Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party

> I've given so much time to this person it's insane.

_why_?

Sounds like any other politician.

I sometimes wonder: is idealism good knowing that you will be disappointed every single time or is aloof cynicism and sarcasm the way to enlightenment?

This is disappointing to read, I guess it is true what they say: you don't become a billionaire by being a good person.

I do not have any personal experience, but sadly it does not sound too surprising from what's been out publicly. The moment he dropped out and immediately got the CNN job really changed my perception of him. Then after some events from his mayoral campaign, such as his Israel comments or the Staten Island ferry cowboy incident, it's pretty clear he is a politician like many others.

>He's not trustworthy, he's a horrible manager of people, and he never pays off on what he promises.

The man was running for POTUS. Do you expect the men who lead the world to uphold your own moral standard?

From Machiavelli's The Prince:

>Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft . Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word. [...] A wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Prince_(Marriott)/Chapter...

> Andrew eventually stole the pac's name and branding - Humanity Forward - put everyone out of a job

"Not left, not right, forward" had been Andrew's slogan throughout his presidential campaign. The PAC may have come up with it (I have no knowledge either way), but it is as much Andrew's branding as it is the PAC's.

As to putting everyone out of a job, I had no idea that Andrew, or any candidate, could guarantee someone a lifetime job once they joined his PAC.

Andrew's presidential bid ultimately failed. There's bound to be disappointments all around. But your allegations ring hollow base on this comment alone.

Sounds presidential to me...

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.

IMO, this is an indictment of the structure, more so than the individual.

First, a campaign is a makeshift setup, staffed just in time and fired shortly after. Second a campaign is a campaign. It's about media attention, hammering messages and getting elected. Anything but a messy collapse, post election, is unlikely.

I'll suggest that what you wanted to be involved in isn't an individual campaign, it's a party or something that you could join. Something that is supposed to last, and where members are supposed to have influence. Otherwise, there's no room for daylight between the candidate and people supporting them and every crack is structural doom.

Yang Gang had a lot of self organising, organic aspects to it. But, it framed itself as a fan club. Yang Gang should have never been subservient to The Campaign, which is really just a bunch of underpaid youngsters run by a handful of professional, non-ideological experts. The campaign should have been subservient to Yang Gang.

"Support for Yang among Yang Gang" is a nonsensical frame. That's not sustainable.

Good to get confirmation. I had a sense Yang was incompetent, and now I know.

I still like some of his ideas, and I'm thankful he led to more Americans learning about UBI from the presidential race.

> The campaign team was full of fools who squandered almost every good turn received

He also fired them one day before dropping out of the race just to send a message. I don't know that that's great leadership, but to me that shows he had some idea of what was going on at least.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/06/yang-fires-dozens-o...

That's definitely not to undermine the rest of OP's message, just adding a little extra color.

> most campaign workers were paid less than minimum wage

This is something really strange. If you work for a campaign, it is very very very very different from working for the Mcdonal's. You work for a campaign because you support its ideology, and you want it to win. You are not trying to make a living by working for a campaign.

I would even say, you are not working for the campaign, you are working for yourself! It's like you are donating to the campaign with your own labor. The relationship between you and the campaign is mutually beneficial. The campaign gets help from you, and you get to use the campaign to fulfil your personal belief. There is no way for you to get the same kind of fulfilment by working in the Mcdonal's. The campaign provides you a platform to express your ideology, a network to find ideological friends.

So, no, you are not exploited by the campaign, nor is the campaign exploited by you. It is a voluntary exchange between you and the campaign for mutual benefits.

Appreciate the insight. Even if all of this is true and I have no reason to think its not, I will still cast my vote for someone from his party most likely; assuming the candidate is remotely palatable. I think the country needs a valid third party as a reaction to the extremes of both current parties taking more power and influence. A third party would optimally pull both parties back towards the center assuming that third party is more common citizen focused. As for the negative character traits, I think most politicians eventually become this way. I am not a fan of it but its reality and these days my political viewpoint is very much "Who will do the least amount of harm to democracy", the days of being inspired are very much passed for me. Maybe I am just old and bitter :)

You mean he is acting like a regular politician?

Elections now are generally 2 people with influence, connections, and wealth (or someone that can be exploited as a puppet) that are chosen by financial backers to win, and a remaining pool of stooges and fake implants meant to take votes away from either of the 2 people mentioned prior.

Everything else, including the idea that an honest candidate can "climb out of nowhere" and win hearts and votes, is a pipe dream because of PACs, political parties, and obvious corruption. Been that way for almost forever if you ask me...

I thought the writing was on the wall when, during his campaign, he made self-deprecating racist jokes about his own ethnicity, furthering damaging stereotypes.

> He's not trustworthy, he's a horrible manager of people

Do you have any examples of this?

> And he never pays off on what he promises

Are you speaking about his campaign promises in particular? If so he lost so I'm not sure what you were expecting.

> YangGang social media

Eh. The "but some of his supporters are jerks" argument is emotionally potent but doesn't contain much substance in my opinion. Jerks are often very outspoken no matter what their opinions are. I'm not sure why that has anything to do with the person they're supporting. I remember people doing this with Bernie also.

I am not that surprised.

He kept going on and on about taxing "tech" to fund UBI. And it would work out and it would be like Alaska with their oil fund thing.

But, when you get down to it, what is "tech"? How is it different from just anything? We use the word "tech" to essentially describe any business that is based primarily on software. Where software is a major focus.

Because, like chemicals, technology is literally everything. The wheel is technology. A car is technology. "Tech" isn't an industry, it's a catch-all term for businesses we don't want to define.

So how do you define Google as "tech" in a way that doesn't include other advertising companies or other companies that run their business with software (which is pretty much all of them now)?

So with that and everything else I've learned about him, he really seemed like someone who was very articulate, but ultimately empty.

His big thing was "MATH" but what he really needed was "ENGLISH".

Sounds like a pretty run-of-the-mill politician, maybe he'll hack it in D.C. after all. There's nothing wrong with giving your time to improving your community, but if you're devoting any part of your life to a politician, you're begging to be taken advantage of.

I wouldn't say this is unique to Andrew Yang and his campaign. I had a ex-coworker travel from California to Texas to work on Beto's campaign in 2018 and when she came back, she had the same stories of minimum wage/volunteer workers being treated with abuse and that abuse and misconducts ignored. The campaign eventually did get around to making things right, but it was too late and she had already left Texas.

Memorable quote was: Mistreatment of campaign staff is common (I think for similar reasons as artists and video game programmers often get abused? the short-term pressure and passion project nature encourage exploitation)

Yang was an outsider who didn't have access to a deep bench of campaign talent the way an established candidate would. It seems entirely possible to me that you are correct but Yang himself isn't to blame -- amateurs were the best available people he had to hire.

In any case, he is right about the duopoly. In order to overcome the duopoly, we need the involvement of major public figures. I haven't seen many volunteer--I'll take what I can get. I would prefer he advocate for approval voting though: https://electionscience.org/

Echoing the comment about this being an indictment of election structure - my wife used to work on political campaigns as a high level operative and she says this is par for the course.

Note: am not a Yang supporter, just offering a different perspective.

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.

Everything must have a start. He of course have supporters and media attention. All of the questions are valid, I guess. But I would not call it a missing party, just you didn't find it yet. Also, ask on Twitter and you might get a lot of responses.

It doesn't really exist yet.

FAQ:

> Is the Forward Party a political party?

> 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.

Since everything is politicized, the perceived stakes are so high that social / legacy media would not allow something like this to get going.

Take a look at Unity 2020, an effort to recruit a third party for the presidential run. It was banned on Twitter immediately upon creation. No explanation was given (they're a private platform).

Hopefully it'll die down a little bit now that we may have more traditional candidates on both sides, but I don't know because there are just as contentious issues today.

Everything is view from a lens of agenda. When decisions are made, they're made in the context of "what would this mean for [x]?". For instance, if a story, no matter how newsworthy, could lead to lower vaccination rates, it is more likely to be buried. And when you have organizations filled with people that believe certain ideas or politicians would literally end human existence, the stakes couldn't be higher. Any effort that could be seen as helping the wrong side is dead on arrival.

https://medium.com/arc-digital/unity-2020-a-tragicomedy-ac01...

He would do better running as a Libertarian IMO. There's been support for UBI within the LP for a while, the party simply lacks candidates with a compelling story.

In 2016 though, if the people who voted Green Party would have voted LP the LP would have earned 5% (instead it earn 3.5%) of the popular vote granting it full federal funding through the entire next election cycle.

It's the closest any third party has come to being validated in decades. During the 2020 cycle, both candidates were duds unfortunately and it showed in the voting.

There is no room for a third party to start gaining ground in the US. We already have a third and fourth party - the Libertarian and Green parties - that have been trying to gain traction for years. Neither has been able to. The Greens came the closest with Nader in 2000.

The reason for that is structural. The Democratic and Republican parties have structurally built themselves into the election system in a way that shuts out any attempt to gain traction by third and fourth parties.

Just think about the fact that the Federal Election Commission, the organization that oversees our elections, is legally required to be half Democrat and half Republican. That tells you everything you need to know.

If we're going to change it to make room for additional parties, we have to take over one of the existing parties with an explicit election reform agenda that removes them from the structural landscape and then restructures it (with things like ranked choice voting or a senate that works on proportional party representation) to allow for third parties to gain traction.

The defectors is an interesting point.

If Yang had major defectors from both parties, this might have a chance.

As it is, its just a party of one.

"This means that we will support Republicans, Democrats, and Independents - as well as candidates identifying themselves as Forward Party members."

It's not a party. It's more of a organization to fund politicians who align with their "core values".

And like Macron, Yang seems to have the support of globalist technocratic elites. Very similar situation indeed.

It reminded me of "twirling towards freedom": 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.

<strikeout>

    En Marche benefitted from the peculiarity of France's electoral system, which combines proportional representation in a 1st round with a "sudden death" 2nd round for the powerful presidency with only the two best-polling parties taking part. When it became clear that the far-right would be the largest single party, people ditched traditional party allegiances to back a candidate they found tolerable.

</strikeout>

(Apologies for posting my half-mangled recollections without checking and thanks to the commenters who fixed my incorrect claims).

France's electoral system is not well-suited to its current political landscape.

"forward" means "progress" which means "left". I don't really see the point there :P I've seen many parties claim "we are not left-wing or right-wing" but they evidently have to be either.

I suspect a huge part of Macron's success was his opponent. France elections have a top-2 runoff, and I wouldn't be surprised if many electors were like "I don't like Macron but I really don't want Le Pen to win".

The whole "socially progressive, economically middle of the road" political coalition that would win every election on HN is extremely unpopular in the real world.

While Macron did indeed win the second round of voting in a landslide, I think that had more to do with an overwhelming rejection of the social-nativism of the National Front. In the first round of voting, it was striking how evenly split four of the candidates were. This is particularly interesting because (as a general political rule) as the margins between candidates decrease, tactical voting tends to correspondingly increase. This is why you very rarely see four-way (or more) splits in voting, and means voters must have been especially divided along multiple axes (i.e. not just "left" and "right"!). Macron was really the candidate of the "internationalist right" - a supporter of global institutions who opposed redistribution (see his abolition of the ISF - the wealth tax).

It's also almost the tagline Rita Verdonk used to use: "Niet links, niet rechts, maar rechtdoorzee" ("not left, not right, but straightforward").

This was when she started her own party after being sidelined by the party of the current prime minister of the Netherlands, after getting more votes than he did. Her party failed miserably, and ten years later he's still prime minister.

Which is to say: success doesn't just come from the tagline, I suppose.

Macron presented itself as the "reasonable" option between classical left & right & the extreme right.

He seems in a pretty good position as far as poles go. The left will be divided as usual. The right is struggling to find a candidate, has many court cases to deal with, and has yet to find its position relative to the far right. The far right is torn with crazy extremists such as éric zemmour.

While Macron has made many communication mistakes, his success with the vaccine pass and his ability to deliver good speeches at the right time may allow him to win a second mandate. After that his party will probably collapse.

The was once the slogan in ex Yugoslavia, death to fascism, freedom to the people. Socialism/communism light followed. Eventually, once that failed, people started saying f##k communism, death to fascism, freedom to the people. Things never meaningfully changed, though.

In Brazil a couple parties sprouted up in the past few years: Novo (New) and MBL (Free Brazil Movement). They both position themselves as being "outside" of the left-right spectrum.

And of course, it's a marketing trick to capture people who are 'fed up with the system' and don't realize it is an impossible proposition. If you're in government you'll inevitably have to position yourself on all issues, including labour laws, social safety nets, property rights and so on.

Invariably these parties sit on the right of the political spectrum. The current government already ran with this idea back then, made of "outsiders" who incidentally have really far-right ideas and associate with the military. But they see themselves as "apolitical", whatever that means...

> "En Marche" ("Let's Go") that took over France in a storm (...) with very few previously known political figures in its ranks

"En marche" is not "Let's go" ("allons-y") but "March on", a military reference. They had key figures in the previous government, for example Macron who was ministry of economy and supervised the destruction of working law protections (2016 reforms) for the "socialist" (huge quotation marks) government.

His first prime Manuel Valls minister was also part of the previous government, where he supervised the crushing of popular uprising as ministry of interior. They both represent the national-capitalist turn/wing of the "socialist" party that emerged in the 80/90's. They both have countless blood on their hands, and have betrayed all their campaign promises. For example, Macron campaigned against Le Pen's racism, then passed racist laws doubling retention times (90 days) for undocumented people, pressured against rescuing the Aquarius...

It's also important to note that if they appear to come out of nowhere, they are not emerging challengers. They have been chosen by the oligarchy (media and land/industry owner establishment) to represent their interests, and have been heavily promoted across private/public media as an "alternative" to the politics we knew. As you could guess, this "alternative" was always more of the same: less public services, more cops/prisons, less taxes for the rich, more corruption in the heart of government.

> The whole thing looked like doing management rather than politics

That's politics, too. Just very reactionary, anti-humane politics that destroy people's lives and autonomy in the name of micro-managed stats. You may be interested to know that historically, having a strong government managing society without "politics" (huge quotation marks, everything is political) is Mussolini's historic definition of fascism:

> "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

PS: "Neither left nor right" is also a popular fascist meme.("third position"). In France, it's still represented by famous holocaust-denier Alain Soral ("working Reft, traditional values Right") or Troisième Voie (the neofascist militias who were dissolved after murdering Clément Méric). Hitler was also famously "neither left nor right", and actively campaigned against existing parties, claiming the plurality was a form of chaos that ruined efficiency. He historically managed to convince some workers that he was going to be their defender against the bosses, while at the same time taking considerable funds/support from the German industry owners who he convinced he would be their defender against "communism".

Macron (a banker) was strongly supported by mainstream medias. And when people realized he was a potential winner, many politicians from left and right started to rally him.

Sounds like the good old Third Way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way

Macron hardly won with a huge majority or something. president by default just like Hollande before.

> doing management rather than politics,

This. I want someone who will throw the culture war out the window (both the left and right wings of it) and focus 100% on competent problem solving and execution and on real world practical problems facing the country.

These are problems like infrastructure, transportation, water security in the West, energy modernization and decarbonization, repatriation of critical manufacturing capabilities (or at least making the country attractive for it), bringing government services into the digital age, and so on.

"Competence!" should be the battle cry of this movement.

The culture war gets everyone to focus on culture war issues instead of the basic competence of the candidates, leading to the election of the likes of reality show star bullshit artists and people with early stage dementia.

Reminds me of the "No Labels" crew in the US. Sounded good for a while, but....

Macron's "En Marche" never took over France "in a storm". That is just media spin. Macron is your typical establishment droid and has always been perceived as such by the majority of the French population. The only reason he won the presidency is because of the extreme vilification of Marine Le Pen by mainstream media.

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.

Truly I think the main motivation is he had a new book to sell.

I disagree on the reason for polarization. Your reasoning is more a symptom than the cause, which is the media/information sphere. Most people are silo'd into increasingly polarized and misinformed information diets. Fox news, huffpost, Breitbart, donald.win, rush Limbaugh, the young Turks -- we all know people who have fallen into these types of news sources and are unable to moderate their views. They see entertainment as truth and triggering bait as news.

> 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'

Agreed. See also, Clinton's political ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way

I think Yang's painted picture of the world is to capture the disconnect between modern society's fast paced improvements and government's resistance to change.

Ironically, the fast paced improvements of modern society is because government has kept the economy and country stable, but that may soon change. Stability is needed in times of prosperity to continue prosperity. Stability in bad times is perpetuated hopelessness.

The forward party I think predicts that times ahead is not going to be prosperous for the majority, and that a slow moving government will not service the times very well.

thats the result of making millions of people pledge to a flag every morning when they were kids

The moment that the Founding Fathers cease to be the mythology glue holding the nation together will be the minute that the country fractures into 20 different nation-states.

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.

This is actually not true at all, especially if you consider wings or movements within the two dominant parties. Examining American political history over the past century reveals all sorts of differing views on the Founding, including a president that was openly hostile to many of their thoughts and ideals (Wilson).

Part of the general trend of radical adherence to the Founding is an understanding of the equally radical philosophies they championed and that many (if not all) of these are universal and timeless. Rights like being able to say just about anything without being detained or killed by your government don’t expire — they’re central to liberty, period.

Also, the Enlightenment was a movement very much based in rational thinking. There’s lots of American political rhetoric based in emotion, but respect and adoration for the Founding is hardly the worst of it.

The USA is an extremely different country than when founded and the founders wouldn’t recognize it today.

We don’t number our republics but it’s clear they have taken dramatic changes at various times from Hamilton (Federalism) to Lincoln to New Deal Roosevelt, each era transforming American politics and the role the government plays in people’s lives.

We share the founding myth of the country (this is important - you need a shared foundation) but the country has faced dramatic transformation at various times from loose confederation of independent states to global empire with concentrated federal power.

The founding fathers are like the Bible: they can and have been interpreted in thousands of ways to support whatever popular cause of the day. I'm sure Davis quoted them in 1860.

And they were a diverse group who only came together against the British.

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.

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.

> He clearly doesn’t have a record of success as an executive, either in private or public sectors.

You could say the same thing about Obama in 2008.

> He seems like a nice guy. If he wants to get into politics, why not start as a city councilor or something?

Nice job damning with faint praise there, well done!

Guess what, he's already in politics. He ran a wildly influential campaign for the Democratic presidential candidacy, and was a top contender in the NYC mayoral race. How many people "wanting to get into" politics could claim to have done that?

> 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.

I am a huge Yang supporter. I donated money to his political campaign, the first time I’ve ever done that in my life.

I was horrified that he ran for mayor. City politics is incredibly complex and it’s actually harder to navigate than other political positions. I felt he should have run for senator which would have been an easier job than mayor.

But overall I think him creating a new party is exactly what we need now.

The US already received a more politically palatable form of UBI when the automatic child tax credit hit. Couples making up to 400k get money direct deposited every month per child. 0% chance this will ever be rescinded.

I would say Yang introduced an issue single-handedly into the conversation and it was implemented quite quickly without any discussion because of the unique pandemic situation. Will be interesting to see the long term research that emerges from this.

UBI is pretty prominent on the front page too, if you scroll down (under Core Values).

I'm tempted to back them purely for Ranked Choice Voting. Will be keeping an eye on this for the future.

I think that term limits are becoming more important with longevity technology coming to the fore. While I do not believe that longevity technology is going stay in hands of the rich and powerful forever, they will surely be the first group that will use it extensively.

Even adding 15-20 years of working life would mean that 100 y.o. politicians or judges would become a normal occurrence. For Democrats: would you like to Amy Coney Barrett to serve until 2072? For Republicans: would you like Sonia Sotomayor to serve until 2054?

In politics, a long tenure is a huge advantage. We should probably act now, before the interests of the current stakeholders are too entrenched.

> The Platform page lists a selection of positions that I think would not be very controversial.

The positions may not be, but voting for anything but R or D is very controversial, because by voting third party in the US, you are helping the choice you like least win.

There is exactly zero chance that a third party will gain any meaningful amount of power, so all you are doing is throwing your vote away.

Maybe you're one of the five people in the country who don't actually care which of those two will win, but for some crazy reason still go to the polls - but if you're not one of those five, the best you can hope out of a third party is to produce better candidates in your preferred party's primary races.

Is there anything that's not "controversial" in American politics? Has the whole "evolution" thing been settled yet?

It's important to note that Yang's organization is just a PAC, and not a political party (yet). Yang doesn't need to outline a full platform because the organization will support any politician that lines up with the platform. Once the group does become a political party, it will most definitely need to stake positions on more "controversial" issues.

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

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.

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://electionscience.org/

do you really think those people don't understand how the current vote works? you can't wake up a person who is pretending to be asleep..

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.

That is actually what he's doing [1]:

    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.

1. https://www.forwardparty.com/whyforward

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_re...]

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.

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).

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.

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.

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-r...

Let's review the record:

Yang ran for President. Did very poorly.

Ran for NY Mayor. Did very poorly.

Why does making him the face of a new party make any sense at all?

This.

I think the best way to think about this party is that the goal isn't to win elections (get the majority of votes, beat out the republican/democratic party) - it is to wield influence via a platform.

If you think Andrew Yang is establishing a political party to win a government race, I think its a bit too naive.

I think he is trying to use a third party lever to influence a bunch of small things to snowball into larger things, and he doesn't have the space to do that in the existing parties.

Ranked choice vote seems like the best low hanging fruit. If Yang can bring 5-10 more of these issues into the public eye, he will be the most influential person in politics, whether he is in office or not.

That has happen. UKIP forced the Conservative Party in the UK to offer a referendum because their members were voting for UKIP (UKIPs voter share in 2015 hit about approximately 13% of the total vote). Whatever you may think of UKIP

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results

However there is several negatives to this:

1) That political party won't get any credit for it. 2) The policy will be implemented hardheartedly. 3) It may destroy your party if one or more of the major issues that the alternative party is implemented. As voters won't see any more need to vote as they have got what they wanted. 4) Thee political momentum will be lost for other reform / change. 5) The existing party duopoly will still exist.

To expand on the final point. I dislike all political parties (I am somewhat of a anarchist) and I don't believe in political solutions. However the Labour party in the UK immolating itself will hopefully end up with its destruction. Which will make space in the UK political landscape for new ideas, new people. Some speculate that it may also lead to the destruction of the Conservative party. Peter Hitchens described both Labour and Conservative parties as two corpses that are propping the other up and if one collapses the other may as well. However I personally think that is a fantasy.

I'm not sure this argument really holds. In the United States, third parties can have a significant influence on elections by siphoning off votes (see, Nader or maybe Perot), but they tend to have much more muted effects on policy. I would argue that Andrew Yang did more for the cause of the UBI as a loser in a widely-watched Democratic presidential primary than he would have been able to as a third-party candidate struggling to qualify for the ballot in most states. If his new goal is to focus on ranked-choice voting, I struggle to understand why the calculus would be any different.

I agree with you in wishing we had more than two parties to choose from; for one, studies have shown that negative partisanship is much lower in democracies with more than two major parties.

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.

They just replaced the Rs in the logo with Fs. What a joke.

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

Trump?

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_...

> 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]

It can make sense as a regional party, especially in states where one party is extremely dominant. But you don't get the president that way.

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.

third parties in the US are historically not very successful, but mostly because they tend to shoot for broke by running for President and failing.

In other places where FPTP results in more than two parties, this is usually because they run at lower levels first, to set the expectation that they can run something. it is also usually less costly to run in such races as the required outreach networks are smaller and media campaigns less expensive.

And US election campaigns at the national level are very expensive because it takes a lot of funding to do outreach to 330 million people over 9M sq km, plus media advertising slots are very pricey. Bernie Sanders spent $220M on his 2016 campaign, and that was for the primary. To put that in perspective, the maximum a UK political party was allowed to spend on all seats in Parliament was 19.5M GBP in 2019; the maximum spend on any single seat is 30,000 GBP.

I don’t quite know how to make it happen, but because of the nationalization of politics there are also plenty of places where only one party is competitive so it feel like those places might be an opportunity for a third party

The parties have changed in the past, so if you felt that a shift was coming up, then you might want to get ahead of it.

I don't want to seem too optimistic but the US seems overdue for a more European style politics so if a big shift happened you could still end up with two parties, broadly left and right and Democrats (that remain) could be either of them.

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Isn't this more focused on winning seats in Congress? Independent representatives have been elected or have switched from a party to independent status before. If Yang concentrates efforts on getting more independents elected he could effect significant change which might even lead to the viability of an independent running for president once the strategy has been proven out.

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) ?

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

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.

It is mentioned on the site

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%.

> 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.

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.

It is obvious he is not interested in moves that can be made as part of the Democratic Party

"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.

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.

> which will increase wages and lower cost of living (real estate) pressures.

this is nonsense

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.

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.

Why don’t you trust him?

Lol! Tim Cook isn't boring. But, I understand you're larger point.

Yet Steve Jobs used to be CEO of Apple so I don't get your point.

Pure centrism from your comment very nice if satire.

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.