
  I like a large amount of this platform but I don't trust this guy & if this goes anywhere he's going to so wreak electoral havoc that will doom him & his natural (& most recent) allies chances harshly.
  • bpodgursky 5y ago
    That's a weird stance. I don't know that I'd vote for Andrew Yang, but I trust him to speak honestly about what he would do if elected more than almost any other politician.
    • darkmatterrat 5y ago
      Why? As the old joke goes, if a politicians lips are moving they are lying.
  • xibalba 5y ago
    Why don’t you trust him?
• seancoleman 5y ago
  I really wish they went with a logo that was a bit more different than that of a literal trash company (https://www.republicservices.com https://www.republicservices.com)
  • QuercusMax 5y ago
    They just replaced the Rs in the logo with Fs. What a joke.
    • happytoexplain 5y ago
      I agree with the parent, but this a weirdly hostile take on this subject.
      • QuercusMax 5y ago
        How can you be a serious political party if your logo is ripped off from a garbage company?
        • smolder 5y ago
          I wouldn't assume they derived theirs from the trash company logo. As a concept, a star made from letters is not extremely creative.
          • QuercusMax 5y ago
            Exactly!
  • nyczomg 5y ago
    I like Andrew Yang, but if we are being petty… I also am just not a fan of “the forward party”. When I hear it the first thing that comes to mind is this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HqjhHVUzl8o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HqjhHVUzl8o
    • 5y ago
• yur3i__ 5y ago
  I did have interest in Andrew yang, but I think leaving the democratic party has drastically decreased his chances of making significant political moves unfortunately
  • AzzieElbab 5y ago
    It is obvious he is not interested in moves that can be made as part of the Democratic Party
    • nivenkos 5y ago
      Then he should have focussed on electoral reform from within the party, because this is going nowhere with FPTP and the 2 party system.
• mperham 5y ago
  https://www.forwardparty.com/platform https://www.forwardparty.com/platform He's not wrong; voting reform must be priority #1 for any 3rd party.
  • fartingflamingo 5y ago
    I'd say that depends on whether he wants his party to have official public mandates. Those certainly help, but they're not always strictly necessary when one's goal is to influence the political discourse...
• endisneigh 5y ago
  One thing people misunderstand about third parties is that they don't need to win. If they're structured correctly (this is by far the most difficult bit), they can have significant political influence without ever winning a single election. For example, love him or hate him, Ralph Nader probably swayed the 2000 Election and had incredible influence over the outcome (for better or worse). Coming back to the Forward Party - what I'd personally want is some minor third party that has a series of very modest goals to complete each year. If this party can complete said goals in a grassroot manner in succession every year I believe they'd eventually be a dominant (third party) player. I think third parties should focus on minor results and less on rhetoric. Unfortunately this is very difficult to do in modern American politics. Oh well.
  • lalaland1125 5y ago
    The main issue is that third parties often have the opposite effect that their supporters want. They draw voters from the more aligned main party, causing that aligned main party to lose elections. Third parties hurt the interests of their own supporters. There are good reasons why the Democratic Party tends to support the Libertarian Party and the Republican Party tends to support the Green Party [1]. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/us/politics/green-party-republicans-hawkins.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/us/politics/green-party-r...
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      This isn't necessarily true. The nuance in the third party vs. aligned party is by definition the distinction between them. Depending on what you prioritize an effective third party can force the aligned party to change. From the point of view of the third party supporter, this would be exactly what you would want. In other words, an effective third party can be a great catalyst toward making some minor (or major) change in the most closely aligned parties.
      • lalaland1125 5y ago
        The problem is that doesn't appear to happen in practice. For example, how did Trump winning in 2016 help your average Green Party supporter achieve more of the change they wanted in the aligned Democratic Party?
• jrm4 5y ago
  Meh. Look, I hope people begin to understand that "ideas" in politics are just about as valuable as "ideas" in the IT field; which is to say -- they're fun to have and they can be exciting, but they're also pretty much worthless without execution. A tough lesson: If you support a presidential candidate because of their ideas, you're unlikely to get very far. The President usually needs to be like the boring CEO of the established company; you need a Tim Cook, not an aspiring Steve Jobs.
  • nathanvanfleet 5y ago
    Pure centrism from your comment very nice if satire.
  • websap 5y ago
    Lol! Tim Cook isn't boring. But, I understand you're larger point.
  • barbazoo 5y ago
    Yet Steve Jobs used to be CEO of Apple so I don't get your point.
  • spyckie2 5y ago
    This is not true in history; many very important ideas need people to spearhead them over many years to get enacted. Slavery was fought against for over 100 years amidst very fierce resistance before it was abolished. John Quincy Adams (a failed president, but a very big abolitionist) spent 18 years to overturn a "gag rule" that automatically nullified anti-slavery legislation. Without the work of countless abolitionists bringing the ideas up again and again to the public stage, pushing for the ideas in ways that made the rest of the country uncomfortable, support for abolishing slavery would never be enough for Lincoln to do his proclamation. The power of ideas are exactly what we need in the political sphere. Ideas in politics are very dissimilar to ideas in tech - in tech, it's all about business viability. In politics, ideas need to be about livelihoods of people. There are two functions at play in governance; the government, which is in charge of executing the will of the people, and the will of the people itself. The will of the people is "represented" in all forms of government by parties. However representation is often taken away from the people by many things (corporate interest is a big one). Climate change for instance is one place where the initiation belongs to the will of the people but is lacking adequate representation in political parties. In this respect, "the Forward Party" is not really a party that will execute governance in the near future; it's a representation of the will of the people, collected together into a political body. More realistically, it's admitting that the political system is trudged up and that no political body represents what Forward wants to represent. I think Forward is different from independents and other minor parties in the following ways: 1) it should be focused on incremental change, not on taking over the office 2) it should be focused on pushing forward ideas to limelight and holding accountability over those ideas, especially when those ideas make sense to a large percentage of the population 3) it shouldn't be a political party to directly compete ideologically with existing parties (liberals); rather it should wield its influence to pressure the competition to pick up its practical issues Assuming it's not just another independent political party trying to run for government, I think the Forward Party is a great "idea", and is sorely needed in the political landscape of the US.
• woodruffw 5y ago
  Maybe this is too mean, but: the only thing more ridiculous (in US electoral politics) than a perennial candidate is a perennial candidate with their own rubber-stamp party.
• rectang 5y ago
  My immediate thought: no third party can succeed in the US first-past-the-post voting system. Then I visit the website, and the most prominent policy preference advertised is Ranked Choice voting. OK, you've passed the first test!
• wchar_t 5y ago
  > Cryptocurrencies now represent well over a trillion dollars in wealth. NFTs have created an entire new market, and smart contracts over the blockchain can allow for exciting new ways to transact within the economy. Okay.
  • QuercusMax 5y ago
    Oh boy, you can buy a checksum of a url. And lock up your money so that people can try to scam you if your contract has a bug. Sure seems important compared to healthcare, climate change and the housing crisis.
• FFRefresh 5y ago
  I'll admit some degree of ignorance on all of the considerations with introducing a new party. But on a surface-level, I welcome more competition for ideas/platforms/parties in the American political system. My naive fantasy would be that an increased number of viable parties would have a knock-on effect of reducing polarization/tribalization in American political discourse, and hopefully spur bottoms up thinking on good policy. If there were 6 parties for instance, it would hopefully force voters out of the 'good party vs bad party' or 'us vs them' dynamics that a 2 party system invites. Political allegiance is a social signal today, and there are pressures to not question the party your social group votes for lest you be confused to be a bad person of the other side. This doesn't invite holding government accountable when it's your side doing the questionable things.
  • shostack 5y ago
    Unfortunately he's more likely to attract some, but not enough Democratic voters. That could hinder Democratic candidates in an upcoming election. Same reason the GOP live the Green party. Getting Republicans Elected Every November
• jcfrei 5y ago
  As long as the first-past-the-post voting system is used in the US such movements will go nowhere. Unsurprisingly ranked-choice voting is mentioned as their first core value.
  • jimbob45 5y ago
    Right, not only will they go nowhere but they will actively hurt the political party nearest to them ideologically unless those two parties agree to vote together on important issues.
  • gpm 5y ago
    Other countries with first past the post voting regularly manage to have more than two parties. Canada, the UK, etc. I don't think the USes problems can be solely attributed to fist past the post voting (though it certainly doesn't help).
    • asdff 5y ago
      Even with ranked choice the US will remain mostly two partied like the UK and some provinces in Canada. The parties are both so dominant already and well whipped, and not much chance coalitions form in this climate when these two parties aren't even in agreement of the same facts of reality. Maybe a centrist coalition designed to spoil dem votes.
    • spiralx 5y ago
      Parliamentary systems still devolve into two-party contests in each district though, it's more that the larger number of districts means that regional parties sometimes takes one of those two slots. At their peak the Lib Dems basically only ever won MPs from a few small regions of the country, mainly Somerset, Sheffield and London. The Greens have their one MP in Brighton, and then the other parties are all regional.
      • native_samples 5y ago
        That's a lot to do with their policies though. The Greens are not really different to Labour, Lib Dems ... I don't think even they know what they stand for these days. A better recent example was UKIP. A single issue party that managed to accrue enough of the vote that they got their issue implemented without ever having to win an election. In FTFP you can implement massive change in politics, without needing to actually replace one of the big parties.
• micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Interested to see if he can break away from his weird contingent of 4chan users.
• newaccount2021 5y ago
  "Fact-Based Governance" Sounds like the slippery slope to eliminating individual rights, none of which have any "factual" grounding. Purely-rational regimes have been tried - if you follow science/reasoning far enough, you'll end up with a eugenics program
• ydnaclementine 5y ago
  I thought the grab cursor hand over the image was intentional (like the raise hands emoji, grab the future or something), but it's a single img in a .slideshow-list
• digbybk 5y ago
  I was excited about Yang’s candidacy in the NYC mayoral election, but it didn’t take very long to see that he was out of his depth. In the end, he didn’t even rank in my top 5 (NYC has ranked choice now). Why does he keep running for top positions? He clearly doesn’t have a record of success as an executive, either in private or public sectors. He seems like a nice guy. If he wants to get into politics, why not start as a city councilor or something?
  • prepend 5y ago
    > Why does he keep running for top positions? I’ve wondered about this with people like Beto in Texas and Abrams in Georgia, and used to think it’s because being a perpetual candidate is lucrative. But I think Abrams may win the next governorship in Georgia. Who knows about Beto. Sometimes “hopeless causes” pay off and I like to think that Yang is an idealist who really wants to make a difference.
  • _jal 5y ago
    I mostly agree. He wants to project a competent-technocrat, "no bull" image, but is so far out of his depth that he comes across as the opposite. He also seems weirdly inflexible, for someone who wants a job that involves unpleasant choices all day, every day.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • cabalamat 5y ago
      > He also seems weirdly inflexible How is he inflexible?
  • spyckie2 5y ago
    I think it's important not to confuse the goal with the action. I don't think he wants to become a politician. He wants to enact political change. These are two very different things. Saying "if he wants to enact political change, why not start as city councillor?" Well... how many democrats or republicans are pushing for change? No one who is born and raised in party lines is pushing for reform; they're doing the opposite. Yang could never push for the ideas that he wants to see changed in the US as a democrat or a republican. It just isn't possible - the system is too incumbent. I think he realized this during his NY election, which was his first real taste of political competition. I think this is the only step that he can take. This isn't a "chess move" that he's doing to brilliantly win the political arena; this is more like someone with core values believing in those core values and doing whatever it takes to push those things forward. At the end of the day, politics is not about winning or losing elections, it's about making sure what you think as important issues are heard and addressed.
• supperburg 5y ago
  I was listening to a popular media personality talking about a third party to fix our problems. It struck me as the wrong way. It would end up as just another political entity that is compromised by dogma, fanatics, money, corruption. No matter how well intentioned. I feel like it would be better to popularize the stigmatization of parties, drain the corrupt party establishments of their cash and support, and make it culturally acceptable to just support bills and politicians you like and not support ones you don’t like. I think ranked voting is good and maybe more direct voting on items instead of people.
• mullingitover 5y ago
  Big time fail not making cannabis legalization a top-line plank in their platform. It's overwhelmingly popular, and because this party (like every third party) is doomed to be a spoiler at best, they could attract enough voters with cannabis legalization to perform (optimistically) in the high single digits instead of the high fractions of a digit. High single digits is enough to swing elections, which is enough to force the major parties to adopt the popular elements of your platform.
  • fsckboy 5y ago
    I'm not saying that there isn't the beginning of a good idea in argument that you're making, but the way you describe it it boils down to "adopt cannabis as a popular platform plank and force one of the major parties to adopt cannabis as a popular platform plank" which might be fine but it might not be Yang's goal.
    • mullingitover 5y ago
      I'm not saying they should just try to get major parties to adopt cannabis legalization as a platform plank. I'm saying they should use cannabis to get adequate popular support for their party in hopes of getting the other parties to adopt the non-cannabis elements of their platform. Federal legalization/decriminalization is going to happen eventually, so this is a limited-time opportunity for a third party. Make hay while the sun shines.
      • asdff 5y ago
        Green party has this plank and its not helping them win any seats or have anyone pick up their other ideas.
        • mullingitover 5y ago
          I'd argue the Green Party's main ideas are already embraced by the democrats. I'm not saying Yang's party has a prayer of picking up even a single seat, either, just picking up enough votes to get their ideas noticed.
• wonderwonder 5y ago
  If they put forward any form of a viable candidate that I am not 100% opposed to they will get my vote. The current 2 party system that elevates the extreme of each party has to go.
• ameetgaitonde 5y ago
  Edit: I was wrong, he's doing exactly what I thought he wasn't. See Hannibalhorn's comment below for more details. I'm glad he supports Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), but I think he's going about this the wrong way. Right now, he's creating a new third-party within an electoral system that effectively defaults to two existing and dominant parties. Those two parties currently control every federal and state legislature and/or election committee that has the power to alter how elections are run. Working against them, in a system that is extremely hostile to third-parties, makes it very hard to effect change because you are almost always guaranteed to be a loser, and be viewed as an opponent. If his interests are truly about implementing RCV nationwide, a better course of action would be to endorse and campaign for the Democratic and Republican candidates that are willing to commit to implementing RCV. In any state where you can get a filibuster-proof majority of those candidates elected, you would have a much better chance of changing the electoral system. Simply put, lobbying for RCV would be more effective than introducing a third-party within our current electoral system.
  • matteodimaio 5y ago
    Mixed member proportionate voting works well for NZ, in terms of allowing multiple political parties to gain significant representation… [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...]
    • worik 5y ago
      It has changed politics here, for sure. For the better It has not made politics sensible
    • robocat 5y ago
      MMP is way better than FPP, however the NZ version with list MPs is undesirable in my opinion, because the party gets to choose candidates who get zero votes and then get into parliament. To remove someone you have to vote out the party. To explain: in NZ MMP, the party creates a list of candidates, and if the party is voted for, people from the list become members of parliament. NZ also has 60 out of 120 seats allocated by voting in an electorate, but even someone that doesn’t win their electorate can still become an MP if they are sufficiently high on the party list. https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-system-of-government/what-is-mmp/ https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy...
• carlosdp 5y ago
  I feel like a lot of people take it as obvious that ranked-choice is just better. I have an alternate take: We just went through a simple first-past-the-post election in the US that a significant percentage of voters believe was rigged. This is the simplest system imaginable, the data is easily available to verify it was not rigged. Do we really think the average american will be able to grok how ranked-choice voting works? Imagine for a moment the reaction from people when their candidate appears to be "winning" and then ends up 3rd after the "recalculation." I feel like the first priority of a voting system needs to be transparency and being easy to understand, RCV isn't that. Maybe works well on small scale, I highly doubt it's a good idea nationally.
  • tsimionescu 5y ago
    Alternatively, you could view the situation as: if the even the simplest voting system can be successfully attacked by a convincing enough demagogue, perhaps the complexity of the voting system isn't that important and we wouldn't actually lose much by picking a better but more complex system. In the end, the attacks were not on the vote system itself, but on the real-life voting process - fear of double-voting, of fraudulent votes, of dead people voting etc.
  • akvadrako 5y ago
    It's obvious that it's easier to show someone how public vote tallies are calculated then convince them the entire chain of custody for ballets was secure. Even if they don't understand it themselves, it's just simple math done in public which would be easy to refute by any educated person.
  • jbaber 5y ago
    This is one of the arguments for approval voting. It's simple enough to be trusted by everybody with all the good properties of RCV and some superior things like rendering negative campaigning useless. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting https://electionscience.org/ https://electionscience.org/
    • gs17 5y ago
• heavyset_go 5y ago
  I can't support a politician or party that doesn't make healthcare a major tenet of their platform. The US is the only first world nation without universal healthcare, and it pays more than those nations for worse results[1][2]. Also, it's interesting that the "Democracy Dollars" page[3] identifies a real problem, but then does nothing to actually address the core of the issue. Doing something about Citizens United would, though[4]. From[3]: > Legislation and policy don’t reflect the will of the people because our voices have been flooded out by wealthy donors, corporate lobbyists, and special interest groups flooding the system with their money. > *The rich thus have outsized influence, and they have very different priorities than the rest of us. Generally, the wealthy are more conservative, respect current authority, and encourage a less radical or rapid approach to change. Candidates and politicians quickly become subject to the donor class. [1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality-u-s-healthcare-system-compare-countries/#item-healthcare-quality-and-access-haq-index-rating-2016 https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality... [2] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-health-care-resources-compare-countries/#item-practicing-physicians-density-per-1000-population-2018 https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-hea... [3] https://www.forwardparty.com/democracy-dollars https://www.forwardparty.com/democracy-dollars [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_amendment#Democracy_For_All_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_amendm...
• troydavis 5y ago
  For folks asking why Approval Voting (vote for as many candidates as you want) is more representative than RCV/IRV, here's 2 starting points: * Voter Satisfaction Efficiency: https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/ https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/ * Ka-Ping Yee showing how voters' preferences would translate to ballots, then how different election methods picks winners from those ballots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btAd1HYvjU&t=1329 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btAd1HYvjU&t=1329 (watch about 10 minutes).
  • jasonhansel 5y ago
    There's also the issue that IRV is persistently biased against moderates, who might be almost everyone's second choice even if they're almost nobody's first choice.
• bloaf 5y ago
  I feel like now is the best time to make a 3rd party. Non-loony-tunes republican voters held their noses and voted D against Trump. Progressive D are frustrated because they're not getting so much as a fig leaf after supporting the establishment candidate. Basically: the Democratic party tent is currently busting at the seams. It seems possible that the corporate-centrist Dems and Republicans unite under the Dems flag, leaving all the non-Q populists without a sane party to represent them. I don't think his chances are good, but the iron is as hot as it has ever been.
• Goety 5y ago
  I have to disagree with the name 'forward party' during civilizational decline I think different messaging is needed.
  • dane-pgp 5y ago
    "Yesterday we stood on the edge of a terrible abyss, but today we have taken a huge step forwards!" I think the implication of the party name is actually that America is moving backwards and needs to change direction. Hopefully the new direction is one that puts civilization on a sustainable path.
• geff82 5y ago
  Ronny Chieng On Why We Need an Asian President https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RCeS1SVFNo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RCeS1SVFNo
• nielsbot 5y ago
  The Democracy Dollars plank doesn't say it will eliminate money in politics, so I don't think it goes far enough. Love the plank on eliminating the revolving door however. We really need that. (cf. Sinema)
  • asdff 5y ago
    I read that and I'm not sure how his points eliminate the revolving door. "Ban all legislators and anyone who works at a regulatory agency from working for a lobbying firm for a period of time after they leave office/their position." Won't change anything. Ajit Pai isn't working as a lobbiest yet he revolved right into his next gig. "Increase salaries for these individuals to make up for this limitation." Legislators as it is today are not hurting for cash. If they are truly corrupt they will try and make as much money as possible by abusing their position no matter what they are paid. "Provide these individuals with stipends for a period of time after they leave their positions to work in the public sector." They already get a pension after 5 years of service and once again, they will just take the very same jobs that are the root issue and have a stipend on top of it. Corruption is not for lack of money. It's from people lacking a moral compass seeing an opportunity and taking it.
    • nielsbot 5y ago
      I think once you "get in" you end up working to stay in. Which is what lobbyists give you. Money for your campaigns. AlsoL if you don't take the money, they'll give it to a political competitor instead.
  • Traster 5y ago
    I think that essentially, because of the supreme court's interpretation of money as speech, it would be very difficult to pass a law to get money out of politics without the SCOTUS overturning it. So at that point you need a constitutional ammendment or to pack/replace the supreme court. Both of these are incredibly ambitious things to do. So it's probably that this freedom bucks idea is a way of dis-empowering the private money in politics by making it compete with public money.
• torginus 5y ago
  Does the 3rd party make sense in the US election system? My impression was that 3rd parties are unhelpful, since they steal voters from ideologically similar parties, thus helping the opposition.
  • fighterpilot 5y ago
    After Ross Perot's modest success in 1992 I think a very charismatic person could do it. But Yang lacks charisma and the mainstream media hates him (remember MSNBC and CNN editing him out of 30 infographics, which Yang says is intentional) so I don't think he can pull it off at the end of the day, even though his ideas are the ones that could actually unite the country.
    • torginus 5y ago
      My impression of the US media is that they are for-hire mercenaries, rather than journalists in any meaningful sense. They ganged up on Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bernie, despite most of them having policies they claim to support.
  • citboin 5y ago
    Right now a third party is a wasted vote so we need more than 3 national parties in order for them to be viable alternatives to the current two. The Forward party and Green Party could cooperate in order to make this happen, but that’s probably just wishful thinking on my part.
    • smolder 5y ago
      I really can't see how multiple small parties teaming up helps anything. Maybe you can clarify? For as long as the big two are considered the big two, any number of additional parties act as spoilers.
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    Generally that's true, but some polities have started doing ranked choice voting, which may give third parties a way in: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_... > Ranked-choice voting is used for state primary, congressional, and presidential elections in Alaska and Maine and for local elections in more than 20 US cities including Cambridge, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California; Oakland, California; Berkeley, California; San Leandro, California; Takoma Park, Maryland; St. Paul, Minnesota; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Portland, Maine; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and St. Louis Park, Minnesota.[1] New York City is the largest voting population in the US using RCV.[2]
• Karto 5y ago
  The top line, "Not Left. Not Right. Forward." kind of reminds me of Macron's "En Marche" ("Let's Go") that took over France in a storm, taking over the presidency AND the parliament only one year after its foundation, with very few previously known political figures in its ranks. The whole thing looked like doing management rather than politics, and offered an alternative to fed-up voters who didn't dare turn to the usual far-right and far-left "protest votes". Headed with a nimble tactical vision, the formula was extremely efficient... for one mandate.
  • disneygibson 5y ago
    And like Macron, Yang seems to have the support of globalist technocratic elites. Very similar situation indeed.
    • southerntofu 5y ago
      Yes, that's just more of the same "managerial feudalism" David Graeber talks about.
  • pjc50 5y ago
    It reminded me of "twirling towards freedom": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:The_Simpsons/Character_quote/48 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:The_Simpsons/Character_... I hadn't realised just how much Macron's party materialized from nowhere. Must have been huge pent-up demand for an alternative. However I suspect that only works in systems that aren't FPTP in the first place, and I suspect Macron is going to the same nowhere that all American third-party candidates go. Especially if he starts by aiming for the top. What might work is a third party taking a city and then a state. This is how third parties practically operate in the UK, they're all local - SNP, Plaid, the various Northern Ireland factions.
    • kryptiskt 5y ago
      France has FPTP elections, but in two rounds, so there is room for tactics.
    • 5y ago
• jagrsw 5y ago
  ".. because our founding fathers .." It's interesting to see that all sides of political dispute in US, even parties (like this one) which want to cater to the seemingly more rational and less emotional part of the populace use the argument of "the founding fathers wanted it this way, so... that must be the correct way of doing things forever".
  • dylkil 5y ago
    thats the result of making millions of people pledge to a flag every morning when they were kids
  • hef19898 5y ago
    That American obsession with the founding fathers always puzzles me as a non-American. France is in tis 5th Republic, the second since WW2. Germany went through a lot of Government changes since the 18th century as well, as did a lot of other countries in Europe. With the exception of some wierdos nobody puts those long gone governments on a pedestal.
    • disneygibson 5y ago
      Germany doesn’t exactly have a good record when it comes to new governments. Nor does France. Very odd to use them as positive examples. As flawed as the American government may be, the Constitution is still a more solid foundation than pretty much anything that has come out of Europe since.
      • hef19898 5y ago
        Well, the 5th French Republic is going well since the 50s, isn't it? As is the post-war BRD in Germany. Both used to have an Emperor at some point, Italy went from Kingdom to Facist regime to democracy. So yes, if the situation changes you can change your government form. Basing 21st Century politics on something written in the 18th century is... weird. Especially as it is more the interpretation of what the authors thought, and might think today, based on these writings. Just my outside opinion.
• Factorium 5y ago
  We've already experimented with UBI in 2020 and seen the result: - Huge levels of fraud (applications from overseas scammers for state unemployment benefits etc.) - Widespread shortages of entry-level workers - Massive inflation and economic dislocation Instead of UBI, we should just stop illegal immigration, and support deportations, which will increase wages and lower cost of living (real estate) pressures. Exactly like the Trump policies of 2019 which saw the lowest Black unemployment rate in history... Soup kitchens and homeless shelters, universal free and available contraception/abortions, and stopping the incentivization of single motherhood with via increased welfare benefits, will better deal with poverty in the short and long terms.
  • dylkil 5y ago
    > which will increase wages and lower cost of living (real estate) pressures. this is nonsense
    • fighterpilot 5y ago
      Why? It should increase low-skilled wages since you're removing a chunk of low-skilled labor supply. It'd reduce rents by a little since the housing stock remains unchanged but demand is reduced, but the effect is probably small. Bad for the economy overall but these two claims seem pretty straightforward.
  • OoTheNigerian 5y ago
    Were Nigerians (allegedly) the only ones making fraudulent applications? Why is it only Nigeria you could use as an example? Perpetuating nasty cliché tropes lead to stereotyping. Perhaps, that's your intention or not, but I just need to inform you and your ilk, that anytime a Nigerian is unfairly discriminated against off or online, you contributed to it.
• bengale 5y ago
  I really like that guy, I hope he does well.
• timwaagh 5y ago
  I don't think he's got it. These are esoteric issues few people ultimately care about.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  Not exactly sure what to make of this, conceptually it just sounds like 90s era Clintonite/Thatcherite consensus with some ranked voting and other stuff thrown in. The reason why the US is polarized (and most other places to a slightly lesser degree) is because that quadrant of the political spectrum is dead[1], and people have overall grown tired of this liberal (in a broad sense of the term) anti-politics which aims to disguise managerialism and technocratic government as 'non-ideological'. [1]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyE_4e9V4AAW0od.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyE_4e9V4AAW0od.jpg:large
  • netcan 5y ago
    I don't think I'd call that Clintonite/Thatcherite. Thatcher was quite confrontational, and also hawkish socially conservative. Not dispositionally centrist, consensus oriented or antipolitical. Blaire is probably the PM you're looking for. That "consensus" happened when the centre left accepted structural changes made by the previous "generation's" new right, Reagan & Thatcher. Economic issues became non-ideological, and technocratic rather than political from that point. This is even more of thing in the UK than the US, where the right wing still focused on economic conservatism rhetorically.
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      > That "consensus" happened when the centre left accepted structural changes made by the previous "generation's" new right No, it didn't, at least not in the US. The neoliberal consensus happenened, in the US, when the center-right faction took over the more left-leaning of the two major parties.
      • netcan 5y ago
        I'm not disputing the US clinton part. I'm disputing the Thatcher part. Blaire is "the center-right faction taking over the more left-leaning of the two major parties" and succeeding politically in the UK.
        • 5y ago
• cabalamat 5y ago
  I'm surprised the Forward party / Yang's platform doesn't include UBI, as that is the main thing he's known for.
  • bonhasgone 5y ago
    It is mentioned on the site
• mattowen_uk 5y ago
  Am I misinformed? As non American, I was under the impression that there could only be two parties, and everyone else had to be independent?
  • 5etho 5y ago
    yes you are, there a lot of parties, even communissm one's. But it's true they always lose due to neoliberalism of bliionaires and millionaires class just a take, also non americam, dont' know why green and liberals don't stand a chanc to go to congress
    • Miner49er 5y ago
      Yeah, but the Communist party is banned in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    There are plenty of American political parties, including one literally called the "American Independent Party," which was founded in 1967 in order to nominate George Wallace to run for president on a segregationist platform after the two big parties were no longer willing to die on that hill. Usually, if you hear about a politician being an "independent," it means they're either a legislator not siding with either of the two major caucuses or a candidate running without the backing of any party, which does happen sometimes when a candidate is wealthy enough to fund themselves. The last time anyone managed get very far doing that nationally was Ross Perot in 1992, but when he ran again in 1996, he formed his own political party instead.
• meerita 5y ago
  This is another attempt to rename socialism. Universal Basic Income will be again the same thing with different name: taxation over taxation. My country Argentina is having a huge problema with offering money montly, they need to print to meet the money demand, it will end really badly.
• southerntofu 5y ago
  For those of you who'd like to take a 10-minutes break to actually talk about issues instead of empowering future tyrants: https://archive.org/details/TrapNews https://archive.org/details/TrapNews
• Marazan 5y ago
  It is still astonishing to me that Yang was the betting favourite for NYC Mayor at one point. I completely missed it at the time which is infuriating as a betting opportunity like that to lay him is a once a year occurrence at best.
• andreyk 5y ago
  Seems cool, their platform has a lot of good elements given the party's main aim ("the current two-party duopoly is not working") . It does have some sort of minor points that seem less worth highlighting (eg "Department Of Technology" which is just a beuracratic revision), but many of the ideas like ranked choice voting, term limits, democracy dollars, etc. are very nice. Might well support this party... It does seem to have much more to do with organizations like FairVote rather than actual political parties, and I suspect the former is the right approach.
• throwaway10122 5y ago
  We have Proportional Representation single transfereable vote system in Ireland and its great, as it forces formation of coalitions to actually represent a majority of population (hence less alienation), allows small parties and independents to potentially join governing coalition (Greens at moment for example), forces parties to compromise and drop more extreme policies. As for the left / right divide in USA, from our point of view your two main parties are well on the right wing out there
• southerntofu 5y ago
  So their program is focused on managerialism and "progress". I could not see a single line on the homepage about ecology and how industrial capitalism is threatening to destroy our entire planet. But there's arguments for easier taxes and blockchain technology. WHO CARES IF WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE?! There's "basic income" mentioned but nothing else about social justice and redistribution of the massive wealth the oligarchs have amassed by exploiting working people. There's talks of limiting congress mandates in time, so that means their program does not plan to abolish elections to create a true democracy where people decide directly without corrupt overlords. Nothing interesting to see in this program, but the great leader's photo splattered across the homepage: this sounds like any other capitalist party with empty promises that will be betrayed the second they seize power, because the problem is not with the people in power but with the *structures* of power that enable abuse in the first place. Personally, what i'd vote for a party who would propose: - self-organized public services: no government, no managers, just the workers and the users uniting to provide optimal service (transport, healthcare, education..) - abolition of borders and national ID cards: no more "illegals" because everybody has a right to live and travel, no more immigrants being exploited by greedy bosses treating them like slaves - immediate redistribution of wealth: all debt is abolished, and every resident is given property rights of where they currently reside ; all homeless people are housed and given property titles (there's currently several empty dwellings per homeless person) - immediate redistribution of political power: the government and parliaments are dismantled, the highest authority is the local Commune (direct democracy) which can organize with other communes through horizontal consent - green revolution: acknowledge that there is no clean energy/resource, and aim to reduce resource usage by making lifetime warranties mandatory on most products (no planned obsolescence) and organizing public life for energy efficiency (mutualization of infrastructure) My personal wishlist would be way longer, but that's the absolute minimum if you'd like me to vote "for you" (for us all!). That would be "Forward" politics. This "Forward" party looks very "Backward" to me.
  • cnlevy 5y ago
    Your platform has a name: Anarchism. I'm interested to know if there a concrete examples of it in the past where it has worked well (at a country level) ?
• cpursley 5y ago
  The use of the international communist star for the logo seems like bad optics (the people who claim Yang is a socialist will latch in the that).
  • smolder 5y ago
    A 5 pointed star is not a communist symbol, except maybe according to some communists. There are 50 of them on the US flag, as just one example.
    • cpursley 5y ago
      It absolutely is, I'm living in a former communist country and these stars are still everywhere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_star https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_star
      • smolder 5y ago
        Okay, I'll cede that red ones specifically carry that meaning. I thought you were claiming all 5 pointed stars as such. I still don't feel that the silhouette of a (white, 5 pointed) star created with red lines is quite the same thing. I could however, to your point, see it being interpreted that way by Fox News, who will claim that damn near anything is communist if they are against it politically.
• Program_Install 5y ago
  Something like this comes along every so often, hot to trot in its genesis. Typically, experiences it’s exodus, when folks fall back in line.
• netcan 5y ago
  What's missing here, IMO, is a party. Who's with him? Do you have defectors from the 2 parties? Independents or popular figures joining up? Candidates being stood? A political party is not a manifesto, it's an organisation. I actually think there's room for a party to start gaining ground in the US. There are so many elected offices that the surface area is huge. Great for "guerilla tactics." IE, earning easy victories by picking the battle.. Maybe your pick a thousand low key positions, and work on them. Standing a thousand candidates with success, even if the offices are minor, makes you a full fledged party by default. Uncompetitive regional strongholds, are another opportunity. You could split the large party's vote and earn immediate relevance. You could even split the small party's vote and try to steal 2nd place. That might make you one half of a dichotomy the next time. You could run candidates in republican or democratic primaries. The primary electoral system is diverse, so you can choose to do this where it has a chance. So, where's the party? Who's running? Where/what? Who else is involved? A political manifesto is OK, I guess. A party manifesto... that would be a lot more interesting. What are you planning to do?
  • h2odragon 5y ago
    A political party in the USA needs an engaged, interested, reliable representative for every single county election commission, at the very least. The Libertarians don't have that. The Greens never bothered with rural areas. The Perot believers and the Tea Parties had boots enough but no co-ordination.
    • Loughla 5y ago
      The green party has such an opportunity in rural areas. I've never understood why they refuse to see any amount of trade-off. Living in a rural area for a majority of my life, I can tell you that (not to make a no-true-Scotsman argument, but) most people are very concerned about the environment. When you are constantly surrounded by reminders that the world is changing, it is impossible to refute that fact. That many still deny global warming while accepting that things are getting worse seems like bickering over semantics at this point.
      • 5y ago
• rzwitserloot 5y ago
  America, especially at this time, strikes me as rather very focussed on 'winning'. They're also extremely used (in that it's been that way for almost the entire existence of the country) to a 2-party getup. (That desire to win would strongly indicate that voters want to vote for a winning party and are thus unwilling to go out on a limb and vote for a long shot like this; it will be reflected in the polls which further highlights that the party can't win, and thus, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy). Thus, unless I'm really missing something, this party can't actually win anything and will just siphon off a few votes. I don't think it's particularly easy to determine which party gets more votes 'siphoned out', but any effect on actual winners of elections that this party might have is focussed solely around: [A] if it siphons significantly more votes off of one party vs. the other, and [B] if either major party is afraid of getting the short end of the stick in the above, and will slightly change their platform (or at least their message) in order to prevent it from happening. I can see an argument that engendering change in politics can be done even if you stand no chance of winning by changing the focus of public discourse, but given the polarized nature of the US, shouldn't you first, I dunno, start a party that tries to fix elections e.g. by applying the ranked voting system as used for e.g. New York majoral elections, or Maine's governor, to presidential elections? Until then whatever message Yang cares to put out there will just be drowned out by the masses eager to just paint them as an insiduous tool of the opposition, where all they will accomplish is to siphon votes off of the party that they are most similar to (probably the democratic party at this point in time). Thus, giving Yang and whomever likes his points the opposite effect: A vote for Yang is actually like half a vote in favour of the party you'd least want to govern. Even if you think that's an acceptable sacrifice on the road to a new party / a change in politics, it's not going to work simply because the news will obviously paint this new party as utterly irrelevant except in regards to which party it siphons more votes off of. Nobody will even be talking about what this party stands for. Am I missing something, or is it all just doomed, in that such a party can neither win, nor meaningfully influence the topic? Maybe Ross Perot had the right idea by tossing down a giant bag of cash to air very long ads that explained his idea to the populace. That way, his take on things was at least part of public discourse (regardless of how you feel about said ideas).
  • pharke 5y ago
• dadoge 5y ago
  This guy just wanted to make a buck…this was announced the same day his book called Forward came out. No one will be paying attention to this in a year. New political don’t start from 1 person who has not held office and failed twice to win an election.
  • FridayoLeary 5y ago
    Trump?
• boh 5y ago
  I'm over Yang at this point. His candidacy for NY mayor went really poorly and illustrated his ignorance of anything outside of his headline policies.
• brightball 5y ago
  I’m an independent but count me curious. Might have to get his book.
• joshuaellinger 5y ago
  I'm surprised nobody mentioned good old H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who made Bill Clinton president in 1992. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot) Perot peeled off enough libertarian voters from the Republicans to enable a Democratic victory. It odd looking back at him. He was not a proto-Trump exactly but he ran against the NAFTA free trade agreement in a way that looks a lot like how Trump ran against shipping all heavy industry to China. My first reaction was that Yang is going to splinter the Democratic coalition thus enable Trump to get a second term. But maybe he can pull moderates away from the Republican side (especially in Arizona). After looking at it for a second time, it looks really out-of-touch with reality and will not have a significant impact. Political polarization isn't a product of a broken political system. People are angry for a damn good reason. It's a reflection of all of the economic gains of the last 40 years going to the billionaires. Someone has got to take control of the country back from the 0.1% like FDR did. That someone will likely be an unknown politician in the Democratic party who makes them pay for the costs of addressing climate crisis. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon.
  • pharke 5y ago
    I may be misunderstanding this bit of history, but wasn't part of FDR's success due to his strong connections among the wealthy and powerful? He was essentially an insider who decided to use a lot of the knowledge he had to reform parts of the system. If we were to have a modern equivalent it would probably be someone from within the 0.1%.
  • spyckie2 5y ago
    > We will support candidates for office who align with our core principles so that we can reform the system and make it more responsive to the American people. This means that we will support Republicans, Democrats, and Independents - as well as candidates identifying themselves as Forward Party members. Yang definitely hates Trump. He's not about to put him into power any time soon. Yang is more about wielding influence on political discussion and trying to move the country away from incumbency than anything else. I really don't foresee anyone building a campaign on the forward party, but I can see a democrat or republican leveraging the forward party's ideas in the right environment to get endorsements from it to win in tight elections.
• Aeolun 5y ago
  > Fact-Based Governance. Legislation should be judged on outcomes, not ideologies But, you’ve already excluded half of your potential voters.
• realce 5y ago
  I raised over 400k for Andrew's POTUS run and devoted a year of my life to running his official Reddit (104k subs at peak), then joined a SuperPAC to further his positions after the run. The campaign team was full of fools who squandered almost every good turn received, most campaign workers were paid less than minimum wage, and Andrew eventually stole the pac's name and branding - Humanity Forward - put everyone out of a job, and then did basically nothing with the organization. I've given so much time to this person it's insane. He's not trustworthy, he's a horrible manager of people, and he never pays off on what he promises. Just dip your toes into YangGang social media and see how his former fans act now, or the stories of abuse within the campaigns that Andrew hardly acknowledged. Inspiring message, but I've been close enough to the sausage factory to know it's fluff. Beware. If you are interested in this endevour do the best you can to build your own power base, do no rely on Andrew's circle to help you in any way other than a retweet.
  • 3pt14159 5y ago
    Edit: Proof accepted. Thank you! Sorry, but I'd like some proof about, really, any of this. For example, that you were a moderator of his official subreddit. I dislike Yang making a third party, but this is a pretty hefty charge.
    • blfr 5y ago
      > created: October 4, 2020 > karma: 258 Yeah, there are plenty of people here with knowledge and experience from surprising fields but I, too, would like some confirmation.
      • 3pt14159 5y ago
        He posted proof here: https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/q2khwm/3pt14159/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/q2khwm/... Not sure if it will stay up or not, but it's convinced me.
    • yangang 5y ago
      This is a great public example of Yang being morally rudderless: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/05/andrew-yangs-israeli-palestinian-gone-awry https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/05/andrew-yangs-israeli...
• zomg 5y ago
  good luck with that. laughs in libertarian
• zaybqp 5y ago
  What messages did you find inspiring coming from him? I find a lot his messages to be too abstract to appeal to the American mass. It's missing the kind of "build the wall" messages that get people excited.
• peter_retief 5y ago
  The US political system is broken, that much is true, Yang says the right words but can make any headway I wonder.
• stooliepidgin 5y ago
  New flavors of political parties in a bought-and-paid-for kabuki theater isn't never going to work. The problem is it's an oligarch-pluto-kleptocracy and that a popularity contest voted-on by illiterate, easy-misled, manufactured consenting citizens are going to produce competent leadership with integrity are delusions of grandeur. You get celebrity chefs, reality show narcissists, and actors who do and believe whatever their wives say.
• seanw444 5y ago
  Crazy to me how many people would rather not consider the Founding Fathers in politics today. Just because we have smartphones and internal combustion engines doesn't mean that general political ideas have changed much at all. People scare and disappoint me lately.
• arminiusreturns 5y ago
  The peoples party is the third party we need. Its not perfect, but its certainly better than Yangs... whatever his schtick is.
• AlwaysRock 5y ago
  I'm not a huge Yang fan but any viable third party would be welcomed. Much of the political deadlock and stagnation of the US comes from there being two parties that both try to appeal to the largest groups of people possible.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• motohagiography 5y ago
  Why start a party instead of creating a caucus within an existing one? No new party has prevailed in the US in centuries, and rarely elsewhere. It doesn't seem to be a solution in the domain of problems it's trying to solve. I get the business side of politics is to represent people and their interests in the democratic process in exchange for financial support, but forking a party to do it may give you more direct access to those funds for efforts instead of having them filtered and allocated by the mainstream party, but at that point, you might as well just be another lobbyist group. I could just start The Billionaires Party, whose goal is to ensure the interests of a few thousand people were represented in the democratic process, and if I could blackmail enough members of other parties, billionaires wouldn't be able to afford not to give donations to support my party. But if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't start a party, I would run a lobby group, or as above, organize a caucus of the establishment party members I could bend or compromise. A party has constraints and restrictions, where a lobby group does not have the same ones, and if you want the benefits of party membership like electability, you give up some of the freedoms of lobbying. Reality is, politics isn't about fixing problems, it's about winning and having your interests prevail, and becoming the people who manage and extract value from problems, not solving them. To adapt a proverb, government isn't in the business of teaching men to fish, it's there to keep him coming back to be fed for a day in exchange for his continued compliance. Of the options available, starting a new party seems so un-strategic as to be a fast filter to find suckers, like spelling mistakes in spam emails, where if people don't see those, they're likely vulnerable to being taken in. Forking a new party seems like a way to do that same thing. That said, by splitting the vote in key areas, he can become a policy kingmaker, as is common with minority governments in the parliamentary system, and that's certainly a play, but it essentially reduces strategically to taking hostages to get policy concessions during an election cycle, which does work, but usually only once, and anything that requires follow through after his leverage is gone is going to be dropped and never touched by any party again. A new party is not the recipe for change.
  • spyckie2 5y ago
    > Reality is, politics isn't about fixing problems, it's about winning and having your interests prevail, and becoming the people who manage and extract value from problems, not solving them. Some people go beyond pragmatism. And pragmatism is not the only way to live, or to even feel alive. Many things have to be fought for regardless of how anti-pragmatic it is to do so and these people look like fools to others, but have their own internal compass driving them. I think the abolitionist movement (freeing slaves in the US) is the most obvious counterexample to your quoted point.
• js2 5y ago
  Yang was recently interviewed by Kara Swisher about this. She's a somewhat adversarial host but he had answers for everything. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/opinion/andrew-yang.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/opinion/andrew-yang.html
• socrates1998 5y ago
  There is a lot going on with this guy. He says a lot of the "right" things and it's pretty clear he has a point with our system being really messed up. The problem with founding a new party is that it has to have a base that is based on something organic and I don't think this guy realizes that. At best, he can only hope for a party base derived from his personality, which is lacking. Other than that, I don't see any demographic group that he can consider his core group of supporters. At the very least, it will make people think about the current system and how to change it.
• desireco42 5y ago
  Not perfect but solid alternative. That is all I ever wanted to have.
• gfodor 5y ago
  Left, right, forward, backward. The way out isn’t through, it’s up.
• dqpb 5y ago
  We don't need a new thought leader. We need a platform for decentralized decision making.
• justin66 5y ago
  Could someone familiar with election law comment on what Yang gets to do with all the money he raises with this PAC if this effort to be recognized as a political party doesn't succeed, or for that matter, in the meantime until it does? > The Forward Party is a PAC that plans to grow its support and then petition the FEC for recognition as a political party when we fulfill the requirements, which include operating in several states, supporting candidates, getting volunteers signed up around the country, and other party activities.
• TimTheTinker 5y ago
  To me, it seems our current system has us stuck in a prisoner's dilemma of sorts. Each side has a large base of constituents who don't love their own party but feel it's a non-negotiable to keep the other major party out of power as much as possible. For example, I dislike both sides, but there's one party I dislike more than the other, so I vote in such a way to keep that party out... which ends up supporting a party that a lot of people hate. If you're in the US, it's likely you can relate.
  • jmull 5y ago
    The general issue is that we have a democracy (of sorts) and there is no coherent party platform/philosophy/approach that could make a majority happy -- at least not for long. As a result, in order to win some elections (have some power) the major parties are formed out of coalitions of disparate groups that can manage to hold their noses and work together. The bigger and more diverse your coalition the more you win, but bigger more diverse coalitions are harder for any individual member or subgroup to actually like. This is the dynamic pushing parties to be the most objectionable they can get away with, while still actually winning. The winning move isn't to be liked, but to be disliked less than your opponent. I'll just note, this is a general issue in democracies, not just the two-party system in the US. In the US the coalition is formed before the election and in some other systems the governing coalition is formed after. You can sometimes get a semblance of a coherent political approach that can outright win elections. But it doesn't last.
• rayiner 5y ago
  I love “grace and tolerance” as a core principle. One of the things I used to respect about Americans is their ability to deal with the reality of the world as it is, including having an aloofness from politics. It wasn’t like Bangladesh where the losing party calls for violent strikes after every election. That confidence has been totally shaken over the last five years. Our mentality is becoming like that of a third world country.
• standardUser 5y ago
  Will Yang succeed where Teddy Roosevelt failed? Somehow I doubt it. But I do wonder what motivates this kind of endeavor. I can't for second believe that a never-elected, fourth place mayoral candidate who didn't win a single delegate running for president actually thinks he can forge a competitive party amidst the world's most famously rigid two-party system. So what's the real motivation?
• verkter2 5y ago
  No equal opportunity for education in goals, but universal income?
• slantedview 5y ago
  This is a pretty blatant re-invention of the wheel. See Third Way, No Labels, etc.
• known 5y ago
  "If you want to test a man's character, give him power" --Lincoln
• mdoms 5y ago
  As a non-American, I have listened to Yang a couple of times on Sam Harris's podcast and I have to say, he is one of the least impressive people I have ever had to listen to. I'm not quite sure why Sam and his audience are so enamored with the guy.
• magwa101 5y ago
  Siphon of Dem votes.
• mulletboy 5y ago
  "not left. not right" Seen that before. Here in Europe that means "right" all the way.
• synergy20 5y ago
  Per Asian's traditional culture it's on the conservative side(hard working to earn your life, minimal welfare/food-stamp, family value, education first, law and order,etc), so yeah for the most part they're republican in heart. As minorities many of them(including Andrew Yang) chose to stand with other minorities fought for 'social justice / equity everything'(welcome to the liberal democratic party!), which for the most part, it means the opposite of their culture and core value. It's hard to imagine hard-working mindset can get along with welfare/equity thoughts for too long. Thus the 3rd party, as he can't really fit into each side.