The Failed Plan of Andrew Yang’s New Party
Before the midterm elections have even begun, much of the country’s political media has already shifted its focus to the 2024 presidential election. Republican observers are obsessed with the Ron DeSantis campaign and if the Florida governor will be able to overthrow former president Trump. Democrats are focused on Joe Biden’s health and if he is interested in running for a second term. There have already been several profiles and speculative pieces on the top candidates and what the future might hold for the next presidential election.
There is also talk about a new party. The Forward Party, led by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, is in its nascent stages. This party suffered a disastrous initial rollout earlier in August, when Yang was heavily criticized for his unspecific platform. The next two years will certainly show whether or not a celebrity- and social media-driven group, focused on procedural reforms with no concrete platform, will have any sort of impact on the country. But the odds of a total collapse are high and growing every day.
Andrew Yang has built his entire political career on a combination of personal funding, social media, and campaigns focused on visible positions. His hope is that he can remain relevant through these avenues even though his specific ideas are speculative at best. Yang correctly understood that he could gain immediate visibility through a long-shot presidential bid. He then ran for mayor of New York, another top-tier position close to the nation’s media hub. With his new party, Yang believes he can repeat this pattern and provide maximum visibility to his political ideas.
Yang is correct to assume that a new party could be a way to be remembered by history. Political parties have an outsized role in the telling of American history. They are a way that historians have attempted to discover ideas that fell outside of the political mainstream. History textbooks frequently discuss third parties that only had a few thousand or hundred members. Yang most likely believes his movement can, if it never gains substantial power, become the next Liberty or Union-Labor Party, one that is discussed and remembered as standing for something.
Observers are also worried about this party as part of Andrew Yang’s self-promotional projects. Yang is a known commodity. He has a vast social media following and appears on popular television shows and podcasts on a regular basis. Liberals in particular remember the damage that Ralph Nader and Jill Stein did to them in the past. They are not worried about Yang siphoning votes from the Republicans, since that party appears lockstep behind former president Trump. Instead, they know that a portion of the electorate that might otherwise vote Democratic may vote for Yang simply because they recognize his name or remember his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Both the hopes and fears of Yang’s party rest on several misconceptions. First, they assume that Yang is famous and that this fame will translate to votes for his party in 2024. But the threshold for “fame” is much lower than it once was. Individuals rise and fall in the political sphere on a daily basis. Yang does not have the television show or the political office that allows him to make news on a regular basis. Appearing on news shows and podcasts to say that he believes in “moving forward” will eventually grow stale and lead to fewer bookings.
In addition, it is not necessarily the case that Democrats will be any more amenable to third party interest than Republicans in 2024. Observers forget that third party candidates in 2016 took votes from both candidates. Democrats and Republicans were almost equally unhappy with their candidates and sought out other options. The vast majority of Democrats did not think Donald Trump would win, and some were comfortable throwing away their votes for a third party. This tendency was much less pronounced in 2020, when the percentage of third party votes declined by more than 60 percent from 2016.
Andrew Yang could always shock the political world. His charisma and social media skills have gotten him much further than most failed presidential candidates. But his movement must gain substance at some point for him to make a long-term impact on our political life. Simply being famous will get him on CNN, but it will not sustain a new political party in the 21st century.
The only available niche that Yang can fill is the “Respectable But Embarrassed Republican” which is wildly overrepresented in media offices across America.Report
Part of the issue is that there seems to be a fundamental realignment bubbling under the surface.
The old two parties may have done a good job of providing a home to the overwhelming majority of people and a choice to the overwhelming majority of the folks left over in the past… but more and more people don’t want to live in either party and don’t want to choose them.
Which makes stuff like a 3rd Party a lot more palatable. Stuff like Perot and, in 2016, the Libertarians were indicators of this growing discontent.
I think it’s a sign that, in our lifetimes, we’ll see a new realignment with a new party. Is it going to be Yang’s? Probably not. He’s a (lovable) dork.
But looking at the two we have now has me remembering the Whigs something awful.Report
This is basically it.
Just dip our toes into RCV (as we’re starting to dip here and there) and we’ll start to see some revealed preferences emerge.
I could be persuaded for 50%+1 open election runoff’s a’la Georgia (and French Presidential Elections) for those who have the stomach for two voting events – and to ward off RCV is too haaaaaaard bad faith arguments. Either way, end the first-past-the-pose duopoly however you prefer.
Yang’s party seems to be advocating for that… if that’s all he does and gets some momentum for just that? It would be political money well spent.Report
Mmmm I think you’re wrong on the direction element. If one of the existing parties (I’d say the GOP seems more likely of course, but I am a liberal) goes the way of the Whigs it wouldn’t be at the hands of a party attacking them from the political center. People pen peans to the center but the reality is the center isn’t where you can found parties. Parties are anchored in more fringe ideologies and then reach from those anchor points in a centerward direction. The Whigs, for instance, lost out to the Republicans and the Republicans weren’t a centrist party- they were hard core abolitionists, a non-centrist position at the time.
So if one of the big two goes down I would expect they’d be felled by something non-centrist. A green or socialist party in the unlikely event the Dems go down, for instance; and a Monarchist or hard core populist or autocratic or theocratic party in the event the GOP fails. Yang and all the centrist pap parties that give our elites and media wankers the happy feels are absolutely never going to do the job.Report
My money is on hard core populist/autocratic.
The theocrats are over (or, at best, it’s winter). It’ll be a nice post-christian populism.Report
I would put my money in a similar quadrant. The Theocrats are in a decline that, I think, will require a generational forgetting before people are willing to approach a revised Christianity with a more open mind after the current neo-pagan-soft-atheist moment has its chance to show its fail points and weaknesses.
Where I hesitate is on the autocratic part. Populism is really popular on its own. You really only need the autocratic element if you’re trying to force some element along with it that’s deeply unpopular. I’m thinking either libertarianism, hard core nativism (not just immigration hesitation, more than that) or some kind of personality cult (Trumpism? Surely the right hasn’t decayed to the point of long term capture by some kind of modern reheated Bolivarianism/Peronism).
So my money is on Populism with yours but I am less certain about the autocratic part. I feel there’s an intellectual element on the right that hasn’t been fully baked yet and it just feels… missing. If whatever that is pops out it might wed better with populism than the other alternatives and prove genuinely popular rendering the autocratic element unnecessary.Report
Populism is always autocratic, almost by its very definition. Huey Long, Juan Peron, George Wallace, Donald Trump…
The idea is to draw a line around some group- maybe ethnic, or economic class, or regional, or religious, but some identifiable group and declare them to be The Real People.
Everyone else of course, are the Unreal People- enemies, interlopers, barely tolerated not-really-legitimate inhabitants of The People’s land.Report
I’m guessing personality cult. It’ll tie everything together. Part of the problem is that populism is, ultimately, not fashionable.
It might be *POPULAR* but it will not be fashionable.
So it’ll be the elite against the populists and it’ll take someone as good at the game as Trump was at the head. I look out and around and don’t see anybody.
Not yet. Just a bunch of dorks under the old paradigm who also see Trump and try to mimic poorly.Report
Yeah a good third party would be nifty. Sadly they all seem to be utter crap. Yang is superb example of guy who loves attention and not a clue in the world. Common sense answers….why gee thanks Andy no one ever thought of that before. Geez. Centrist bsdi is not the basis for squat. Endless temporizing between imagined extremes is in wide supply and going nowhere. Have some actual f’n ideas and policies. Until then he is just another rich guy wanting attention.Report