Sounds nice. The bulk of the Dem Party platform is supported by 70%+ of voters including Republicans. Seems like every penny of money and ounce of effort they are making would be better spent getting voters to vote based on policy rather than team jersey. Instead, Yang et al want to add a third team to the playing fieild who don’t know the rules, have never played the game, and have the goal of disrupting it.
That will most certainly work! /s
A 92%approval rating issue and he can’t even state clear support for it! It’s even firmly in the Libertarian “small goverment/personal autonomy” wheelhouse and he still can’t articulate it.
With Jill Stein being too Putin-linked, and the Libertarians going public Neo-Confederate, they need a replacement sponge party to absorb the protest votes that would otherwise go to a real party.
This sure sounds like a way for party positions to sway wildly between ideological extremes as the zeitgeist shifts – even if those extremes include such things as “certain individuals are not wholly people and should not have their basic human rights respected”.
Taken to the extreme, if “common-sense consensus” were implemented as formal policy, it would open the door for a class of charismatic political tastemakers to emerge whose goal is simply to sway the population to a desired position.
This may come off as strawman-ish, but it was not much more than half a century ago that the commonsense consensus was that Black people were not fully deserving of the rights and privileges afforded whites. Majority approval for gay marriage was only reached in 2011(!!!). And how about the current struggles of trans and nonbinary folks to be recognized as humans worthy of respect?
One of the goals of having any kind of political stance is to model how you think the world can be better than it is right now. The will of the people doesn’t cut it when it comes to promoting basic human decency as a societal goal. You need someone to lead.
I do like the idea of the will of the people somehow protecting certain inalienable rights that folks have worked decades to achieve, so subverting that will and doing things like overturning Roe wouldn’t be possible. But ultimately I think we need a populist leader for the left, as you suggest. It’s not enough to have protections in place or aspirations to become more egalitarian. We need leaders to take us there, and the Yangs and Pelosis are not the leaders we’re looking for.
It seems that Andrew Yang is not happy that the majority of Californians CA are progressive, want to stay progressive, and want progressive policies that help the majority of Californians. He’s suggesting ranked-choice voting because he can’t find a way into CA politics based upon his wishy washy core principles.
BTW, nothing in their core principles speak to what sort of policies this politcal party actually embraces. If they are going to be tolerant of people who want to restrict my gender’s reproductive choices, why would I be part of that politcal party? He WILL NOT take a stand on policies.
And who gets to “decide” what’s best for them? How does Andrew Yang know what’s best for anyone else?
Maybe because Yang doesn’t believe such “divisive” issues as basic human rights should be discussed.
Human rights are not a “hot button issue”… not everyone should be decided by a fucking vote. We need to strengthen the floor of what we consider our rights, and none of that can be taken away by a vote. Period.
The left won’t vote for Yang. He is appealing to self identifying “moderates”, but I don’t know how many of those are still in the Republican Party.
I don’t know, the Third Way politicians in Britain are anti-trans, anti-left and anti-GRT right now. Just give Sir Keith a few more years until everyone forgets about Corbyn, then overt anti-semitism will slip back into the party unnoticed.
The Labour Party conference clashes with Rosh Hashanah this year, and I am certain that the conference counts as work.
Well let us not forget the Third Way policies of the Democrats in the 90’s. With their defense of marriage act, welfare reform, and tough on crime policies. But at least we got the FMLA and a balanced budget (due entirely to an economic boom in tech the they had absolutely nothing to do with)
I’d be very curious to hear an actual, non-hypothetical example of this as it relates to the current parties. From my point of view, Side A (fascists) have completely overrun the Republican party, while Side B (progressives) aren’t much represented by any party (and certainly wouldn’t be represented by Yang). Thus, the Democrats are already the “compromise” you speak of and any compromise between them and Republicans is already favoring Side A. What issues are you thinking of when you say the best solution would be a compromise between Republicans and Democrats, given how extreme the Republicans have gone in recent years?
The whole idea that “the party” on both sides just unilaterally decides which issues are “political hot issues” just reeks of conspiracy theory to me. There aren’t a bunch of party leaders sitting around smoking cigars and saying, “Let’s get everyone riled up about gun control next week.”
Fox News and Facebook’s algorithms do that for the GQP, while the Democratic Party leadership is so timid that they always seem to be sending out feelers asking, “Is it okay if we do this thing to stand up for basic human rights? Is that going to make us electable?”
