![]() ![]() While past third-party efforts have united behind specific issues or ideological projects at odds with the two dominant parties - say hostility to free trade or desegregation or capitalism - the Forward Party intends to become the first successful political venture founded on etiquette. The Forward Party may be vague about specifics or ambiguous about worldview, but it cannot hide the technocratic, Silicon Valley approach that animates it: “We just have to… reintroduce a competition of ideas” in order to do away with extreme polarization. #Andrew yang mayor seriesYou are invited by a series of bubbles to “DISCOVER” (Fearlessly seek diverse and new ideas) DESIGN (Come together around sensible solutions) and, finally, “DELIVER” (Yes, actually DO something). Once you move beyond the ambiguous goals, visitors to the Forward Party website are treated to a sleek flow chart outlining just what the future of political parties will look like. There’s a reason the alumni of his 2020 run all wrote marketing how-to books, rather than treatises on political philosophy or public policy. ![]() In 2020, Yang ran on unique ideas to deal with concrete problems - e.g., universal basic income to offset the pain of automation - but only picked up steam when he began sporting a “MATH” pin on his lapels and convinced crowds and comedians to chant “PowerPoint!” at rallies. But staking out actual positions on actual issues could threaten to alienate one side of this dissatisfied middle or the other - so instead they are uniting behind three, no doubt focus-tested, priorities: “Free People” “Thriving Communities” “Vibrant Democracy.” To read the list is to get a glimpse into the mind of communications, rather than policy professionals at work. “We are trying to build a container to house candidates that can emerge and serve their communities… we want to give our candidates room for their solutions.”Īt the core of Forward’s appeal is the belief that an increasingly progressive Democratic Party and a GOP poisoned by Trump have left many politically homeless. “We are a group of people who have varying ideas about specific solutions but committed to working together to come up with real solutions,” Searby says. New York election officials keep it stupid.Yang and his crew are hard at work “reinventing what a political party should be”: vague, it turns out, according to top Forward advisor Joel Searby, who headed up Evan McMullin’s doomed 2016 presidential run. ![]() Forward pledges to do away with the old ways of doing business, namely by trying to appeal to the most voters. Reuters broke the news in July with one of the most bewildering sentences in modern journalism: “The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet.” It is odd to see reporters give deference to this notion since the group has staked no positions on any issue beyond ranked-choice voting - overturning voting laws in nearly every state is evidently centrist these days, so long as it is done in melodious tones and grounded in good intentions. In media write-ups Yang and co-founder Christine Todd Whitman, ex-GOP governor of New Jersey, emphasize that it will be a centrist party. Over the summer failed Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang launched the Forward Party after merging with a pair of anti-Trump groups: one from the center left, one from the center right. Right next to those kilted folks, I caught my co-conspirators hiding in plain sight: two middle-aged men in blue polos beneath a tent declaring, “Not Left, Not Right, Forward.” ![]() I then circled the booths advertising natural medicine and religious preschool programs, before settling my eyes on the tent for the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society of the Washington, DC Area. Loud and angry, sure, but hardly the stuff of political upheaval. Walking from the Art Deco former elementary school, I bypassed the distractions of the bingo game and carnival rides, hooked a left at the minimart selling live bait, lottery tickets and a rack of women’s clothing and found myself outside the New Deal Café greeted by insistent women opposed to a proposed Maglev train promising hour-long commutes from DC to New York City. They were off for Labor Day weekend, so only a couple of hundred people were on hand to see the dawn of a political revolution. On weekdays 7,000 people travel to NASA’s Goddard Space Center to work on those telescopes that go viral every few months with their high-definition photos of space. In 1958, the federal government surveyed the vast plains of the United States for the site that would launch the future of humanity and settled on… Greenbelt, Maryland, which had the advantage of a quick commute from the capital. ![]()
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