The "Forward Party" of Andrew Yang Is Going To Be A Flop.
Here we go again: another vanity candidate who thinks that Americans are yearning for a third political party that will break through the partisan squabbling in D.C. Andrew Yang has joined with Christine Todd Whitman and David Jolly (both Republicans) to “create” the “Forward Party.” The Media is giving this so called project of Yang’s some air time, but this latest attempt to form a third political party is going to fail for a myriad of reasons. History, political polarization, and a lack of defined political issues are just a few of the reasons why this group of washed up politicians are going to fail. First up, American history has clearly demonstrated that two parties dominate the political system. The founding fathers may not have liked “factions,” but the American political system literally started out with political parties during the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. We also have a winner take all political system, so members of congress are not apportioned based upon political percentages of the vote. However, there have been several attempts to form third parties, and there has been no third party candidate who has one the presidency or taken over control of congress. Before the Civil War, there was the Free Soil Party. In the later part of the 19th and early 20th Centuries there was the Populist Party. George Wallace run a third party in 1968, but he ran as a Democrat in 1972. And we have Ross Perot with the short lived Reform Party in the 1990’s. Now, according to NYT Columnist Jamie Bouie points out that the Free Soil and Populist Parties were successful at pushing their issues or part of their agenda into national debates though. Here is what he says about the Free Soil Party: Take the Free Soil Party. During the presidential election of 1848, after the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a coalition of antislavery politicians from the Democratic, Liberty and Whig Parties formed the Free Soil Party to oppose the expansion of slavery into the new Western territories. At their national convention in Buffalo, the Free Soilers summed up their platform with the slogan “Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men!” The Free Soil Party, notes the historian Frederick J. Blue in “The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-1854,” “endorsed the Wilmot Proviso by declaring that Congress had no power to extend slavery and must in fact prohibit its extension, thus returning to the principle of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.” It is the duty of the federal government, declared its platform, “to relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence of slavery wherever that government possesses constitutional power to legislate on that subject and is thus responsible for its existence.” This was controversial, to put it mildly. The entire two-party system (the first being the roughly 30-year competition between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans) had been built to sidestep the conflict over the expansion of slavery. The Free Soil Party — which in an ironic twist nominated Martin Van Buren, the architect of that system, for president in the 1848 election — fought to put that conflict at the center of American politics. It succeeded. In many respects, the emergence of the Free Soil Party marks the beginning of mass antislavery politics in the United States. It elected several members to Congress, helped fracture the Whig Party along sectional lines and pushed antislavery “Free” Democrats to abandon their party. The Free Soilers never elected a president, but in just a few short years they transformed American party politics. And when the Whig Party finally collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, after General Winfield Scott’s defeat in the 1852 presidential election, the Free Soil Party would become, in 1854, the nucleus of the new Republican Party, which brought an even larger coalition of former Whigs and ex-Democrats together with Free Soil radicals under the umbrella of a sectional, antislavery party. The progressives in the Democratic Party incorporated elements of the Populist movement. We got a graduated income tax idea and popular election of U.S. Senators from the Populist, and these came about under the Wilson Administration. Sadly, later third party movements were either based upon preserving segregation (Wallace), or they became the vanity project for billionaires (Ross Perot). While I agreed with Ross Perot on being against NAFTA, Perot’s other agenda item was a fetish for balancing the federal budget. A lot of people forget that Perot was one of those who pushed for cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Naturally, the media didn’t point out that Ross and other wealthy people like him were reaping the benefits of tax cuts and forcing the middle class and poor to accept cuts in government programs in order to finance those tax cuts. In other words, Austerity economics. Because Perot was able to get 19% of the popular vote, Bill Clinton and most other centrist Democrats embraced Austerity economics to one degree or another. This was especially true after Democrats lost congress in 1994. Yes, Clinton fought against cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, but centrist “Democrats” were still proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare up through the Obama Administration as part of some “Grand Bargain.” Clinton was into balancing the federal budget throughout the remainder of his two terms as president. Also, Bill Clinton specifically rejected the notion that the federal government could do big things anymore. Too bad that Republicans after him started handing out big tax cuts again to the wealthy and threw away all that fiscal displicine shit. And that they believed in funding wars on a credit card to boot. Nothing like watching the federal deficit explode again. By the way, Ross Perot would have gotten more of the vote if he hadn’t been such a skin flint. Perot spent only $50 million dollars at the time. It was projected for him to be truly competitive that he needed to spend $150 million dollars, but Perot believed he could go on Larry King Live and TV for free because the Media loved him. And after Perot failed again in another run in 1996, he walked away from the Reform Party. What was left of it was taken over by the racist and Nazi loving Pat Buchannan, and he destroyed the rest when he took over the Reform Party in 2000. But not to worry. We had the Greens run Ralph Nader who bleed enough votes from Al Gore to help George W. Bush steal the election in 2000. Further note, I remember a Republican friend of mine who would go ballistic when you mentioned Ross Perot. My friend HATED Bill Clinton. I used to laugh about that, until Ralph Nader came along. Now, I understand how my friend felt. Oh yeah, and Jill Stein can go fuck herself too for what she did in 2016. Anyway, you can see the rather checkered history of recent attempts to create a third political party in America. But at least those parties had agenda items or issues to run on. Does the Forward Party have any issues that they are rallying around? No, they do not. Here is a what was said at the announcement: Two pillars of the new party's platform are to "reinvigorate a fair, flourishing economy" and to "give Americans more choices in elections, more confidence in a government that works, and more say in our future." The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet. It will say at its Thursday launch: "How will we solve the big issues facing America? Not Left. Not Right. Forward." This simply isn’t the old Wendy’s commercial of “Where’s the beef?” x x YouTube Video We do not even have the hamburger buns. This really is a nothing burger. The lack of any issues to rally a third political party around are not there. What about the climate crises? Anyone want to bet that Yang and his “gang” will be able to put forward any ideas on how to save the planet from environmental collapse. How about saving democracy? Those are two biggies right there. Nothing so far, but they will go “forward.” But I am going to go out on a limb and say that there will be no plans for any of the serious problems facing America today, at least not from the Forward Party. This is because they are going on the premise that members of the two dominate political parties can sit down and hammer out solutions. Their premise is that Yang and his crowd can do what Obama and Biden have really failed to do: get Republicans to advance a positive agenda with Democrats. And Obama made all the same kinds of noise when he ran for president. Not Blue States or Red States but America! Well, Republicans refused to sit down with Obama on anything. And this was because they understood that their voters are racists who want to go back to a time when whites are safely supreme. Does Yang really believe that he can get enough Republican support when Republicans have embraced Trumpism? No one is holding all those Republican voters as hostages. They could stop voting Republican any time they want. But I know more than a few of those voters, and it is part of their identity. They hate African Americans, Latinos, Asians, LGBTQ, and Democrats as a whole. And I am not the only one who has noticed that problem with Yang’s vanity project: This is all to say that there’s nothing about the Forward Party that, as announced, would have this kind of impact on American politics. It doesn’t speak to anything that matters, other than a vague sense that the system should have more choices and that there’s a center out there that rejects the extremes, a problem the Democratic Party addressed by nominating Joe Biden for president and shaping most of its agenda to satisfy its most conservative members in Congress. The Forward Party doesn’t even appear to advocate the kinds of changes that would enable more choices across the political system: approval voting, in which voters can choose multiple candidates for office; multimember districts for Congress; and fundamental reform of the Electoral College. Even something as simple as fusion voting — in which two or more parties on the ballot share a candidate — doesn’t appear to be on the radar of the Forward Party. The biggest problem with the Forward Party, however, is that its leaders — like so many failed reformers — seem to think that you can take the conflict out of politics. “On every issue facing this nation,” they write, “we can find a reasonable approach most Americans agree on.” No, we can’t. When an issue becomes live — when it becomes salient, as political scientists put it — people disagree. The question is how to handle and structure that disagreement within the political system. Will it fuel the process of government, or will it paralyze it? Something tells me that neither Yang nor his allies have the answer. And we have seen how Republicans want to solve the conflict in politics: with voter suppression, voter nullification, and political violence. Too many Republicans are fine with this dynamic. This is because they see their power in the democratic system being threatened by a diversifying America. And the so called Forward Party is not going to solve that problem with empty slogans. Read the full article