6 ms·

Former Republicans and Democrats to form new third U.S. political party

29 points by thesecretceo 4y ago

yuppie_scum 4y ago
There are dozens of us, dozens!
Pakdef 4y ago
They did this in Canada... The current prime minister got less then a third of the votes I think.
- jtode 4y ago
  Minority governments are great, though. Keeps the gov from getting too crazy, and they have to make deals to get shit done.
  - Pakdef 4y ago
    They should at least do ranked-voting
    - pauljurczak 4y ago
      It's on their agenda: https://www.forwardparty.com/ranked_choice_voting https://www.forwardparty.com/ranked_choice_voting
  - pauljurczak 4y ago
    Except that the Canadian government went batshit crazy during and after trucker protest. I hope there will be a Draconian political price to pay for this.
    - Pakdef 4y ago
      They went a bit crazy with Covid rules too... curfew, etc..
      - pauljurczak 4y ago
        Yes, that's how the avalanche started.
h2odragon 4y ago
Needs a Ross Perot. Maybe McAfee can run again. Betya the Dead Presidents would license their music free to the campaign.
- Pakdef 4y ago
  They killed McAfee
  - muttled 4y ago
    Your comment made me think of when I used to work on desktop computers, and you couldn't uninstall the pre-installed McAfee Antivirus because it says it can't be uninstalled while it's running, and there was no way to kill it from the GUI. So you had to be tech savvy enough to kill it from task manager. Still angers me to this day.
    - h2odragon 4y ago
      Similarly, McAfee himself is apparently still in a freezer [1], no one seems to be able to figure out what to do with him. I think he'd have found that deeply satisfying. So technically, we still have a chance of electing him. "Alive" isn't specified anywhere in the requirements, is it? As long as we can puppet him sufficiently it should be good. [1] https://news.yahoo.com/john-mcafees-corpse-still-spanish-090847238.html https://news.yahoo.com/john-mcafees-corpse-still-spanish-090...
newaccount2021 4y ago
dane-pgp 4y ago
I think strategically they should encourage their voters to support whichever major party supports electoral reform (adopting a voting system that doesn't have the spoiler effect), and only vote third party if neither of them do. In practice what this means is putting the Democrats on notice that they have to support RCV in every state, otherwise supporters of electoral reform will deliberately sabotage the party's chances and throw each election to the Republicans. This is from the "don't mess with me! I'm crazy enough to do it!" school of thought, which worked so well against the "split or steal" choice given in a famous quiz show clip.[0] That game was deliberately designed to be equivalent to the Prisoner's Dilemma, just as the US voting system ends up being. [0] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2012/09/21/split-or-steal-an-analysis-using-game-theory/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2012/09/21/split-or-steal...
- londgine 4y ago
  their goal isn't voter reform, so why should they do that?
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    Electoral reform is a necessary pre-condition for a third party to have any power at the state or federal level at all. It's not enough to have policies and politicians that appeal to people who currently vote for the major parties, you also have to convince them that voting for a third party won't lead to a worse party getting elected.
thr0wawayf00 4y ago
It will be interesting to see how this goes. This is the first serious attempt to build a 3rd party in the social media age that I can think of, which will go a long way towards driving engagement and retention that didn't exist in the 90s. We're already getting non-stop campaigning nowadays so I could see that working out in Forward's favor.
krapp 4y ago
The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet. It will say at its Thursday launch: "How will we solve the big issues facing America? Not Left. Not Right. Forward." Well... they have a catchy but ultimately meaningless slogan. It's no "Make America Great Again" but it'll fit on a bumper sticker. Unfortunately for them, "centrism" is an often morally bankrupt and intellectually lazy philosophy based on the premise that a correct solution always lies between two opposing, equally invalid ideologies. But the center-point between ideologies (assuming such a thing always exists) more often than not simply serves the interests of the status quo and its injustice. The centrist view of racial equality gets us Jim Crow laws. The centrist view of LGBTQ rights stops at "civil unions" but not actual marriage. The centrist view of science "teaches the controversy" of creationism. The centrist view of Hitler seeks peace in our time. Sometimes there is no valid middle ground and compromise is giving in to evil. You're not going to get anywhere with the black community, or womens' rights, or climate change or immigration or any issue Americans actually care about with centrism. Sometimes, you have to pick a side and make a choice. The US doesn't need another party committed to never actually taking a strong stance on any issue, it already has the Democratic Party. But I guess it'll be fun watching these folks siphon votes away from the left and win Trump a second term. Damn I hate US politics sometimes.
- knubie 4y ago
  What you're describing is usually what happens when Democrats and Republicans compromise on things, but there's no reason that approach should define "centrism." For example the Libertarian party is often described as fiscally "conservative" and socially "liberal." This approach takes the "best" ideas from either party, as opposed to splitting the difference on every issue.
  - krapp 4y ago
    But don't the 'best' ideas on the left tend to assume strong central government, whereas Libertarian prefer a more limited government?
    - fallingfrog 4y ago
londgine 4y ago
when the title says "former republicans and democrats" they mean a democrat whose only experience is a failed run for the primaries and a former republican governor. I wish them well, but I highly doubt this will be any different than the other 3rd parties.
yuan43 4y ago
> The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet. It will say at its Thursday launch: "How will we solve the big issues facing America? Not Left. Not Right. Forward." Universal basic income was a major part of Yang's campaign in 2020. Given enough time, I suppose it could become centrist. In the meantime, this raises the question of what positions this new party will support exactly. > .. The leaders cited a Gallup poll last year showing a record two-thirds of Americans believe a third party is needed. One of the reasons they do so badly is that American third parties have almost nothing to do with respect to local governance. They tend to be focused on trying to win national elections. It's hard to build a bench of electable national candidates when so few of them have run a city or state under the banner of the party they're running with. Unless this third party is willing to make a serious investment in local governance, I doubt it will do much better than the others.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  2/3rds are unhappy with the two main parties but they're not unhappy in the same ways, so it's not possible for any third party to capture that 67% or probably even 33% or 3.3%. Once they come up with their own bundle of positions, most people are going to be unhappy with something in their platform. Living in an intersectionalist age, anything other than absolute compliance with one's unique set of positions makes others unacceptable and often are seen as being just as "evil" as those who are 100% opposed.
  - carapace 4y ago
    It reminds me of the "happy families are all alike, unhappy families are unhappy in their own way" quote from Anna Karenina. I think to be successful the first order of business will be to establish the process of reaching compromise itself a base principle. We have to recognize that we can't all get everything we want, but we can try for the "highest common denominator", if you will, of our shared values. We can respect each other even if we don't all agree on every issue.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > One of the reasons they do so badly is that American third parties have almost nothing to do with respect to local governance. This just isn't true, third parties like Democratic Socialists of America (Bernie Sanders' party)[0] are heavily involved in state and local politics in various parts of the country through grassroots efforts and have been for years. For example, they now represent 10% of the Chicago City Council (5 seats). Groups like DSA are also heavily involved in projects like unionizing Amazon. They do a lot for their local communities beyond supporting policy. People think that third parties are just in for Federal races primarily because we're exposed to so much more Federal politics in the press than we are state and local. 0: https://www.dsausa.org/ https://www.dsausa.org/
simne 4y ago
The most irritate, that party created without policies, so they position, moral relativism, and they plan to make pivot. Good I think they will catch lot of votes from democrats.
innagadadavida 4y ago
> The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet... There is one I can think for starters: members that are not under heavy medications, less than retirement age and don’t drop dead if they walked a mile.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
>The merger involves the Renew America Movement, formed in 2021 by dozens of former officials in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump; the Forward Party, founded by Yang, who left the Democratic Party in 2021 and became an independent; and the Serve America Movement, a group of Democrats, Republicans and independents whose executive director is former Republican congressman David Jolly. Sounds like a third skin on the existing uniparty. Perot caused as much impact as he did because he was someone from outside of the existing party structures. These sound like people who wanted more power in the structure but were never able to get it so now they want an alternative path to those levers of control.
fallingfrog 4y ago
Probably to the extent that’s it’s successful this will pull moderates out of the Democratic Party and lead to Republican wins. Almost no republicans will switch. Moderate republicans are increasingly mythical unicorns in the current political climate. Also, obligatory essay on “not left or right but forward” from Second Thought: https://youtu.be/9TYK9Mu_dzA https://youtu.be/9TYK9Mu_dzA
pauljurczak 4y ago
Worst case scenario, we may have a bit more acceptable lesser-evil...

29 points by thesecretceo 4y ago

yuppie_scum 4y ago

There are dozens of us, dozens!

Pakdef 4y ago

They did this in Canada... The current prime minister got less then a third of the votes I think.

jtode 4y ago
Minority governments are great, though. Keeps the gov from getting too crazy, and they have to make deals to get shit done.
- Pakdef 4y ago
  They should at least do ranked-voting
  - pauljurczak 4y ago
    It's on their agenda: https://www.forwardparty.com/ranked_choice_voting https://www.forwardparty.com/ranked_choice_voting
- pauljurczak 4y ago
  Except that the Canadian government went batshit crazy during and after trucker protest. I hope there will be a Draconian political price to pay for this.
  - Pakdef 4y ago
    They went a bit crazy with Covid rules too... curfew, etc..
    - pauljurczak 4y ago
      Yes, that's how the avalanche started.

h2odragon 4y ago

Needs a Ross Perot. Maybe McAfee can run again. Betya the Dead Presidents would license their music free to the campaign.

Pakdef 4y ago
They killed McAfee
- muttled 4y ago
  Your comment made me think of when I used to work on desktop computers, and you couldn't uninstall the pre-installed McAfee Antivirus because it says it can't be uninstalled while it's running, and there was no way to kill it from the GUI. So you had to be tech savvy enough to kill it from task manager. Still angers me to this day.
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    Similarly, McAfee himself is apparently still in a freezer [1], no one seems to be able to figure out what to do with him. I think he'd have found that deeply satisfying. So technically, we still have a chance of electing him. "Alive" isn't specified anywhere in the requirements, is it? As long as we can puppet him sufficiently it should be good. [1] https://news.yahoo.com/john-mcafees-corpse-still-spanish-090847238.html https://news.yahoo.com/john-mcafees-corpse-still-spanish-090...

newaccount2021 4y ago

dane-pgp 4y ago

I think strategically they should encourage their voters to support whichever major party supports electoral reform (adopting a voting system that doesn't have the spoiler effect), and only vote third party if neither of them do. In practice what this means is putting the Democrats on notice that they have to support RCV in every state, otherwise supporters of electoral reform will deliberately sabotage the party's chances and throw each election to the Republicans. This is from the "don't mess with me! I'm crazy enough to do it!" school of thought, which worked so well against the "split or steal" choice given in a famous quiz show clip.[0] That game was deliberately designed to be equivalent to the Prisoner's Dilemma, just as the US voting system ends up being. [0] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2012/09/21/split-or-steal-an-analysis-using-game-theory/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2012/09/21/split-or-steal...

londgine 4y ago
their goal isn't voter reform, so why should they do that?
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  Electoral reform is a necessary pre-condition for a third party to have any power at the state or federal level at all. It's not enough to have policies and politicians that appeal to people who currently vote for the major parties, you also have to convince them that voting for a third party won't lead to a worse party getting elected.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago

It will be interesting to see how this goes. This is the first serious attempt to build a 3rd party in the social media age that I can think of, which will go a long way towards driving engagement and retention that didn't exist in the 90s. We're already getting non-stop campaigning nowadays so I could see that working out in Forward's favor.

krapp 4y ago

The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet. It will say at its Thursday launch: "How will we solve the big issues facing America? Not Left. Not Right. Forward." Well... they have a catchy but ultimately meaningless slogan. It's no "Make America Great Again" but it'll fit on a bumper sticker. Unfortunately for them, "centrism" is an often morally bankrupt and intellectually lazy philosophy based on the premise that a correct solution always lies between two opposing, equally invalid ideologies. But the center-point between ideologies (assuming such a thing always exists) more often than not simply serves the interests of the status quo and its injustice. The centrist view of racial equality gets us Jim Crow laws. The centrist view of LGBTQ rights stops at "civil unions" but not actual marriage. The centrist view of science "teaches the controversy" of creationism. The centrist view of Hitler seeks peace in our time. Sometimes there is no valid middle ground and compromise is giving in to evil. You're not going to get anywhere with the black community, or womens' rights, or climate change or immigration or any issue Americans actually care about with centrism. Sometimes, you have to pick a side and make a choice. The US doesn't need another party committed to never actually taking a strong stance on any issue, it already has the Democratic Party. But I guess it'll be fun watching these folks siphon votes away from the left and win Trump a second term. Damn I hate US politics sometimes.

knubie 4y ago
What you're describing is usually what happens when Democrats and Republicans compromise on things, but there's no reason that approach should define "centrism." For example the Libertarian party is often described as fiscally "conservative" and socially "liberal." This approach takes the "best" ideas from either party, as opposed to splitting the difference on every issue.
- krapp 4y ago
  But don't the 'best' ideas on the left tend to assume strong central government, whereas Libertarian prefer a more limited government?
  - fallingfrog 4y ago

londgine 4y ago

when the title says "former republicans and democrats" they mean a democrat whose only experience is a failed run for the primaries and a former republican governor. I wish them well, but I highly doubt this will be any different than the other 3rd parties.

yuan43 4y ago

> The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet. It will say at its Thursday launch: "How will we solve the big issues facing America? Not Left. Not Right. Forward." Universal basic income was a major part of Yang's campaign in 2020. Given enough time, I suppose it could become centrist. In the meantime, this raises the question of what positions this new party will support exactly. > .. The leaders cited a Gallup poll last year showing a record two-thirds of Americans believe a third party is needed. One of the reasons they do so badly is that American third parties have almost nothing to do with respect to local governance. They tend to be focused on trying to win national elections. It's hard to build a bench of electable national candidates when so few of them have run a city or state under the banner of the party they're running with. Unless this third party is willing to make a serious investment in local governance, I doubt it will do much better than the others.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
2/3rds are unhappy with the two main parties but they're not unhappy in the same ways, so it's not possible for any third party to capture that 67% or probably even 33% or 3.3%. Once they come up with their own bundle of positions, most people are going to be unhappy with something in their platform. Living in an intersectionalist age, anything other than absolute compliance with one's unique set of positions makes others unacceptable and often are seen as being just as "evil" as those who are 100% opposed.
- carapace 4y ago
  It reminds me of the "happy families are all alike, unhappy families are unhappy in their own way" quote from Anna Karenina. I think to be successful the first order of business will be to establish the process of reaching compromise itself a base principle. We have to recognize that we can't all get everything we want, but we can try for the "highest common denominator", if you will, of our shared values. We can respect each other even if we don't all agree on every issue.
thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> One of the reasons they do so badly is that American third parties have almost nothing to do with respect to local governance. This just isn't true, third parties like Democratic Socialists of America (Bernie Sanders' party)[0] are heavily involved in state and local politics in various parts of the country through grassroots efforts and have been for years. For example, they now represent 10% of the Chicago City Council (5 seats). Groups like DSA are also heavily involved in projects like unionizing Amazon. They do a lot for their local communities beyond supporting policy. People think that third parties are just in for Federal races primarily because we're exposed to so much more Federal politics in the press than we are state and local. 0: https://www.dsausa.org/ https://www.dsausa.org/

simne 4y ago

The most irritate, that party created without policies, so they position, moral relativism, and they plan to make pivot. Good I think they will catch lot of votes from democrats.

innagadadavida 4y ago

> The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet... There is one I can think for starters: members that are not under heavy medications, less than retirement age and don’t drop dead if they walked a mile.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

>The merger involves the Renew America Movement, formed in 2021 by dozens of former officials in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump; the Forward Party, founded by Yang, who left the Democratic Party in 2021 and became an independent; and the Serve America Movement, a group of Democrats, Republicans and independents whose executive director is former Republican congressman David Jolly. Sounds like a third skin on the existing uniparty. Perot caused as much impact as he did because he was someone from outside of the existing party structures. These sound like people who wanted more power in the structure but were never able to get it so now they want an alternative path to those levers of control.

fallingfrog 4y ago

Probably to the extent that’s it’s successful this will pull moderates out of the Democratic Party and lead to Republican wins. Almost no republicans will switch. Moderate republicans are increasingly mythical unicorns in the current political climate. Also, obligatory essay on “not left or right but forward” from Second Thought: https://youtu.be/9TYK9Mu_dzA https://youtu.be/9TYK9Mu_dzA

pauljurczak 4y ago

Worst case scenario, we may have a bit more acceptable lesser-evil...