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.
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.
indictment of the structure, more so than the individual.
It seems to me that someone who wants to change the way the country works should at least be able to do a little better with how their campaign works and treats it's people. Yes, the work is short term and I think people know that going in. But mistreatment & broken promises? Not acceptable. Again, for someone trying to change the country, changing those aspects of their campaign, where they have much more control, had better be easy.
Fine-- campaigning is hard, and a bit broken. So is running the country, but on a much much much larger scale. As I said, if a candidate can't do the former without staff mistreatment and broken lies, I'm not optimistic about when they suddenly have to deal with issues many orders of magnitude larger and with less control.
The fact that Yang acknowledges the issue doesn't make it better.
Yang Gang had/has the seeds of an interesting political paradigm, and a lot of that just emerged as people showed up on the sub. The paradigm was just not built to last, grow or evolve.
Do you see a path from A to B? It would be a shame to see a general dispersal, without any form of continuity.
A lot of people worked very hard to build that bridge from the flash of the POTUS run to a more typical "movement" structure, but even in those efforts the disconnect between the motives and trust of the volunteers vs Andrew's crew was omnipresent. Humanity Forward couldn't even convince the volunteer orgs to adopt their name or charter without some extreme pushback due to their treatment of volunteers during the campaign. They further picked that network clean during the mayoral run, either disillusioning members with his poor, corporately-controlled campaign, or trying to leverage supporters that had nothing to do with NYC.
The path from A to B has already happened IMO. Andrew gave a certain group of people the ability to rise above their cynicism and feel politically useful for once. That feeling frees people and makes them uppity in the face of entrenched power, which is great. The next step of this whole game is YG ownership of this "party" instead of acting like it's Andrew's property, leading to a distribution of power throughout the network. Then you attack localities, like city councils and mayoral races, and build a new narrative closer to a "people's party" than "Andrew Yang's Party"
The party has to feel like the internet did: Anyone with the grit and intelligence can break through, meritocracy be damned.
Sorry to write a book about it lol.
UBI isn't a pipe-dream for NEETs, which is what it was in 2016.
Second on doing a second take of the drama 1-3 years later. I bet you'd have some insights into politics, movements, and the nature of collective power that others don't.
> The party has to feel like the internet did: Anyone with the grit and intelligence can break through, meritocracy be damned.
just fyi - meritocracy is the ability for people with grit and intelligence to push through, I think you mean autocracy?
Who manages the organization? Where does the buck stop? The statement is "more so than" the individual, not the binary option you provided.
I get that you're offended by my complaints, I don't want to be a messenger of total cynicism and I apologize if I haven't framed my experience in a way that's more helpful to you. I like Andrew personally, I support the majority of his ideology. He's a bad manager and my experience working deeply within the campaign, the volunteer orgs, the SM accounts, the Discord, etc, has proven this to me to my sincere displeasure many many times. Hell - he's written about it over and over again himself.
That doesn't mean he's not worth supporting if he's who inspires you to engage with the political structure of the nation though. Whatever works. There are WAY MORE good people out there than there are good managers, and Andrew's just a plainly good person individually. His institutional aptitude isn't great though.
Hope I got my intention across, apologies if I'm fumbling. I don't mean to be a grouch, but I've seen reliance on the central pillar of "Andrew Yang" waste so much of the energy his ideology inspires.
In a sense, this kind of confirms some of the instinctive, "left wing" suspicion that Yang's a naive "enlightened centrist" type. Inclination to bring in experts and consultants to run things via "best practices" and such. The equivalent of hiring Deloitte to tell you how to restructure your operations.
It's the kind of thing that stings a lot of left wing movements, which is now why they are now all crazy paranoid of being "co-opted."
It might be interesting to see if forward learns, or repeats the error.
Andrew is a smart guy, and he seems to come up with smart ideas when he focuses on them. OTOH, he seems to overlook other things and then default to a generic. A party is not a corporation or even a non profit, at least a democratic party can't be. You can't just hire employees, appoint executives and run it like that.
I think americans have difficulty envisioning a party. You have so few. Republicans and Democrats are so old, big and established that it's impossible to imagine them without a ton of power. The libertarians & whatnot are so quirky that they seem more like a convention than a political party.
Ultimately though, a party is a political club. There are members. They interact with one another, nominate candidates, develop policies & such. There's always/usually a two tier system. Actual candidates, campaign managers and whatnot obviously have more power, are more engaged, etc. But, at least the concept of membership exists. It's not supposed to operate as a fan club. It isn't the Foo Fighters.
I heard some of his interview. He has policy ideas. I didn't hear him say anything about the party itself, or got the impression that he has thought about it much.
> 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.
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...
Notably -- and in alignment with winternett's post -- there were an unheard-of 16 nominees that year. Further, they stayed in the race, ensuring the rational voter's influence was split as many times as possible.
That seems... preferable? Say what you will about Trump, but his ineptitude and lack of party connections meant he was limited in what he could accomplish. Contrast that to the Bush presidency and its two foreign wars.
Bush was able to "accomplish" those wars because the country was "united" after 9/11. It didn't have much to do with his personal competence or connections.
The US government (like all liberal, democratic governments) is a massive, many-headed bureaucracy, with competing and sometimes contradictory objectives. Those objectives are long-term, shaped by committee and subject to organisational inertia, so the departments will function regardless of the political weather. It doesn't matter what public sentiment is, nor how widespread that sentiment may be. Being able to utilise any part of it requires connections and a high level of managerial competence - in George W Bush's case that was through his own personal, familial connections, and through his cabinet, many of whom were career civil servants who'd served in previous administrations going back decades. The feeling of "unity" people may have experienced doesn't come into it.
That certainly helped, but it was well known even then that Cheney had a lot of power, and he had many connections. GWB wasn't a complete puppet, but he wasn't fully running the show either.
> 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.
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.
The 2 green icons next to the title indicate that it's a mod post and that it's stickied to the top of the reddit, and the title of the post is that dude's username.
> 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 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.
I donated to his campaign after seeing him on JRE, and I’ve been getting spam emails from political candidates ever since. I’ve blocked at least 7-8 different “PLEASE DONATE” mailers, but they keep coming. I think Yang sold my info.
I donated to a few candidates and the same thing happened. Not sure if it’s from the campaigns individually, or via the Act Blue platform that they all used.
My issue was not with stopping the assault, but more with the fact that the story as told seemed quite embellished, ran on a number of outlets, and it seemed specifically tailored to garner votes.
To be specific, on one side the "bad guy" was a staten island guy wearing a cowboy hat in the midst of a hate crime epidemic soon after the capitol riots. On the other side, with pictures, a mentally ill person of color. The assaulted photographer was there shooting Yang, with many other campaign people and other photographers. All the accounts and pictures were released by the campaign, nobody pressed charges, and as far as I know nobody helped the guy get some help.
I hope that's a bit clearer. I wasn't there and don't really know what happened for a fact, but after looking at multiple sources my best guess was between cheesy embellishment and distasteful stunt.
Now I don't know what to think anymore... I thought it was widely discussed at the time, but I'm having a hard time finding the original coverage of the event on youtube, and the written articles I find seem more balanced than what I remember hearing. So maybe fake news got me on this one.
That said, the Israel comments and the CNN job had a lot more weight in changing my opinion (which to reiterate, is not "Yang is the worst", just "Yang is like his peers").
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 :)
Andrew Yang has never held office. If one election campaign is enough to turn him into a typical politician, what does that say about his value as a prospective public servant?
Nothing really, I think people are turned into politicians because most of them have no idea how to run a campaign as its pretty specialized knowledge. They rely on campaign managers to really do everything. Again, while I like Yang or at least the platform he espouses, I am not going to vote for his party because I expect massive change or some sort of feel good reaction. I just want a viable third party to balance the other 2 parties that I currently am very much not a fan of. A third party will optimally bring the other 2 parties closer to center which is where I am. Right now I just vote for the party I dislike the least. If the end result is a 3rd party I dislike but less than the other two then that's an improvement.
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)
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".
Devil's advocate, but starting with a broad based "who to tax" concept allows for more room to horse trade.
If he said front and centre "I want to personally dangle Jeff Bezos and Sergei Brin over the edge of a tall building and shake until their wallets fall out" that gives one clear target to fight over. Starting with an amorphous blob target lets everyone involved say "Oh, we'll exclude X, Y, and Z...." and feel like they won something, while still getting what you really wanted in the end.
It's why they always talk about the budget proposals as "$3.5 trillion" or "$1.8 trillion" without anyone ever saying "my real red-line is the $12k of subsidies to the local dirt farmers."
Yes, and the real trick is to say "Jeff Bezos" without explicitly naming him. Because a law that calls out a specific person has a built-in expiration date.
The message and intention is inspiring and I think engineered poverty is the greatest problem with American society, creating wells of trauma and hatred that make rational governance impossible and make political oppression very simple.
There's other stuff - I strongly support a VAT and stuff like that, but the poverty>hatred pipeline is what I'm truly interested in.
Because (s)he believed in something and wanted to make a change. And a lot of times this will be for nothing, but believing enough in something to sacrifice a lot or even yourself is how almost any type of progress happens.
I have a high level of skepticism for anyone who is a reddit moderator. This is purely speculative and anecdotal, but the ones I've known are not generally healthy, stable people.
I was a redditor for a decade before I did this, and I TOTALLY AGREE.
Reddit moderation, esp for large subs of like over 50k, is outrageous. The power you can muster to influence debate and exposure at that level is immense, and there's basically no repercussions for abusive mods. The amount of time you have to devote to managing a community is immense, the ability to keep your mod team on point is hardly possible. It's really hard and thankless and can totally twist your head up.
I volunteered when I thought the mods did a poor job on something and DM'ed them, and one invited me to help.
So every day or three, I hop on and help clean out the report queue if it's stacked up.
Being a decent person, modding can be difficult because the internet is full of bad-faith people and idiots. Applying a consistent standard in a way that keeps the sub clean while allowing real conversation is tough, so it is a lot of judgement calls.
I could go on, but it is a tough job. I do it because I want the "chatroom of the city" to be as friendly as possible. I tend to let "merely stupid" comments get downvoted to oblivion, but name-calling or straight-up disinfo (I tend to look at their profiles for context) gets deleted quickly.
And yeah, I step away from it a few days a week, simply because caring too much will keep you steeped in horrible comments and stupidity far too much.
Edit up front to say, it's unfortunate that you read that one line and got extremely nervous rather than take anything else I had put into consideration.
I personally don't care where you post if you're being polite on the sub I moderate. I try to think of it like being the chairperson of a meeting, or the bartender at a local bar: Let people debate and disagree and even say stupid stuff, but if they say something obviously offensive or start name-calling, you get modded.
And if I then look at your comment history and see a stream of vitriolic behavior, that shows me it wasn't "just one time" you got out of hand, but a pattern of undesirable behavior.
I do know other subs, mostly political, that will instantly ban you if you have a different set of beliefs than they do. It's very frustrating. But that's not what I'm discussing here.
I was hopefully tactful enough in my wording to raise the concern with the sentiment but not make it an accusation. I'm obviously reading into a statement you made a bit offhand. Please understand that I'm not saying you engage in any malfeasance.
However, different subs run differently. I may well engage in a nuanced and sourced debate in one subreddit, and frankly tell someone off in another. Subreddits are communities and communities have different standards of behavior.
Likewise, community membership is a terrible proxy for actual opinions or beliefs. I belong to many communities I disagree with, but I find monitoring them to be useful and sometimes engage in debates. I've found my debates with anti-vaxxers to be very enlightening - I still think people should get vaxxed but I understand my opposition.
All of this to say that a top down examination of a profile without context is worse than useless - it is actively misleading.
Honest question: what's the alternative? Maybe sign-off from multiple mods on every action? That'd be a tough sell to require double, triple, or more time from mods. Some sort of random review of x% of mod actions maybe?
There's definitely some "politics" where that's an extremely wise move. For example, people who regularly post in a subreddit dedicated to holocaust denial don't really deserve benefit of the doubt when they've already posted something bad enough to require moderator interaction in /r/lego.
Reddit moderators are a whole breed of their own. Any that I've encountered (mostly for 100k+ subreddits) have lost any shred of empathy they once had.
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/
And I also know how he failed in the presidential and New York City mayor race. And I also know his history with his non-profit. And I also know his performance in ventures before that.
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?
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.
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.
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, 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.
> The man was running for POTUS. Do you expect the men who lead the world to uphold your own moral standard?
Yes?!? It’s insane to me how little some people expect of their elected officials. Yes, the cynical side of me knows it’s never going to 100% live up to expectations once they're in power but good grief.
"things can never be good, here is a 16th century essay that proves my point" is just self-fulfilling prophecy. The Prince mirrors the politics we see today because we keep electing people who read The Prince and use it as an instruction manual.
If you wish to acquire any kind of power, you cannot embarass yourself with right and wrong. Those who compete with you and won't do so will overrun you. Just like companies in a market or competing species in an ecological niche, you need to be as ruthless as possible. The universe has no regards for your morals.
And against the Putins and Xi Jipings of the world, I would not want a virtuous saint upheld by a tight moral code as a leader for my country.
Yeah, yeah, I'm familiar with the content of The Prince. Studied politics and listened ad nauseam to all the wannabe politicians that worshipped at its altar. Thing is, nothing you've just stated is fact. It's just a viewpoint. Which is fine, but let's not pretend we have some absolute truth in front of us.
Relevant case in point: I live in New York, where until recently we had a governor that was all about ruthless assertion of power and ruled by personality. Then, when he ran into problems everyone turned their back on him because everyone hates him.
>Thing is, nothing you've just stated is fact. It's just a viewpoint. Which is fine, but let's not pretend we have some absolute truth in front of us.
Absolutely! I would like to see a political entity led by Kantian ethical formalists. My opinion is that such a faction couldn't come into power. Let's hope I'm wrong.
>Relevant case in point: I live in New York, where until recently we had a governor that was all about ruthless assertion of power and ruled by personality. Then, when he ran into problems everyone turned their back on him because everyone hates him.
Sure, the history is littered with the corpses of the Hitlers and Mussolinis (and the mountains of corpses they have caused), the small petty tyrants who thought brutality and charisma it was ALL you needed to rule. They meet their ends alone at a moment or another, but this doesn't make a case for the success of ethical leaders either.
It's the nature of power, you have to sell your ethical standards to compete at this level. If you think someone is above it, they've just succeeded in their marketing.
That's a selective reading. In fact, I wish more politicians would actually read the Prince, and explicitly incorporate the overall lessons. Machiavelli mostly advices leaders of not surrounding themselves with yes men, not letting their vanity cloud their judgements, lead modest and exemplary lives, be prudent with finances, prefer predictability and stability in all things, known their own limitations, not be greedy.
The popular readings for The Prince focus on the passages about scheming, ruthlessness, the palace intrigue basically. It's only a blip in the actual book.
If you do come away with a cynical reading of the Prince, it's not only about the supposed celebration of the amoral ruler, but also (maybe more) about the stupidity and fickleness of their subjects, or the gaggle of untrustworthy sycophants and rivals at court.
I agree with you and don't have a cynical reading of the Prince at all! Machiavelli simply talks about what works and what doesn't. As he explains, as a leader, helding upon your promises for the sake of it is a liability. Why be angry at successfull politicians when they apply what works?
Out of the three things listed, being a horrible manager of people is definitely disqualifying for a presidential candidate (the primary job of the POTS is managing people.)
That said, while Machiavelli has a point, the opposite is also true: that many leaders have fallen due to losing the trust of their key supporters. No king rules alone, knowing how to keep your supporters happy while still being flexible is a vital talent for a democratic leader. Even more so, many states have fallen due to their allies deciding they can no longer be trusted in negotiations, and the president is the face of the US. You can see the consequences untrustworthy presidents have had in our weakening bargaining power with many of our allies, such as the EU’s many talks of becoming more self reliant. Having a president that at least knows how to appear to be keeping their word to people that interact with them is incredibly important in our current geopolitical climate.
Basically, trust isn’t valueless. A good manipulator knows how to weigh the positives and negatives of breaching trust.
Thanks for this shard of realpolitik in this discussion among people disappointed that their hero turns out to not be the hero they thought. Who would have seen that coming?
> 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.
There is a key difference between volunteers and campaign staff: Campaign staff are managers: they manage the volunteers and bring key competitive advantages to a campaign. Good campaign staff is the difference between winning and losing.
Campaign staff can work 60-80 hours a week during the life of a campaign. This is an actual job.
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?
> 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.
This is kind of a technicality, but I guess I deserve it for posing a rhetorical question.
My point was to criticise the "launch" for two things: (A) Launching as a single person. (B) focusing on the "if I were king" manifesto paradigm, over an actual political roadmap or theory of what the party is.
Ideally, he should be sitting alongside retired senators, serious media people & such. Multiple people who could credibly run for office. Then, what are you planning to do. A theory of the party and its politics, not just a theory of policy. Otherwise what's the difference between this and "The Office of Andrew Yang?"
The sample size of successfully established political parties in the US is small enough that the rhetorical question went over my head :)
I'm not sure we actually know what works and what doesn't.
> retired senators, serious media people & such. Multiple people who could credibly run for office.
That sounds like a recipe for more of the same. Though so does "I'm making a PAC about it!"
Though this "soft-launch" seems like more vapor than ware. I'd like to see more credibility, I'm just not sure how/when someone is supposed to bootstrap that.
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.
True, but what you go to as a starting point is telling.
"A lot of people on Twitter like this" is a naive seeming starting point. It just seems like an extension/abstraction of Yang's candidacy. My key point is that a party is not that.
There are lots of starting points, all incomplete, that he could have chosen. Multiple, politically credible people. Another option might be organisational novelty: This is how we'll recruit & nominate candidates.
Certainly not discounting that this can't be straightened out later, just that it is not straight now. At this point it's not that different than a book tour. It's a set of policy ideas, an author making the rounds defending them, with supporters and detractors in the public or press.
Calling that a political party should be a statement of intent. What is "the party," meaning Andrew, intending?
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.
Going for broke by running a presidential candidate is a surefire way to lose, and no one really donates to parties that lose. Which is a problem, because presidential campaigns cost a crapton of money; Bernie 2016 cost $220M and that was the primary.
If you look at successful third or fourth parties in FPTP nations, they are generally running lots of local campaigns, which are cheaper, give a place to train a talent pool, and also show voters proof that they can get a job done. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a formal third party running for local positions near me. And in this role they can serve as kingmaker; they may never get the top job, but in a perenially razor-thin Senate margin and a currently thin House margin they could certainly lord a lot of power even with a handful of seats.
Most localities in the US are dominated by one of the major parties to the point where the primary becomes the election. That doesn't leave any room for a third party to break in either. Too many people never learn about local candidates and end up just pulling a straight ticket lever.
This is the end result of decades of gerrymandering.
I wonder if you could form a mathematical model of which districts would be most amenable to a dedicated 3rd party challenger. It seems like you'd want a district which is a "safe seat" (if there is a serious R/D contest in the district, people will want to avoid "throwing away their votes" by voting for a 3rd party). But you'd also want to identify a district where people are dissatisfied with their elected representative anyways. Ideally the elected representative is a significant distance from the median voter.
Maybe a good metric would be the ratio of primary ballots cast to general election ballots cast. If a small number of extremist primary voters are de facto selecting the candidate that will win the general and get the "safe seat", that suggests an opportunity for disruption by being a high profile 3rd party candidate who's just a bit more moderate than candidates the extremists select (more appealing to the median voter).
Another idea is to reach out to a bunch of independent candidates and try to recruit them for your new party to work towards critical mass.
Really the big issue here is not lack of ability but lack of will.
Look at the Tea Party and the DSA; they have enough motivated bases to form parties of their own, but their strategy is to co-opt and purify the existing mainstream parties. Equivalent movements in Spain decided to make their own parties and Podemos and Vox became the next two largest parties in Spanish elections.
If you run a third party that is appealing enough, you can certainly have a go at it. I just have literally never seen, I don't know, the Green Party put up a candidate for local city elections.
It's not like party establishments haven't had candidates lose despite all odds. And Independents have had good streaks at lower offices (e.g. Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg)
Was responding to the idea that the Green party doesn't put up candidates for local elections... I think I've seen them on smaller races than Governor as well, but this was a recent example that came to mind easily.
I wonder if it's seen as a necessary evil for perceived relevance. If you aren't running a presidential candidate, it feels like an admission that you're a local player without the resources to run a big, expensive campaign.
I wonder if there's anything to be learned from those weird "secondary" parties you see in some states. It will be like "Working Families Party" or whatever, with a Democratic or Republican candidate for President and few unique of down-ballot names.
I'm not sure exactly how those work. Might be just a way to use some legacy "default ballot access" In my state, a candidate supplied by any of the four largest parties would get on the ballot, even if only 15 people actually voted for the Green or Libertarian.
Perceived relevance hardly matters if you never win seats, though.
Electoral margins, particularly in downballot elections, are very very slim. For City Council of New York, which is a fairly powerful local position, you are looking at margins in the hundreds or thousands of voters, and combined with how thin legislative majorities tend to be, can form a significant wedge to wield.
> 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.
It's more than that: The Democratic - (and arguably the Republican party at one time) - are functionally "big tent" parties. For example, the Democratic party has a progressive faction, an "establishment" faction, and a centrist/moderate faction.
The republican party has a big tent too. There are neocons, extreme far right people, religious people, disaffected workers, anti globalists, and increasingly Hispanics and other immigrant groups.
These groups often have little in common. Just look at trumps support base.
From his podcast interview it sounds like this is a “party” like the DSA is a “party”: it throws its support behind more mainstream candidates who advance their platform (mainly ranked choice voting for now). But being independent allows them to throw support behind both Ds and Rs.
While it's true a third-party attempt is all but hopeless, Nader's campaign isn't the most successful in recent years. Gary Johnson did better in 2016 and Perot did much better in 1992 and 1996 although he wasn't running as a Libertarian or Green.
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.
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.
Maybe they are concerned in an abstract sense, and definitely they are when it negatively impacts them. The problem is they offer little to no support for EPA, and red states have been gutting their state EPAs (or putting into place shills for mega-polluters) for decades now, because they are "bad for business".
A few years ago I was reading about an issue with the cleanup of a coal fired power plant. The power plant owners collected a cleanup surcharge for the entire life of the plant, and put it into escrow. It was supposed to be used to handle site cleanup after decommissioning. For some reason, the company was allowed to sell the site, escrow, and all liabilities to some random 1-person LLC. This person then spent all the escrow funds paying companies he owned to do none of the work properly, and now the people in the region who are dealing with the effects of this botched cleanup have no recourse. Coal retention ponds are nasty, nasty things and because they weren't properly dealt with, its leaking into the water supply.
Yes. And the common thread is, it's a problem, but only when it impacts my life. It's like there's a vague unreality in that we are all connected, and what impacts one of us will eventually impact all of us, or an unwillingness or inability to be truly empathetic.
I don't think so. Again, that's focused very much on semantics. If you dive in and really ask questions, outcomes are seen as the same, even if inputs are seen as different. Pollution is a problem, in their views, even if it isn't causing global warming.
The individuals (who I would note are actually very much in the minority) who steadfastly believe global warming isn't real, still identify that changes in species and/or weather patterns are happening.
It's not a stretch from there to mitigation. While they may not believe global warming exists, they do still understand that we need to make changes to our consumption, travel, and lifestyle patterns in order to ensure their children and grandchildren can have a planet worth living on.
I keep stressing global warming, because, in my experience, these individuals do not talk about climate change. They talk about global warming and how it's not a thing, even thought they identify that the weather is wetter and hotter sooner, then drier for longer periods of the year.
Thank you for the thoughtful explanation. Do you have any explanation for why these folks pretty reliably choose representation that pledges to relax environmental protections? Is it possible that they are concerned about the environment, but not concerned enough to matter at any practical level (e.g. given their expressed actions)?
Money, and a lack of understanding of the tragedy of the commons. That's the pure and simple of it.
I need to be able to exploit [resource a] to be able to feed my family. For example, take fertilizing a field or crop. So it runs off into the water. Well, that has never been a problem on my farm. I don't have algae blooms and my pond is fine. They don't seem to understand that they are just one small part of the larger picture of all of the nitrogen and phosphorous flowing into streams, rivers, lakes, etc. Source: The Obama era watershed protections that everyone was up in arms about.
They are very willing to express their concerns in their own backyard. Whether that is fostering native species, eliminating invasive species, or even adjusting farming/other practices to ensure the sustainability of their own soil. It just falls apart when it translates into policy across the board.
I feel like it's a lack of common definitions and something basic, but I don't really get it, to be honest.
I think this somewhat misses that pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are different issues with distinct (sometimes opposed) mitigations.
Pollution, like runoff and smog can be _much_ more locally tangible, both in the "i can see that we're putting something into the air/water that wasn't there before" sense and the "I can see the damage this is causing relatively directly". Greenhouse gas emissions is much more ephemeral, since things like carbon dioxide are natural parts of the atmosphere and are released to some extent by natural processes, and they only have a tangible effect on a global scale and over long time-spans.
I don't think it misses that point at all, unless I misunderstood you. I think it actually absolutely exemplifies what you wrote.
They identify that something is happening, but do not know what to attribute it to. Concrete steps that can be taken are in your immediate proximity. You can see the immediate effects of pollution, therefore you can try to fix that. You may not be able to see the immediate effects of greenhouse gasses or climate change, therefore it is not a problem.
It's the same as pollution not really being a problem until it impacts you, in particular. The same (I would argue confusing) attitude, I think.
Facing a behemoth like the two parties head-on is impossible. You can't have as much coverage as them as a starting point. OTOH, you also don't have to stay in their paradigm or split your efforts so widely. OTOH, elect three senators or nine mayors would, in itself, represent a major victory and real political power.
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.
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.
If he's planning on endorsing candidates in other parties, that's probably an option.
OTOH, why take on all that baggage when it doesn't come with any votes? Probably makes more sense to recruit former LP and
Green figures to run under the new banner.
This might be a controversial take but candidates for the Libertarian party should be libertarians. If Yang wanted to run under an existing third party then the Green Party would make more sense.
Just looking through his points on the website, here's what's actively supported by the LP...
- UBI
- Ranked Choice Voting and Open Primaries
- Term Limits
----- These are widely supported within the LP
- Working with government should be painless
----- For LP this means because there should be less federal power, leading to less of a feeling that it's trying to control your life
- Legislating based on outcomes, not ideologies
----- I doubt anyone in the LP would be opposed to this stance as the fact that opposition to ideologies which make little sense from either major party is a driving force of the LP itself.
- Grace and Tolerance
----- A party who wants to let everyone live their lives without government interference with a comical tag line of "I want gay married people to protect their marijuana plants with guns" would seem to be the epitome of giving each other the benefit of the doubt. A cornerstone of freedom is the belief in trusting people to make their own decisions.
- Human Centered Capitalism
----- I'm not entirely sure what this means and it's not elaborated on within the platform.
From the actual Platform page, a couple of others...
- Automatic Tax Filing so simplify the tax process
----- This has been a LONG time Libertarian Party rallying cry.
Yang may be trying to get attention by creating a new party, but he's so closely aligned with the Libertarian Party here it's crazy.
No wonder Yang got nowhere. This list isn't really a list of policies at all, it's a set of vague truisms that hardly anyone would disagree with but which can't be obviously turned into any sort of implementation.
And what sort of libertarian party supports UBI?! How would that ever be implemented without massive levels of top-down coercion and taxation? No analysis I've ever seen says it can be self-funding as was once claimed. If that's really their position then no wonder they don't accrue any influence.
UBI as a means of eliminating and consolidating most other government welfare programs under a single umbrella. It would eliminate a ton of federal agencies and bloat in the process.
Additionally, having it conditionally tied to overall government spending so that excess spending cuts into UBI would ensure that every American at any level has a reason to combat new government spending and inflation.
It seems there is a divide between libertarians who support liberty and libertarians who would like government to be even deeper in the pockets of billionaires.
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.
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.
> "socially progressive, economically middle of the road" political coalition that would win every election on HN is extremely unpopular in the real world.
... except Germany?
I think it's more popular on the ground than you'd think, but it's very unpopular in the media who like their politics to be professional wrestling.
A lot of people seem to think that Germany is "socially progressive, economically middle of the road" but that is not the case. Angela Merkel and her CDU/CSU party like to pretend and brand themselves as such, but they don't vote that way.
Also, Germans as a whole can be categorized as liberal regarding social policies but very conservative regarding economic ones.
However, the election last week was a big upset to her party and might finally lead to a new government coalition with the policies you mentioned.
That said, "grudgingly as socially progressive as the public demands we be, economically center-right" is pretty common in European politics; CDU/CSU are an example, as are FF and FG in Ireland.
That seems fine/palatable to me. And honestly, that's good leadership. Social policies should follow popular opinion and be flexible enough to shift ever few years. But economic policies may require unpopular actions to be taken.
The population may not want higher interest rates, or a trade deal that kills a local factory. But those things might be for the greater good of everyone.
My issue with this approach is that it tends to put off progress until there is _overwhelming_ public support. For instance, the 38th Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which liberalised divorce rules, received _82%_ of the public vote. That's particularly extreme, but the 34th and 36th amendment (equal marriage and abortion) received 62% and 67% respectively. All of these could have been introduced years earlier and passed with clear public support.
If you wait until you have no choice but to do something, you tend to delay doing things a very long time. And it bleeds over into timidity about making tough decisions; for instance the FF/FG coalition in Ireland has been unable to do anything about housing, because any actual action is going to annoy _somebody_.
> for instance the FF/FG coalition in Ireland has been unable to do anything about housing, because any actual action is going to annoy _somebody_
Ireland has a ridiculously high percentage of population dependent on government support for housing. This is in the form of assisted rent payments which in effect, sets a high floor for rent. People receiving support are competing in the same market for housing as pretty much all workers.
We don't build government housing anymore because we saw the actual disaster that became of that.
The far left parties have a 'housing for everyone' nonsense manifest which a) Ireland doesnt have the labour force for, b) tax payers subsiding shit wages c) Ireland already has high income tax and sales taxes.
At some point there has to be the realisation that life on the dole shouldn't equate to a middle class lifestyle without the stress or debt when those who should have a middle class lifestyle don't have one because they're being squeezed in every direction possible and still have to take on hundreds of thousands of debt for mediocre accommodation.
While I agree with pretty much none of that, it also entirely misses the point. The problem with housing in Ireland is, very simply, that there is _not enough of it_. This clearly needs to be fixed, whether by prodding the markets or changing the planning laws or direct social housing construction or all of the above. The coalition's approach has been to do ~nothing (the previous FG government did tinker rather timidly with the planning laws, at least, but it fell far short of the sort of action required).
Counterpoint: California voted against gay marriage once upon a time, and overwhelmingly so. The popular (lack of) support was overridden by judicial activism. The rest of the country followed.
I would not classify 7M votes for banning same sex marriage and 6.4M votes against banning same sex marriage with 80% registered voter participation rate to be overwhelming.
The voting age population was 26M in 2008, so even subtracting non US citizens and non CA residents, there were many millions of people who did not bother to vote, and I would bet that people who wanted to ban same sex marriage were more motivated to
vote than people who did not want to ban same sex marriage.
No, it is very unpopular in the US in those who regularly vote in primaries. The primary decides the race, for many, many elections. The presidential race is not exempt from this, either. To draw enough primary voters to make the ballot in one of the two major parties, candidates are, increasingly, needing to take extreme stances on most social and economic issues. (for example, look at how many people came out for Trump in the 2016 primary. In my parents' county in their Midwest state, the polling place literally ran out of republican ballots)
Pandering to the extremes, and the movement of many politicians toward extreme views is a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.
This is part of the reason he and others will be pushing for structural changes, including open primaries, as central to the platform. Changing the mechanics of the elections is the only way to enable a return to centrism in the US.
> Changing the mechanics of the elections is the only way to enable a return to centrism in the US.
There is no centrism to return to. The post-WWII age of bipartisanship wasn't one of centrism, it was one where the party split didn't align with the ideological divide. It was jist as much a period of competing ideological extremes (and governing from ideological polarized positions, which is why it featured the US military being used to enforce the federal will against US state governments.)
Changing the mechanics of elections to artificially favor centrism is...opposed to the kind of changes that would expand the scope of meaningful choices and improve representation.
Americans feel unrepresented. This makes us despair and forces us into increasingly unpopular, existential crisis, that are good for no one.
I do not believe the problem is we aren't progressive enough. The problem is no one trusts the goverment. And no one trusts the goverment is because no one in goverment is accountable to the majority and no one governs the way we would like to be governed.
Frankly it's not about 'centrism'. It's about the fact the parties do NOT represent the diversity of opinion in America. there pro-choice republicans, pro-life democrats, republicans who like trans-rights, pro-capitalism democrats, pro-gun democrats, anti-trump Republicans ... But despite all this diversity of opinion, you have a system that forces binary choices between slates of options.
We are a very diverse country - ethnically, politically, socially. It's beautifully diverse. Among the most diverse in the world. I do not believe the current political system reflects that diversity accurately.
Which is why voter participation in America is low, and most elections across the country do not matter. This is wrong. Every district in America should be competitive.
In order to qualify for the run-off, Macron had to end up in the top 2 first. Which he did. And that En Marche got the parliament as well was a bit of a surprise. Curious to see how things play out next year so.
If Le Pen or Zemmour get through to the second round then I imagine Macron will win, as voters unite to avoid them winning, much as happened in the previous elections.
Although I guess Le Pen and Zemmour might split each others vote, preventing them from reaching the second round.
The National Assembly scores wasn't a surprise, since presidential mandate last 5 years like the AN's deputies mandate and the AN elections come right after the presidential election we haven't see any cohabitation government like it was the case in the past when the presidential mandate lasted 7 years. And LREM, which is easy to place as centrist, is full of recruits that come from the PS (Socialist Party) and LR (The Republican, last name in date of the main party from the right). And LREM got the support of classic center party like the MODEM which get many members promoted in the current government structures.
Yeah, him getting a majority was the bigger surprise. The presidential election is a popularity contest. Both major, traditional parties shot themselves in the foot repeatedly and lost a lot of their appeal. Then, in a runoff against Le Pen, you just win by not being a Nazi.
Getting enough MPs, so many of them outsiders, on a technocratic platform (so without pulling th usual emotional strings) was quite impressive. Of course, the end result is not great, but then nothing really is these days
Sometimes Macron makes me think of Schröder in Germany. Both came as a surpise, both had to implement some unpopular measures. In the case of Schröder, these measures helped to get Germany back on its economic feet (Germany was Europe's sick man in the 90s) and ultimately cost him his Chancellory further down the road. And not all these reforms were actually "good", Hartz 4 is still a damn disgrace for rich, highly industrialized country. Not that it will be changed anytime soon, regardless of the next government we get. We'll see how Macron does.
Not being a Nazi is actually good thing so. Even more so if it wins elections!
> 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.
I don't know about that, it has won the popular vote in 7 of the past 8 US presidential elections.
I'd think that Bush represented a socially conservative position, and I'm not entirely certain that Trump was any more conservative on particular social issues. Additionally, I think Clinton represented a middle of the road approach to social issues (RFRA, massive deregulation, "begrudgingly" signed Defense of Marriage Act, etc.) On economic issues, they all fall somewhere between middle of the road and hardline neoliberalism.
Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and HR Clinton won it in 2016. The only popular vote victory for a Republican post-Cold War was in 2004. Also, "deregulation" is typically an economic issue.
Economically, neoliberalism is indistinguishable from conservativism so I’m not sure what “hardline” means (it also was certainly not Obama — he talked a good game while still murdering children with drones and funneling tax dollars to corporations hand over fist). Liberalism takes the worst parts of both the left and the right and mashes them together. You can’t divorce socialism from social progress — they are two sides of the same coin. No social justice without economic justice.
Bush was definitely socially conservative. Trump was closer to middle of the road socially.
Clinton was middle of the road socially for his time, at best. Trump was more progressive than Clinton.
See for Clinton regressiveness: signed welfare reform (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act); was adamantly against gay marriage (the Defense of Marriage Act); don't ask don't tell; aggressively championed one of the worst human rights violations in US history in his tough on crime campaign (1994 crime bill); Clinton did practically nothing to advance drug legalization and instead furthered the oppressive war on drugs program by the US Govt; started another major US war; financial and telecommunications deregulation; Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Clinton was an excellent conservative.
And when it comes to the border and immigration (as a mark against Trump on the social score), the Obama Admin deported more people per year than the Trump Admin did.
>Clinton did practically nothing to advance drug legalization
Clinton tolerated the first medical marijuana program in the US when it was passed in California in 1996 (Prop 215). That was the first significant liberalization of drug laws since 1980; if the Feds had shut it down, the movement may have been significantly slowed.
While true, politicians cant stray too far from their base, and there was 20 years of social progress in the general population between them: drug decriminalization, gay marriage, etc.
Only because it’s been pitted against increasingly obvious forms of fascism. And it was unpopular enough that Hillary Clinton lost against Donald fucking Trump who was at least pushing something different.
There are a lot of people in this country, myself included, who have stopped voting period. No meaningful change will happen by continuing to elect democrats and I’m solidly in the accelerationist camp at this point. An economically left platform would get me out to the polls. Yang is not that; this is just neoconservativism in new clothes.
It's always true that the election system itself plays a big role in how/what candidates get elected. It's also true that the US electoral structure was a huge factor in Biden or Trump's election. Change the structure of the primary or main election, get different results.
That notwithstanding, it's also true that elements of Trump or Bidens' success might translate.
In any case, the "The whole "socially progressive, economically middle of the road" political coalition that would win every election on HN." is arguably the most successful coalition in western (and many non western) democracies for decades.
Depending on vantage, political classifications like "progressive" and "middle of the road" are relative, and we don't usually agree on the bounds. But if
If you compare changes though, these orientations have been politically powerful for decades. ...
Normative beliefs around gay rights, minority rights, secularism, women's rights and such have been marching forward, call it progressing. Circa 2005, gay marriage was fringe and ilegal almost everywhere. Obama, Clinton & other prominent US democrats occasionally even had to pretend to be against gay marriage, for elections. Within <15 years, gay marriage is legal in the US, most of western europe, etc. A religious-conservative position on a lot of issues is considered fringe now. 15 years ago, condoms were still politically controversial. Bush cancelled HIV prevention initiative because condoms.
Meanwhile, the economic middle-ground is approximately in exactly the same place as it was in the 90s. This might be breaking down ATM, but very generally, the conservative position from the 80s became the middle ground. Barriers to trade, corporate shields, tax structures and such haven't changed much since that shift.
> If you compare changes though, these orientations have been politically powerful for decades
They have, but they usually don't go toghether, that was my point.
Social rights advocacy usually goes hand in hand with far-left positions, while more centrist economic policy usually implies conservative social positions.
I believe it's been a policy driver because it's kind of an "elite ideology", which is overrepresented in educated or powerful circles, which have relatively more soft-power.
It all makes sense. If you're part of group X which is legally excluded from wealth or power, you're hardly going to be impressed by a system that says "lets judge everyone's moral worth as a person on their inherited wealth".
So the best way to increase support for market based economics is to remove such government interventions.
But instead the market-based people often team up with the bigots slowing prpgress on both fronts.
I don't think these narratives are ever definitive, but I think this rendition isn't really operative.
>> Social rights advocacy usually goes hand in hand with far-left positions
Maybe to some extent, but mostly I think this is a product of being "in opposition." You get to be more blunt, fiery & vanguard in your rhetoric when you are in opposition. Also party fringes tend to group somewhat.
In any case, "centrism" has been relative to a previously conservative economic outlook and a previously liberal social outlook. A party representing the economic left wing agenda combined with the social conservative social agenda of the 1950s-80s would have bombed in the following decades.
Maybe "elite ideology" has been further right economically and further left socially than the mainstream... but that position tends to be well represented as centrist factions of large parties.
There aren't fringe factions representing these positions because mainstream parties already do. The UK does actually have such a party, the Libdems. They sometimes act as punisher for labour or tory candidates that stray from the middle ground. IE, they get labour votes when the labour candidate is overly radical in rhetoric, and conservative votes if the conservative candidate is overly reactionary. But, any recent British PM would have been at home in the LibDem party.
There's no need for a centrist party that defines political orientation the same way the main factions do. Even in real multiparty systems, this kind of centrism is usually a small, short lived and inconsequential victory. The problem isn't that the ideas aren't popular enough. They're too popular. Both major parties already court these voters.
> 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.
Is it? "Economically middle in the road" is somewhat around classic Social Democrat politics, a staple of European politics. The problem with the classic European Social Democrat parties is that they shot themselves in their feet by a combination of neoliberalism (e.g. German SPD post-2005/Hartz IV or British Labour) and individual scandals (corruption).
"Economically middle in the road" is somewhat around classic Social Democrat politics
Even more conservative parties in Europe are moving that way. Just look at the Tories in the UK for example, proposing massive government spending plans paid for by raising taxes.
That’s surprising only if you consider the Tories as being economically liberal. They are conservative in the sense that they look after the interests of the old aristocracy and a coalition of the rich. Their policies are intended to benefit a specific subset of the population. Their taxes (as well as things like the universal credit cuts) are perfectly aligned with that ideology.
They don’t have a problem with the concept of taxation, just taxation of the powerful.
They increased UC for the pandemic, and then reduced it, much like the Furlough scheme, and both of those policies would have been considered centre or centre-left responses if done by a centre or centre-left party.
> They are conservative in the sense that they look after the interests of the old aristocracy and a coalition of the rich.
I thought this was the literal definition of right wing? The side that supported the king against the democratic will of the people?
And is there anyone who has a rhetoric of "less taxes" who actually intends everyone to benefit? That seems like a mirage and it's all done in service of the rich and powerful.
Which is a hard policy to sell to ordinary people, unless you wrap it in some cheap bigotry to confuse them.
The Tories are a coalition of three major faction: One Nation, Thatcherites and Cornerstone.
One Nation, which has tightened its control from Cameron onwards, is closer to centrist Christian democrats, who e.g. oversaw expansion of universal healthcare and welfare systems by themselves or together with the left in many European countries.
People see this as a departure for the Tories largely because the Thatcherites were in control from 1975 until Cameron.
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.
This wasn't exactly a FPTP situation. First, the presidential election spans over two rounds. Second, about a month later, the legislative elections (two rounds also) were won too
with a proper tsunami (350 out of 577 seats, providing a governing majority).
When he won the presidential election, everybody thought it was no big deal, as he hadn't shown a single viable candidate to staff any of the 577 seats in the parliament, without which he couldn't wield any real structural power. But he used that weakness as a strength. He hired inexperienced people from all regular ways of life, young and shiny. To the voting public, the message was "you wanted neither left nor right ? Here you go, vote for the almost normal people I'm offering you." This turned into a huge strength, as once in office these inexperienced MP simply followed the group leader, who, you guessed it, was a seasoned politician from olden, and made the parliament a transparent corridor for the presidential power for quite some time.
The public pitch was along the "climb over the left/right stalemate and go forward". But the mechanics, besides good ties with the corporate world, were a masterpiece of perfect timing for every action along the campaign, and then for the legislative elections. In those days I was admiring Macron like you would admire a talented enemy general.
I have nothing substantive to add, but: here’s the clip of the quote referenced [0] and a larger clip containing most of that Treehouse of Horror skit [1]. Classic Simpsons is the “soul food” of American TV IMHO.
Not sure if he will go nowhere, he is still having the same 4% lead (24% vs 20%) over Le Pen for the 2022 election (I just checked). Macron basically replaced the French Conservatives (they basically died after Sarkozy) while the Socialists (not in the sense most in the US understand that, they are the French left) killed themselves with Hollande after Sarkozy. So there was a huge opportunity for someone like Macron, it seems Le Pen isn't really able to get a true majority.
These numbers are despite things like: Yellow Vest demonstrations against Macron, his hugely unpopular reforms around retirement (especially railways among other things), Covid lockdowns and so on.
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...
I never seen any of them put themselves "outside" of the left-right spectrum.
I probably read what they say in a different way. What I see both movements doing is not align enough to either side to position themselves as such.
You said it yourself: they need to position themselves on "all issues". If you align yourself 90% to the left or right, you can align with a traditional party. If you split your positions 40-60% on the issues, you are neither right or left wing.
One example for both Novo and MBL: Both movements align in economic ideas closer to right wing parties, but both movements are pro environmental polices. Traditionally you don't see political groups in Brazil that support both ideas.
Both parties supported the (terrible) idea of merging the environmental protection and agriculture ministries.
The previous Minister of the Environment came from Novo, and in only 2 years his policies had a disastrous effect on the environment, especially deforestation in the Amazon (he was kicked out of the party but the damage is done).
If you split your positions 50/50, you're in the center :)
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.
Happened in the UK as well. A group of centrist MPs from different parties got together and started a new party called Change UK. They got a lot of good press and good will from people wanting a more 'rational' center option. One catastrophic election later the party collapsed and later dissolved.
"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.
In the case of "Macron", forward was clearly "right", as it was mostly about getting rid or reducing social schemes. In France, "neither right nor left" generally means "right".
If what you say is true, there must be some underlying outlook or philosophy that leads to one or the other.
What I suspect is that's true for some kinds of issues, but other issues are more of a mixed bag that just happened to end up polarized. Maybe those other issues are important enough to make a third party worthwhile.
forward in Yang's case means "anti incumbency". Not sure if that's leftist or not because incumbency is basically a mainstay of the current political system of both parties.
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.
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.
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.
> which combines proportional representation in a 1st round
No it doesn't.
The french parliament is elected in 577 single member constituencies by a 2 round system: in the 1st round, voters vote for any candidate.
If no candidate wins >50% of all the votes in that constituency, a 2nd round is held, where candidates that came 1st or 2nd or got >12.5% of the vote, in the 1st round, can run.
Thus the French 2 round system is similar to Instant Runoff Voting, except that it isn't instant.
As an example of how the French system isn't proportional, En Marche got 32% of 1st-round votes but 61% of seats.
> for the powerful presidency
Presidential elections, like any other election that elects 1 candidate cannot in principle be proportional, because each party must either win 100% or 0% of the candidates elected.
> When it became clear that the far-right would be the largest single party
No, the National Front only got 13.2% of 1st round votes (and only ended up winning 8 seats, 1.4% of the total). They were nowhere near being the biggest party.
That's not entirely correct. Macron got 24.01% in the first round, 66.1% in the second. Le Pen, the far right candidate, got 21.3% in the first and 33.9% in the second. The runner-up in the first round was Fillon, a coservative, with 20.01% in round one. There was the fear Le Pen would win the second round, sure. One thing about the French system is, that usually the second round is not won by a radical candidate as those usually fail to get enough votes from the other parties and candidates not qualifying for round 2. We'll see how that plays out next year so. Not sure how the French system wouldn't fit the current political landscape.
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).
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.
It's not easy to divorce "culture war" from "problem solving", since the question of whether problems even _exist_ and need to be solved is frequently a culture-war issue.
For example, you can't pursue "energy modernization and decarbonization" in the USA without taking a side in the "does anthropogenic climate change exist?" culture war.
Any infrastructure plan, whether heavy-infrastructure or social-infrastructure, touches the culture-war questions of "should the government subsidize industry?" and "should the government subsidize the working class?"
Because much of the culture war stuff isn't substantive. It's theater. There aren't any numbers on it.
IF your concerned with say racial inequality - well then good! Solve a practical problem by focusing your energy on poverty which already selects for a racially diverse group.
End gerry mandering ? That right there is the root of racial disparity in representation, and people hate it. Open Primaries is the only thing Libertarians and Greens agree on - that should be an easy lift when 65% of America wants more options.
What Yang is saying is "Instead of 2 flavors of ice cream, how about 10!". Who the hell votes for only 2 flavors?
Culture wars fall within the purview of media op-eds and social, which tries to rope in policy makers. I don't think Biden for instance has devoted much time addressing identity politics any more than Yang. Does it not then mean he's focused on pragmatic problems? Competency is up for question.
I like that Yang narrows the focus of what he purports are policy changes in need. I don't think this has resonated well, but I expect it's because UBI and VAT scares off moderates who want someone to feign upholding something close to the status quo. Also because UBI and VAT don't rank among the more imperative concerns people have, or at least don't obviously address them, e.g. healthcare, cost of living, economy.
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.
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.
> "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".
You seem to suggest Manuel Valls has also been prime minister under Macron presidency (after having been under Hollande's), which he hasn't.
Also, the "neither left not right is also a fascist meme" is both true and misleading: when you have several leftist parties that reclaim being "the only true left" for themselves, portraying anything else as evil or stupid, and rightist parties that move further and further to the extreme, and both wings being plagued with moral/financial scandals, you may as well consider that the left/right dichotomy is broken, or that the parties broke it joyfully.
So trying to pave a way with another, maybe more subtle and demanding understanding than just left/right, progress/conservatism, is not completely absurd either. And that, without going necessarily right into fascism.
> You seem to suggest Manuel Valls has also been prime minister under Macron presidency (after having been under Hollande's), which he hasn't.
Thanks for correction. I thought he was prime minister of Macron, but that was in fact Edouard Philippe. I must have confused with Jean-Yves le Drian, previously Ministry of Defense (under Hollande) then Foreign Affairs (under Macron).
> and both wings being plagued with moral/financial scandals
I don't agree with all of their politics, but when was the last time you heard the NPA or LO (left-wing parties) had a financial/moral scandal? I've never heard of any.
> you may as well consider that the left/right dichotomy is broken, or that the parties broke it joyfully
Left/Right dichotomy (collectivism/capitalism) is as alive as ever, in terms of politics. But the "left" and "right" labels have lost any form of sense when parts of the left in the 80/90s started accepting capitalism, applying right wing programs (eg. neoliberalism) and then started to campaign/act on extreme-right ideas (eg. anti-immigration measures). But the media apparatus have not called them out on moving right and continue to call them "left" without any form of meaning. That's why we're so confused about the terms, at least in Western Europe and North America.
> more subtle and demanding understanding than just left/right, progress/conservatism, is not completely absurd either
Oh sure, we have to look at the measures behind the keywords. I think that was exactly my point to begin with: that just because you say "neither left nor right" doesn't mean you aren't very very very right-wing. And having a "progress party" with the leader's face placated everywhere and no actual discussions of the most pressing issues we face as an entire species is not giving me a lot of confidence.
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'.
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.
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.
> I'm not disputing the US clinton part. I'm disputing the Thatcher part.
I wasn't disputing your dispute of the Thatcher part, I was disputing (in the US context) the center-left part.
> Blaire is "the center-right faction taking over the more left-leaning of the two major parties" and succeeding politically in the UK.
From my American perspective, it looked like that, but 1990s UK internal political party dynamics isn't something I’m nearly as confident of as their US parallels, so I wasn't going to take a stand on that.
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.
> 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'
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".
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.
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.
I think its more philosophical than an rubric for actual governance. The constitution was deeply influenced from enlightenment thinkers and basically the first of its kind that influenced the rest of the world.
Towards that end I would recommend the recently published book _America's Revolutionary Mind_. It provides a comprehensive (and sometimes exhausting!) overview of the influence of Locke and other enlightenment thinkers on the evolving mindset of the pre-Revolutionary war era. It's not just a review of well known names - but shows just how much Locke's ideas really reached a large range of the then every day royal subjects of the crown in the colonies.
Even with that - its still amazing we got something as good as the Constitution.
I think you have a point in terms of choice of symbols, but ultimately... these are just symbolic choices. The nature of politics, usually, is that it defines and harnesses "who we are."
That's kind of what defines politics. EU politics may be where a lot of power is, but it's not where most of the politics is. "Who we are as europeans," beyond a point, isn't a sensible way to start a sentence. No morality tale or symbol of the EU commands that kind of sentiment.
In the US, it's the opposite. State politics might house a lot of power, but the politics is a lot meeker. "Who we are as Californians" commands a lot less sentiment that "as Americans." No one cares who fathered California, or how many constitutions it has had. There isn't much existential anxiety about how California might lose influence relative to Texas.
So, whether it's the constitution of the 5th Republic, founding fathers... it's all just symbols, like a flag, but with more depth. Ancestor tales aren't new. It's rare that they don't play a major role in human culture.
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.
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.
> the 5th French Republic is going well since the 50s, isn't it?
Is it going well, though? There's never been so much inequality, industrial pollution is spreading everywhere (is there even a single river left you can drink in France?!), political corruption has been adopted as governing principle (see also: Jacques Foccart and the Françafrique scandals), law enforcement is plagued by nazism (French police was never denazified after WWII), and the social services De Gaulle was forced (by popular power) to implement have either been dismantled or rendered painful for both workers and users (healthcare/education/housing).
> Basing 21st Century politics on something written in the 18th century is... weird.
I agree in principle, but it's important to realize that the most important social issues we face today (including depletion of resources and pollution) have been fought against for centuries. We have a lot of lessons to learn from the past.
Basing 21st Century politics on something written in the 18th century is... weird.
The Napoleonic Code is about the same vintage as the US Bill of Rights and remains a foundational influence on the legal systems of not just France but many other countries.
Sure, which I pointed out firther down the thread. I have yet to see someone bringing up Napoleon, or his Code Civil, to promote or justify any proposed legislation today.
People do all the time, since, as I mentioned, it's still the basis of the French legal system. For something straight out of the 18th century, the very first sentence of the current French constitution begins:
Le peuple français proclame solennellement son attachement aux Droits de l’Homme et aux principes de la souveraineté nationale tels qu’ils ont été définis par la Déclaration de 1789 [...]
It's just a strange argument to make about two states that were effectively founded right around the same time, espousing broadly similar principles and continue to do so, claiming them as fundamental to their systems of government. Both have had a couple of hundred years' worth of significant reinterpretations of these principles.
And yet I have yet to hear, even a French politician, say things like "as Napoleon wanted for the French people...". That's my point. Plus, the Code Napoleon dates to 1804, not the original revolution.
And their slogan is still on coins (Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite). But how exactly does Napoleon figure into that again? In the way the Founding Fathers still influence modern US politics?
I think I explained how Napoleon fits in, as a response to your original Basing 21st Century politics on something written in the 18th century is weird bit. France has laws based on an early 19th century system, its motto is an 18th century slogan, its modern constitution straight up begins by #including an 18th century document.
I can't actually find a reference to 'founding fathers' in the linked page but maybe the confusion here is a misunderstanding of what that usually means in political speech - it's an invocation (often derived from context) of some principle they espoused or are said to have espoused. It's functionally equivalent to standing in front of that 18th century slogan.
> It's functionally equivalent to standing in front of that 18th century slogan.
I don't think it quite is. There's references to phrases from founding documents - which Americans often invoke ("we the people", "shall not be abridged", etc). But there's still an awful lot of reference to "Founding Fathers" specifically. I'm not sure you can listen to more than a few hours of right wing radio in the US without someone invoking Madison, Jefferson or whoever else fits their particular talking point for that moment. The individuals' names, and their writings, are still very much referenced outside of individual slogans.
We were talking about the phrase 'founding fathers' specifically and invocations of 100+ years old 'founding' principles of the state generally. If you want invocation of individuals and their writing, here's president Macron again, a year ago:
In the Paris Pantheon, a mausoleum to France’s heroes, Macron handed five new citizens their French papers in a solemn ceremony to mark the 150th anniversary of the Third Republic.
“At the start of the trial of the attacks of January 2015, I say that to be French is to defend the right to laugh, jest, mock and caricature, of which Voltaire maintained that it is the source of all other rights,” Macron said.
Voltaire, a man born in the 16th century and who is buried at said Pantheon - a temple to the secular saints of France, dedicated in the 18th century - "On April 4, 1791, the Assembly decreed "that this religious church become a temple of the nation, that the tomb of a great man become the altar of liberty.""
Voltaire is an author, not a politician. Hardly the same thing.
EDIT: Today Voltaire could be regarded as an anti-semite it seems. Maybe more due to his disdain for religion, and Judaism being the oldest mono-theistic religion, than a true hate for Jews but still. Always nice to read up, even just quickly, on people and things. And he corrected these statements after being called out for them, specifying he disagrees with Judaism as a religion and not the believers. More than can be said of most people being called out for BS they publicly say.
He was a lot of things, including a political philosopher and he is quoted as such by Macron. You can split these hairs indefinitely, I don't think it changes the (I think more than amply) demonstrated fact that the political system of France is, among other things, thoroughly permeated by 18th century stuff and politicians allude to it and refer to it directly all the time.
Not at all, the Founding Fathers, as implies their name, founded a nation. Voltaire did nothing like that. Philosophers are quoted all the time, and yet nobody really tries to justify his plans by interpreting what these philosophers would think about them. That's not splitting hairs, it is about not drawing falls equivalents.
It is weird in the context of "modern thought," which is ironic perhaps, but it's not unusual... historically speaking.
Once you have generations of commentary, commentary on commentary, past crisis-resolution precedents, etc.... At this point you have a body of "jurisprudence." This is a lot like jewish torah, or most major schools of islamic jurisprudence. A rich one will contain enough examples, rationalisations and counter rationalisations that a very wide range of arguments can be made within the framework.
We like to think of ourselves as rational and rationalistic. rational principles with rational conclusions. The generation of America's founding fathers, and the French revolutionaries was particularly hubristic in this regard. Peak Enlightenment, rar!
But real life society doesn't work this way. We evolve. We make judgements instinctively, incorporating lots of conflicting anecdotes, principles and half principles. We create exception cases etc. A body of jurisprudence can act as a formal, social version of this. It's like a history of ideas.
No, it isn’t weird, it’s simply rejecting the frankly naive notion that you should change everything all the time according to the whims of the populace. History and human nature didn’t begin in 1950.
Again, the US has never had anything remotely as horrible as the French Revolution or Nazi Germany. That’s likely a consequence of a constitutional government with limited powers.
The United Kingdom is in a very similar situation, although their specific version is different.
—-
Editing because apparently I am “posting too fast” and can’t reply. What a passive aggressive move.
Responding to your comment:
The American Revolution preceded the French one by a decade plus. Your chronology is backwards.
The French Revolution also didn’t pave the way for much at all. It failed, led to Napoleon, that failed, led to other monarchic systems until WWW1, another disaster, which led to fascism and WW2, an even bigger disaster.
And the US isn’t a democracy and never has been. The founders set it up as a representative republic for a specific reason.
My thesis still stands that the US is infinitely more stable and has been in comparison to Europe, largely due to its adherence to the original constitution and legal setup.
Ah, the "a republic isn't a democracy" trope. That debunked so often, I won't even go there here. You're right with the french revolution so. Doesn't change the fact the French supported the US a lot.
And yes, the French Revolution is seen, rightly so if you ask me despite the Terror and so on, as the first real modern democracy in Europe. At a time when Europe was reigned by Kings and Emperors.
A side note, I really don't get why Napoleon is seen in such bad light. His Code Civil is to this day the basis of some legal concepts, and was very progressive.
> A side note, I really don't get why Napoleon is seen in such bad light.
I’m really surprised that he isn’t more often seen in a bad light. He started a gigantic war, mobilized millions to expand an empire, crowned himself emperor, etc…
When do we draw the line? I think as a society we are very hypocritical and nonsensical in who we venerate. People were having serious discussions about how “offensive” the Lincoln Memorial was… yet nobody is clamoring for removing statues of Napoleon? I’m just not following the logic in any of this.
> Ah, the "a republic isn't a democracy" trope. That debunked so often, I won't even go there here.
Debunked in what way? The founding fathers (to their shame in my view) were explicit in creating a republic system and gave only certain people such as landowners and men the right to vote. Republicanism is a form of democracy, but it stands in stark contrast to what the person you are replying to is talking about which is a “might makes right” 51-49 wins kind of democracy, which if you look at Congress the founders set up explicitly to counteract. Now, the OP may be making a mistake in terminology, but it’s very clear that the founders were against simple majority. Frankly, I have to say I am too, because a 51-49 kind of country quickly falls apart. You can see elements of that at play today.
51-49 falls apart because the 51 can dictate the 49, I assume? Great, then what about having the 49 (as of total vote) having found ways to dictate the 51? That would be even more instable, wouldn't it?
And as far as Napoleon is concerned, he lived in a period were conquering swaths of land was more or less seen as normal. The Napoleonic Wars grew out of the Revolutionary Wars, and those were started, partially, by European Monarchies to contain democratic France. Sure, Napoleon pushed that to the extreme. Equally true is that it was the British Empire that pushed all of the Alliances against Napoleon. That is not nearly as clean cut as WW2 concerning the bad guys.
The only country that really has discussions about statues is the US. And those statues came up as part of a dedicated, racist-motivated propaganda program from the loosing side decades after the war. I don't see any Napoleon statues in the UK for example, or Rommel ones in Germany.
> 51-49 falls apart because the 51 can dictate the 49, I assume? Great, then what about having the 49 (as of total vote) having found ways to dictate the 51? That would be even more instable, wouldn't it?
I mean the issue is dictating isn't it? I think the congressional setup in America makes a lot of sense generally speaking, though it's not without faults.
> he lived in a period were conquering swaths of land was more or less seen as normal.
So do we do historical revisionism or not? When do we draw the line? Do we shame people for killing and enslaving Native Americans when that's what people did at the time? I honestly find this strangely confusing.
> The only country that really has discussions about statues is the US. And those statues came up as part of a dedicated, racist-motivated propaganda program from the loosing side decades after the war. I don't see any Napoleon statues in the UK for example, or Rommel ones in Germany.
Not sure I follow this comparison all that much. The South lost and erected statues in the southern states. It's not really all that comparable to Napoleon statues in the UK. At least not that I can see.
When exactly did Napoleon exterminate and enslave the people of the countries he "conquered" (he usually defeated them in a decisive battle and then had them sign treaties, he never dissolved, e.g. the Prussian Empire). He did reintroduce slavery in the French colonies, and should be called out for it. As should France and all other countries on their colonial history, and they are.
A civil war is different in the regard, that the defeated party is part of the same nation. So yes, I think the better analogy would be Napoleon statues in the UK. Or Wellington ones in France. And aren't there some of these statues on federal property as well?
Sorry I just disagree, and starting wars and killing hundreds of thousands is pretty comparable to exterminating and enslaving people as far as my moral compass is concerned.
I'm not really here to defend statues or whatever, but I just don't follow the logic in who we decide was a bad man.
> A civil war is different in the regard, that the defeated party is part of the same nation. So yes, I think the better analogy would be Napoleon statues in the UK. Or Wellington ones in France. And aren't there some of these statues on federal property as well?
IMHO, the Napoleonic Wars were the , given the people involved, inevitable conclusion of the Revolutionary Wars. And those were started by the First Coalition as a reaction to the French Revolution. So just as WW1 it is not all that easy who is responsible for those wars. Just look up the First Coalition for more details.
Which makes you wonder how history would have turned out if Napoleon would have been as stupid to go to Russia. Imagine he would have taken the most powerful army of the time, including staunch (more or less) allies (incl. the Prussians, minor German powers, Austrians) to Spain against Wellington. Interesting what-if. Just proofs that you don't go to war with Russia or try to conquer Afghanistan.
Funny. It was the French Revolution that paved the way for modern democracies in the West. If I remember correctly, the American Revolutionary Army received quite some assistance from them. It is ironic so, the the French ended up with an Emperor so, I have to agree. Not comparing anything to Nazi Germany, but didn't the US have a pretty nasty Civil War?
Also, changing things based on the whim of the population is pretty much the core believe of democracy. As long as that change is following some process and is happening peacefully. Just a disclaimer, demonstrations that end in some violence are still what I would consider "peaceful", as opposed to outright anarchy or civil wars.
EDIT: Yep, the French revolution happened after the American one. The French helped the US as reaction to the Seven Year war, basically to stick it to the British. That Napoleon became Emperor was also caused by the various wars the French Republic fought against the various European monarchies. History is ironic sometimes.
The UK is different from the USA because it doesn't have a written constitution. Then UK has a parliamentary system but the USA has a presidential system. I'd say that from a constitutional perspective the US system is most similar to the French system.
>Again, the US has never had anything remotely as horrible as the French Revolution or Nazi Germany.
Google the Three-Fifth compromise some day. Or whip out your copy of the US Constitution and closely read Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3. It took a civil war that almost tore apart the nation to rectify.
That's what those - infallible to some - founding fathers compromised on.
If the anti-slavery states hadn’t compromised with the slave ones, the Revolution would have failed. Slavery would have likely existed longer because the British would end up being allied to the slave states (likely still colonies.)
Nothing is more nauseating that modern people looking upon the past with moral superiority.
The British could abolish slavery because they no longer had any real economic incentive to keep it, as they had lost their colonies. They also then proceeded to exploit labor in India in barely better conditions.
If Britain retained its American colonies (because the slave holding ones didn’t join the revolution) then abolition might not have happened at all.
> Again, the US has never had anything remotely as horrible as the French Revolution or Nazi Germany. That’s likely a consequence of a constitutional government with limited powers.
Uhhh... slavery? American Indian genocide? The Civil War? The US has certainly had things at least "remotely as horrible" as the French Revolution or Nazi Germany, although the holocaust is a bit of stretch.
Not only did America have the Civil War over slavery, but the losers are still trying to fight it today, they can't face the reality that they lost the last election, and they even tried to pull off a violent insurrection, breaking into and defecating and urinating and marching through the halls of Congress with a Confederate battle flag.
>The Confederate battle flag, which rioters flew inside the US Capitol, has long been a symbol of white insurrection
>Confederate soldiers never reached the Capitol during the Civil War. But the Confederate battle flag was flown by rioters in the U.S. Capitol building for the first time ever on Jan. 6.
Every country has its own myths to both give legitimacy to the government and unify the people around a national project. Sure, the US is more extreme in its focus on its foundation as the core of its national myth, but is it so different from the French left rhetoric about the CNR program or the French right name dropping the founder of the (latest) republic left and right?
But I think the Founding Fathers specifically had a vision for the nation that was transformative. And it actually goes all the way back to European Philosophers like John Locke.
The U.S. Constitution has embedded within it the Enlightenment observations that created the modern world. I believe these observations were profound. I also believe that's why we aren't on the the 5th republic. Despite being a young country, we have the oldest constitution on the planet.
And much of the trouble we are in as a planet is that the enlightenment itself is under siege. It's worth it at this time of turmoil to consult history with a bit of prudence.
As someone who grew up under communism and has one remaining grandparent who fought fascism all the way to Berlin, I am puzzled how any seemingly complacent westerner can call the topic of "founding fathers" an obsession. I guess it's an obsession with the foundations of freedom? I wasn't born American, but I have embraced the fact that my life no longer feels like prison in the US and I truly think that calling America's relationship with the work of founding fathers an "obsession" is truly idiotic, especially considering a trend suggesting more and more countries are playing with authoritarian regimes. [1]
I truly believe that most people who dismiss the founding fathers as an obsession or otherwise irrelevant to modern day are also the same people who have never read any of the well-documented and freely available discussions they had about governance in general. Excluding technological and other scientific advancement, they really did think of almost everything. Even the oft-cited claim that the country was founded upon "Judeo-Christian values" is argued to death in their correspondence and shows that they were ultimately neutral and fantastically "tolerant"... so long as you take their words for their meanings at the time of their writing and not by modern renditions.
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.
An important point. There are ideas worth keeping in an era of revolutionary change. I believe many if not most of the ideas ( if not specific implementation ) within the American Constitution are among them.
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.
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.
People seem to take the unity of U.S. for granted. But there is nothing granted about it.
The former Spanish colonies from Mexico to Argentina were part of the same empire, speak the same language, derive their legal systems from the same framework, but they shattered into 20 different states and even led wars against one another.
The only attempt to build something bigger out of them, Greater Colombia, only lasted from 1819 to 1831, and the country split precisely on the centralist vs. federalist question.
In contemporary intellectual climate, it is almost a heresy to say this aloud, but American political model proved to be messy but durable. Of course, it may yet split on the social network toxicity much like it did split in 1860, but its longevity is pretty significant.
Of course, it helped that U.S. is isolated from other powers of the world by two great oceans. Invasion by an external enemy was by far the most frequent cause of problems in my corner of the world. Being located right in the center of a historically violent continent is a recipe for trouble.
> People seem to take the unity of U.S. for granted. But there is nothing granted about it.
I agree completely. It’s hard for us to imagine seeing it break up but there is nothing that prevents that except our general desire to live together.
I think large democracies with functioning governments are very unstable over long time horizons. The reason I mention functioning is that if the government of a large democracy is largely non-functional than you can mostly keep doing whatever you want with whatever cultural norms you have where you live. But a functional one will actually pass laws and actually enact things that affect your life that you may disagree with - look at the current abortion stuff. There is no reconciliation to be had on many of these issues. Or look at the Republicans rhetoric around the debt limit “they’ll have to do it without us” - yikes.
The US has lasted as long as it has because for most of the time the country was somewhat homogenous and where it wasn’t you could “go fuck off into the woods” and nobody would bother you. With that being less of a possibility the country was always on a collision course for instability, but WW2 and the Cold War kept people united around a common enemy that threatened basically held beliefs. With that gone we will either have a new uniting enemy, or we’ll eventually just form some different governments.
An entire bloody Civil War was fought over (among other things) whether or not it was possible to break up the USA. The outcome was: States cannot leave. The Constitution does not address secession, but the Supreme Court has consistently interpreted the Constitution to have created a union that is in their words, indestructible,”[1] and ultimately the Civil War seems to have pretty convincingly established the illegality of unilateral secession.
> It’s hard for us to imagine seeing it break up but there is nothing that prevents that except our general desire to live together.
That thing that prevents it is evidently the [EDIT: Supreme Court's interpretation of the] Constitution, so it's not just a matter of losing that general desire to live together. We'd have to at the very least go through the difficult process of amending the Constitution to allow it, in order to actually legally break the union up.
Ah I see. I don't see a legal dissolution occurring so that wasn't something I was really tracking (but hey maybe that's the black swan event?). Much more likely IMO is another civil war (unlikely though because we're fat, happy) or the system becomes so dysfunctional that people aren't willing to shed blood to get rid of it, but they largely ignore it.
> 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.
No, it won't.
Because the Founding Fathers aren't now the mythology glue holding the nation together. American national identity is mich more (and much fuzzier) than that.
Appeal to the Founding Fathers is just a tired political cliche.
To continue on the "American national identity" trope. Could the (un)conscious fear of the country loosing cohesiveness the reason for displaying national US signs in many contexts of American life so frequently, in order to counter any possible de-federalisation movements?
Flags are frequent on walls of event venues, people put them on cars as stickers/flags or on their clothing (rarely, I know), and the US populace displays national symbols much more frequently than elsewhere (maybe with the exception of war/conflict zones for other reasons).
Living in Europe, the flag is used typically in the "us vs them" (sport, marking of some products maybe) and in official (army, embassies, governmental buildings and posts) contexts. Of course, there are exceptions.
The "proud to be American" saying doesn't really seem to answer the question, as it's on some level just word salad which begs for another set of explanations, so I was thinking that my original thesis might be closer to the reality.
The American Flag is a symbol for a set of ideas that we actually hold sacred. Call it a religion if you like.
I got one behind me. I put it up the day after Seditionists attacked The Capital. My uncle gave it to me after I returned from an actual war 20 years ago.
I think we got reasons to be proud. The Enlightenment was first conceived in goverment here. As a result of that awareness I read all the original European philosophers who made up that 17th century intellectual movement, and I have a deep appreciation for that wisdom and what it helped create. And I think the ideas within are worth defending. I can't speak to a Europeans relationship with his or her country, but there is a good reason both historically and ethically, that ours is so prominent, and I think that identity has been good for the country.
And honestly just as an observation it seems more benign to have a flag as a symbol that actually means something to people when there isn't a war or a soccer game, than only trotted out when there is one.
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?
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 got to spend many millions of other people's money to run ads with his face on them, and enjoyed many millions more worth of earned media. It's not that strange. He certainly wouldn't be on HN otherwise.
He has lots of real fans now, even if they aren't enough to win a presidential primary.
Ironically a phrase made most famous by Donald Trump. It's going to be real interesting as politicians going forward analyze and adopt ideas often attributed to him while simultaneously trying to distance themselves from him.
I think the policies he wants to push are ahead of the times ideas that resonate.
He will be as popular as those ideas are popular, and it's his "job" to make those ideas popular. So yes, by that definition he wants to be a celebrity and he wants people to buy his book.
However, if he pushes forward ideas that just don't make sense, have bad narratives or don't connect with people's sentiment, he will be quickly forgotten.
> 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.
imo most politicians are not interested in the issues themselfs but in winning elections because that is their job.
What will be interesting, and telling, to watch will be who joins him. If some high profile government people join him in the Forward Party, then Yang doesn't need to be great at management or politics, he just needs to light the fire and find the kindling.
There's enough other higher profile politicians across federal, state, and local politics who don't fully align with either major party today. If even just one of them publicly joins Yang, I think that'll be enough to justify the last few years of his efforts and it will encourage others to join him, too.
> I don't think he wants to become a politician. He wants to enact political change. These are two very different things.
No, they aren't. Well, one is an action, and one is the description of a person in a position to do that action (not every politician enacts political change, but everyone who enacts political change is a politician.)
>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.
This is factually not true. Both major parties have radical wings that have both seen measures of success in the last decade or so. The Republicans have had the tea party movement, and the democrats have the progressive caucus which are likely in the middle of setting an infrastructure budget way beyond the what people previously thought was possible. Obama had a perfectly traditional route into politics and he stood directly against the wars his party had supported 5 years earlier and passed an incredibly ambitious healthcare bill. Bernie Sanders is radical in his positions, has been effective in championing them and changing the debate and he is well within the democratic party.
What Yang is pushing for in terms of policy isn't that much more radical than AOC. What he is pushing for is more radical but arguable way less effective than the incremental changes that Stacey Abrams acheived.
I want to be clear here, I'm not saying there's no value to what Yang is doing. But it's a dis-service to the actual political reality when people pretend like nothing gets done in traditional politics.
Admit that demeaning results of the current parties is unfair to them.
Beg to differ about comparing him to AOC. Yang's forward policies much more radical than AOC's and absolutely do not belong in the democratic party.
80% of Yang's policies is all about limiting the power of incumbency (democracy dollars, ranked choice votes, open primaries, stop DC revolving door, term limits). It hurts the party a LOT to reduce the power of incumbency; no party member with any position would actually support any of this.
Comparatively, AOC's medicare for all, public safety, housing as human right, and immigration reform is super in line with democratic party issues.
> 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?
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.
That depends a lot on what you mean by politics. Plenty of things are unctroversial in polls of the population, but either controversial or uncontroversial in the opposite direction in political discourse (medicare for all, war in Iraq, to give two examples).
If Yang took positions on those things it would mostly give people reasons not not support him rather than to support him, thus reducing his (and Forward Party's) overall support.
Yang probably thinks the things he's pushing -- UBI, RCV, etc -- are more important in improving the lives of ordinary Americans than those highly controversial culture-war issues.
If they manage to avoid all of the current "hot button" issues, then the discourse around some of the things that they do talk about will have to be heated up, until there is suitable angry controversy.
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.
The people all arguing how approval is better than ranked choice remind me a lot of people here arguing that functional programming is better than imperative, and being constantly flabbergasted that their preference isn't reflected in real world implementations.
Approval voting has advantages when you get into the weeds, but ranked choice has one big advantage right out the gate: people like it more. If you present the two systems to regular voters with simple one paragraph descriptions, people will choose ranked choice nearly every time, because they want to be able to rank candidates if they're voting for more than one person. Nobody wants to have to say that the guy there willing to hold their nose for is just as worthy of their vote as the guy they really want in office.
Ranked choice has a lot of advantages over the alternatives that are often underestimated by people too worried about theory.
The big advantage of ranked choice is that it is simple to understand and implement.
In elections, it is essential that the average person understand exactly how the system works. An election result that people don't understand/trust is worse than useless.
No it isn't, technically. I can guarantee you that most people in Norway can't explain the Sainte-Laguë divisors method which delivers proportional representation.
What is true, is that simplicity is a propaganda advantage for actually getting it passed, since "It's too complex so we can't trust it" is a good attack line even if it isn't true.
I'm not sure that advantage is worth it, given that 1. it's a terribly long shot anyway, and 2. It's the same argument which will be used to defend the status quo.
> I can guarantee you that most people in Norway can't explain the Sainte-Laguë divisors method which delivers proportional representation.
I expect most could if they spent 5 minutes on Wikipedia researching it. They don't, because they don't want to; most probably regard it as an unimportant implementation detail.
You don't need to know the method, though. You just need to know that in Norway getting above or under the 4% line drastically affects how many representatives a party will get, and vote according to that.
Regular voters will basically always prefer ranked choice over approval imo, because they really want to be able to rank their preferences. A leftist who wants a green party candidate but will hold their nose for a Democrat doesn't want them to be "equal" in how they vote.
Approval voting makes much more sense to me. Consider ranked-choice if it were applied to the presidency: Given that some states are slow to report their results, there are scenarios where you can't fall back to people's second choices until all the votes are in and finalized to determine who lost the first round.
With approval voting, you can declare a victor without running a state machine.
Ironically, although no individual would want it, it is probably a good thing that it is hard to tell what a ballot's effect will be.
If the situation is close the best outcome may be a somewhat random outcome. Having 1,000 extra votes determine the outcome is just as arbitrary as anything else.
> I think ranked choice is in that sweet spot where it is reasonably simple to use and simple to count.
"Ranked choice" is a range of methods and usually people mean instant-runoff. Recognizing that no system is perfect, I nonetheless have significant worries about instant runoff.
Imagine we have a society that's predominately split into two religions, where members of each religion would love a theocracy of their flavor, would settle for secular tolerance, and is vigorously (sometimes violently!) opposed to theocracy of another flavor.
If we have three candidates, one representing each of these positions, and everyone votes their true preferences then we see maybe 40% theocracy A, 40% theocracy B, 20% secular tolerance. The very first thing instant-runoff does is throw out the compromise, and we chose violence and strife.
If we generally believe that "a good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied" then IRV will never choose a good compromise. I worry that that's a bad way of choosing what we do as a society.
I would really like to see open primaries with approval voting and the top two going to the general election. I think that is much simpler than RCV and I'm not convinced RCV would ever provide a better outcome.
It seems strange to give people worse election outcomes that they have to live with for 4 years at a time just to make their 5 minutes in the voting booth feel a little more pleasant.
Approval voting may not seem "fun", But thousands of voters have used it in Fargo and St Louis without any issue. All the evidence says it gets better results, is more resistant to strategic voting, and has a better chance of replacing the status quo.
Approval is also simpler to count. Ranked choice ballots can't even be properly distributed among congressional districts, as a result it takes longer to get results.
The only advantages ranked choice have over approval are entirely theoretical. Another advantage approval has is that it trends towards moderation.
Approval isn't perfect though (personally I prefer STAR, but it requires ballots to change).
> The big advantage of ranked choice is that it is simple to understand and implement
No, its not. That would be a big advantage of the method equivalent to it but without loser elimination and instead counting each rank down on all ballots simultaneously, which is both easier to understand and much easier to implement.
Proportional representation, the federal government enacts laws and levies taxes on everyone and isn't just some far away entity you can ignore. The multi level democracy USA has now where each party sends candidates based on local votes makes sense when the federated entity doesn't have direct power over people, but since USA has such a strong federal government that taxes people directly it needs to better represent its people than now.
Alternatively we can scale back the power of the federal government massively and have it be funded by the states rather than via direct taxes, similar to how EU works. But right now it is the worst of both worlds, taxes and control like a local government but poor representation like a federated one.
Sums up most of the points about it.
I want to highlight the "leads to two party dominance in countries that use it" (australia for example) point. This is exactly what we want to avoid.
I prefer approval or score voting for single member elections as it does away with all these bad voting incentives.
But regardless, I think single member elections are stupid and proportional systems are far better and more democratic. The idea that the thing most representative of you is the piece of land you live on is very outdated. Zweitmandat is the most advanced implementation of proportional representation imo.
I absolutely agree about the Zweitmandat system. For those unfamiliar:
> The Zweitmandat (English: second mandate) is a feature in the variation of mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) used to elect the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. Unlike most variations of MMP, such as the German federal electoral system, Baden-Württemberg's system does not use party lists. Instead, proportional seats are filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of votes.
The main distinction is that Ranked Choice can elect someone which is not the best compromise of everyone's choices, while Schulze and Ranked pairs will always elect the best compromise of everyone's choices. If there is a candidate who is preferred over the other candidates, when compared in turn with each of the others, they guarantee that candidate will win, while Ranked Choice does not.
The downside to Schulze or Ranked Pairs is that saying that someone is your second choice could hurt the chances of your first choice to be elected, because by putting forward a compromising candidate, and since Schulze or Ranked Pairs optimize for that, you lean the tally towards your potential compromises (which are your second, third, etc. choices) in the case where the election are a "close call".
If I understand correctly.
I personally would prefer a system that optimizes for the compromise, as I think it's more important to get the candidate that the least people dislike, than it is to get the candidate that the most people adore.
So if I understand correctly, it means something like:
If you have A, B and C.
100% think B is second best.
40% think A is best.
19% think B is best.
41% think C is best.
With Schulze or Ranked Pairs B will win, but with Ranked Choice C will win.
That's because C is most people's first choice, so they win. But if you asked people to pick between C or B, B would technically win, because 19% would pick B (as it is their best), and 40% that think A is best but B is second best would also pick B, thus B vs C would get 59% votes for B and only 41% votes for C, that means that in a vote for B against C, B would win, but with Ranked Choice B loses, and C is elected.
The fallacy in the argument is that, first choice only, NO candidate has even a slim majority, let alone a strong one.
If you decay the hypothetical 3 party set of options by eliminating the least popular candidate then you're back to first past the post which is the current status quo in the US.
Schulze and similar methods use the ranked lists to evaluate pairs of candidates and eliminate the candidates that are universally the worst first / retain candidates that rank well in isolation. This is more likely to result in a compromise that works best for the most people.
> Ranked choice seems to be the best one I've read about.
IRV (sometimes called “ranked choice”, but its among the worst of the ranked choice single-member methods) can be improved by getting rid of the loser elimination step, and counting down on all ballots (instead of those with an eliminated loser) until some candidate had a total that crosses the winning threshold (this is a version of Bucklin, but historical Bucklin implementations have often done dumb things like limiting the number of preference ranks to a much smaller number than candidates (often 2-3) rather than using fully-ranked (forced preference or unforced preference) ballots.
But, other than things like unique executive offices, single-member elections should be avoided. Legislative elections with small multimember districts (say 5 members) with a system like STV (or a Bucklinish cousin, again without loser elimination) gets decent proportionality, the candidate accountability of single-member districts (but more, because parties are likely to run more candidates than they'll win seats, so there os general election accountability even within preferred parties) and avoids high-stakes districting (eliminating gerrymandering opportunities.)
Even executive offices with a designated successor (e.g., governor and lt. governor) can be made multiwinner (sequential rather than proportional) using a ranked ballots method with a normal single-winner majority threshold: once the first winner is selected, eliminate that candidate and recount the ballots (for some methods, this can simply be continue the count till the next winner crosses the threshold with the same effect) to select the winner of the successor office. This improves candidate accountability when one party is clearly preferred, because a disfavored incumbent can be demoted without abandoning the preferred party.
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.
Understanding is one thing, counting is another. Plurality voting is great because it’s easy to count by hand and audit with volunteer observers. I’ve personally observed the counting of ballots as a volunteer and it gave me a lot of confidence that the election had been conducted fairly according to the law.
While I would really love to see what outcomes could be produced by a Condorcet method I can’t imagine actually implementing one without relying on computerized counting and software. This makes it impossible for volunteers to audit due to the need to audit the hardware and software of the computers doing the counting. If only security experts are capable of auditing such a system then our whole democracy is at their mercy. That’s essentially a technocracy.
Sweden has an extremely complex system for tallying votes and very very few people can explain the exact algorithm that turns a collection of ballots into a list of names of people in Parliament. Even people that follow politics closely only have a vague idea of how it works. Yet most people feel the system is fair and reasonable and there is no real push to change it or make it simpler to understand.
If your business relies on some big pile of spaghetti code, you might be very reluctant to change it, but you also would be unlikely to recommend that design to someone who was starting from scratch (unless they were a competitor).
I'm not recommending the Swedish system per se. Just pointing out that as long as people feel they understand how to vote to nudge the result in their desired direction, and that the outcome (ie. who ends up in parliament) feels reasonable and representative then people probably don't care too much about the details of the voting system
The Condorcet property (not method) is easy enough to understand.
"Imagine this candidate ran in a two person race against each of the other candidates in turn. If he'd win ALL those races individually, he should win when running against all of them at the same time too."
Now, explaining various methods which guarantee this property is not as easy - nor is it easy to understand why you might prefer one such method to another.
But this isn't actually a big deal. In the many, many countries that use proportional representation, it's the outcome ("parties share of seats in parliament should be roughly the same as parties share of votes in the election") which is agreed upon. The actual mathematics to achieve it are somewhat counterintuitive and not many people are aware of them, but that doesn't matter. We can all see it works, and so we would in an election with, say, Ranked Pairs.
Well, I'm not really seeing people complain about the math itself, but instead more about fraud in the votes themselves, or machines/people cheating when tallying.
Just to be clear, the difference would be something like having to say B won because he was the most common second choice and beat every other candidates in a one on one. Versus saying B won because it had the most first choices, yet did not have a majority of first choices.
I think it's easy enough to understand that while someone had more first choices, they didn't have a majority first choices and since someone else had more second choices they took the win.
After watching people freak out when NYC implemented Ranked Choice, I feel like most Americans won’t tolerate anything even slightly more complicated. It’s our only shot.
I’m from NZ which changed from FPP to MMP in 1993.
Two big problems:
1. Half of the politicians that make it into parliament are from the party list (which is chosen by the party) and are not voted for individually. I believe much of the power of democracy is the ability to vote people out, and the party list mostly prevents that.
2. There is a lot of talk of strategic voting. I guess all systems can be gamed, but MMP seems to encourage it.
https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy... “Every candidate who wins an electorate gets a seat in Parliament. They are called electorate MPs. The remaining seats are filled from party lists. Every party has a party list, which is a list of candidates ranked in the order the party wants those candidates to be elected to Parliament. Candidates elected from a party list are called list MPs.”
The NZ voting system looks very much like the German system to me. And while that system certainly has its flaws (e.g. when a party has more directly voted members than seats from the overall proportion of votes), it does respect a higher number of cast votes than FPTP. Any vote in FPTP that wasn't cast for the winning local candidate is lost. In MMP, every vote for a party influences the result in every case.
As a german I can tell you that not being able to get rid of certain people because they will always re-enter parliament via party list is annoying as hell.
The intended way to do that is to join a party and try to work towards that from within. Parties are required to have democratic internal processes including voting on the candidate lists. But let's face it - only people with political ambitions of their own will even think about that.
I'll take second worst over worst. The current system has been in place for hundreds of years, I'm not going to hold my breath for the "perfect" voting system.
> It is the second WORST voting system after first past the post
I dunno, I think random ballot is worse.
Its arguably the worst system that uses ranked choice ballots and ever considers more than the first position, though, which is why in should be called its proper name, “instant runoff voting”, and not “ranked choice”.
> 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.
> There is exactly zero chance that a third party will gain any meaningful amount of power
The US has had a two party system since about its second election under the Constitution, but only one of the current parties has a direct lineage to the original two. The second party of the two-party system has been replaced twice. It could happen again.
OTOH, it won't happen with a platform that isn't very controversial (that's two easy for one or the other major party to coopt—or both in pieces); it would only happen with a platform with a strong position on a controversial issue where a sizable fraction of the population has views more strongly opposed to one major parties position than the other existing major party is willing to take.
This is a little self-defeating, even for our current political systems.
Recently, there was a Canadian election. While we use FPTP here, many chose to vote NDP. They are effectively a third party, and were unlikely to hold even a minority government.
But neither incumbent party put forward anything, or anyone, more compelling. So those voting NDP were given two choices: they could vote for something barely better than the other guy, or they could treat their ballot as a mixture of optimism and a spoiled ballot, to voice their disappointment at the current state of affairs in the hope it might lead to something better, someday.
Canada has a different political culture, and changing that is even harder than changing a political system. The only reason the Liberals and the NDP continue to exist as separate organizations[1] is because the Tories can't get more than a third of the vote in any particular riding, so the Lib/NDP leadership can continue to be big fish in their own ponds. If the CPC enjoyed the voter turnout that either of the major US parties enjoyed, Canada would either be a two-party system (as the Libs and NDP would merge, if they ever wanted to win a single seat ever again) with a regional spoiler (BQ) that ensured minority governments, or would be permanently ruled by the Tories.
[1] Their politics couldn't be more similar. Look at how provincial NDP parties govern, and tell me how it differs from the Federal Liberals. (It doesn't.)
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.
We don't have longevity technology yet though, only "keep you alive whilst you get dementia" technology. I wouldn't want to live over 90, maybe not even over 80 - but we'll see what changes by then.
I agree with term limits though, but mainly to ensure that the politicians better represent those working in the economy. So many issues come from politicians effectively being idle landlords - completely divorced from the issues caused by the housing crisis and the damage that comes from the subsequent lack of economic mobility.
We cannot yet turn a 70 y.o. into a 50 y.o., no. We are nowhere near that kind of technology.
But we might be able to turn 70 y.o. into 67 y.o. relatively soon. In fact, there already was an experiment in humans which turned their epigenetic clock back 2,5 years by rejuvenating their thymuses.
(Of course, the complicated relationship between epigenetic clock and real internal state of the organism is not fully clear yet. I know. This might be a very imperfect measure.)
This kind of baby steps is going to compound. I am sort of afraid of the possibility that we will ignore the baby steps until their aggregated weight is unconquerable, much like the climate crisis, where any single added chimney meant "almost nothing", but all of them together over decades meant a lot.
A permanent but senile supreme court is an ideal substrate for permanent government; in 2100 the justices are the same ones from today, all bodies in vats, whose decisions are delegated opaquely to key party donors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Approval voting is my favorite method as well. The best benefit IMO is that someome who votes the same as before is still making a valid vote, they've just set their approval threshold high enough that only one candidate meets it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One method for avoiding the problem of splitting the vote is to only run candidates in ridings which are otherwise effectively "single candidate", places where the incumbents are expected to get >66% of the vote without you running.
This also lets you focus your resources more, and lets you pander more to a specific kind of voter (the voters you need to win the otherwise-not-competitive ridings you are running in).
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-sy...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
If nothing else, RCV should help lower the political temperature in the US and soften the polarization that seems to be leading us to literal civil war.
Everyone is backed into a corner of supporting one or the other party, and it's started feeling like an increasingly high stakes game between the two that's only getting worse.
Lol we're nowhere near a civil war. The US is the the same as the pre-breakup USSR in that the peasant class fully knows that they'd be the biggest losers of any conflict or breakup.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One advantage of Yang's platform (at least during his Presidential run) is that he was able to draw people from both sides of the aisle to his side.
He's not quite a centrist as much as he's trying to break completely out of the left/right dichotomy and compile the best policy ideas that often neither party is supporting, which appeals to a lot of people.
Yes, it can do. Without the real threat of UKIP taking votes from the Conservative Party in the UK, David Cameron would not have promised the in/out referendum on EU membership.
This is a fair counter example, but one also has to consider that (i) much of the referendum demand came from within his own party for ideological rather than practical reasons and (ii) he was able to implement it because the UK's electoral system and multiparty politics gave his party a clear majority with a minority of the vote .
Or put more simply: his personal standing within the party was threatened more than his party's electoral chances (UKIP votes were irrelevant in most Tory seats and took votes off Labour too in marginals), and he wouldn't have been in power anyway under a proportional system.
Ironically, EU Parliament votes being proportional probably played a major role in Farage deciding back in the nineties that he could try to win the Brexit debate from outside the Tory party too...
The votes were not irrelevant. Most people think that offering the referendum to UKIP voters is the only reason the Conservatives weren't forced into another coalition government.
UKIP went from having a 3% share of the vote in 2010 to 12-13% in 2015. People constantly downplay this to make it out as if it was only an internal Conservative party dispute. However there was growing pressure to have the referendum.
They provide a very important mechanism that allows for the main party to fail in a way that it otherwise couldn’t. The only way for a “good” (according to the constituency) idea to succeed is if the “bad” ones fail. If bad ideas are prevented from failing, then the efficiency of the entire system declines.
In the two party system, the only ways for a party to fail are via apathy (not bothering to vote at all), and total defection to the other side. The small party allows voters to signal to the main party that they are failing to adequately represent certain elements of their constituency. It forces the main parties to consider all the components of their base, otherwise they’re can safely abandon them to some extent while they fight over the middle.
It’s arguably less efficient in the US due to an electoral structure that’s quite unfavorable for small parties, but it still serves an important purpose. It doesn’t make sense if you only look at one single election, but the election is the most important feedback mechanism in a democracy, and they typically happen rather infrequently. So you can look at one election, and conclude that a minor party cost one side a particular victory. But if the loser decides to examine why they lost, there’s a clear incentive to improve how they represent their constituents next time.
It’s not highly efficient, but no democracy is. Perhaps the US more than some others, but even if you look at the worlds ‘direct democracies’, you couldn’t conclude that asking the public a handful of extra yes/no questions every year is perfectly efficient either.
The main issue is that in the US, it seems like voting in the primaries is much more effective than third parties.
Look at groups like the Squad, the Tea Party and Trump. These groups are/were able to achieve substantial changes in party platform by working through the primary system and have shifted politics much more than the third parties in the US ever did.
Yeah, that’s true. But you just run into a different set of inefficiencies there. The higher the level of participation you demand for the electorate, you risk an outcome where you represent popular sentiment less and the intensity in motive and means of individual factions more.
The entire idea of electing an executive separately from the legislature is not necessarily efficient in the first place, and the higher level of important placed on for former is quite strange from some perspectives.
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.
Not in a First-Past-The-Post voting system, which is used in most of the US (&afaik, in all presidential elections).
The 1PPP systems systemically trend to metastable 2-party states. Of course 3rd parties will have distinctions from their closer main parties, but it is almost impossible that a 3rd party will triangulate exactly between the two major parties.
This means that in practice, a vote for a 3rd party is effectively a vote for yourworst major party option. The 3rd party acts as a spoiler - always.
This is NOT true in Ranked Choice Voting systems. There, the 3rd party spoiler issue goes away, and the 3rd parties have a real chance of being able to get elected & have a real influence.
To have the effect you want (vs some perverse effect), you must vote strategically in the system you have.
That said, it is long past the time that we implemented a few upgrades from the systems of 200 years ago, such as upgrading to Ranked Choice.
Yes, from the ideological push perspective, losing a crowd to a 3rd party might cause a major party to move in that direction.
I certainly prefer a number of 3rd parties for a number of reasons, but not until we get off the 1PPP voting system. Ranked Choice, or any of a number of other options, but the role of 3rd parties as spoilers is just too great.
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?
Perhaps a better example is the UKIP party swaying the Tories to become more isolationist, and eventually triggering the Brexit referendum? A little bit different, knowing the political system of the UK enables smaller parties to be successful in a way the American system doesn't. But the principle is still the same. UKIP acting as a spoiler is factored into the strategy of the Tories policy makers, and thus they pivot their policies more in line with UKIP ideals to prevent bleeding voters to UKIP. A similar dynamic is at play on Canada's left-wing between the Liberals and the NDP
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
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.
> "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."
None of this is a problem if you are a one-issue party. UKIP doesn't need to exist anymore because the cause it was founded on has now been taken up and implemented by "mainstream" politics. UKIP has all but vanished today, but that's precisely because it was successful.
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.
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.
> 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...
If we're talking about what we're _thinking_, I think Andrew Yang is establishing a political party to make a lot of money, whether it's through direct donations or a higher profile that turns into more financial opportunity elsewhere.
I don't discount the possibility of him doing it just for the political influence, though.
No, it's common for someone who's won an election somewhere, once or twice, to fail for President.
Nixon won several (Congress, VP). Biden won several (Delaware, VP). Bush 41 won Congressional elections. Reagan won as Governor. Carter won as Governor. Shall we continue?
* 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 (watch about 10 minutes).
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.
It reminds me of when some atheists ran a campaign to be called The Brights. A name that can be seen as a little pretentious doesn't help. I think calling his party the Liberal Party, to borrow from Canada and Australia, would have worked well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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) ?
There's a few interesting examples in history. You can read about anarcho-syndicalist Spain and the 1936 revolution [0] or the peasant-led Communes (soviets) of Ukraine in 1917 [1], the two most successful anarchist revolutions so far (that actually managed to implement profound changes before being crushed).
More recent examples include the zapatista caracoles in so-called Mexico started with the 1994 uprising [2] and democratic confederalism in Kurdistan since the 2011 arab spring [3]. Although to be fair democratic confederalism is not exactly anarchist, and despite the younger generations of the kurdish revolutionary movement having strong inspiration in anarchism (eg. Murray Bookchin / Emma Goldman), there is still a strong central State in Kurdistan to this day (and being under constant attack from Turkey and ISIS does not help to dismantle it).
It's fair to ask if these two revolutions can be considered anarchist, as they're not labeled as such. However:
- zapatism abides by anarchist principles (such as the people's army EZLN having zero political power/influence, because all power is in the hands of the people) and claims to a movement from the bottom left (anarchist quadrant on the political compass) ; they also have a restorative justice system not based on punishment
- kurdish emancipation struggles have strong authoritarian (marxist-leninist) influence and history, but there's been a push since the 2000s by party leaders to decentralize power, and recommend anarchist readings to all people receiving political education
In both these examples, women are at the forefront of revolution and have various forms of non-mixed (no cis-men) organizing. Democratic confederalism also has non-mixed ethnic/religious assemblies to empower multiculturalism.
[0] Readings: Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell), Free Women of Spain (Martha Ackelsberg) ; Movies: Living the utopia (documentary with subtitles), Land and Freedom, Libertarias
[1] Readings: zines (i don't know books about the Makhnovtchina) ; Movies: The nine lives of Nestor Makhno
[2] Readings: zines (i don't know books about zapatism) ; Movies: Viva Mexico
[3] Readings: La commune du Rojava (not sure if translated), Make Rojava Green Again, Democratic confederalism (Abdullah Öcalan) ; Movies: Notes from a kurdish rebel
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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
> 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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.