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The Forward Party Is a Step Backward
Andrew Yang’s new political venture can’t succeed. But in trying to reinvent American politics, it’s likely to do more harm than good.
To hear the founders of the new Forward Party — a would-be third party that was announced on Wednesday by Andrew Yang, Christie Todd Whitman, and David Jolly — tell it, the basic problem with American politics is that the system has been “torn apart by two increasingly divided extremes.” While Yang and his colleagues begin their manifesto by citing January 6 and the fact that many Republicans support using violence to return Donald Trump to power, the vision behind their new party is, crudely speaking, “a pox on both their houses.” The Forward Party, they argue, will embrace the “sensible center” of American politics, and on issue after issue find a “reasonable approach most Americans agree on.”
Obviously no one is against sensible and reasonable policies. But its rhetoric notwithstanding, it’s hard to see how the Forward Party will end up making a serious difference in American politics. To begin with, while the party frames its appeal as wide-ranging, the obvious constituency for its approach actually seems to be a fairly narrow one, namely the kind of fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters who voted for John Anderson as a…
