Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang recently announced he would be leaving the Democrat Party and launching his very own political party. His new book “Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy” comes out on October 5th, which he has promoted as a “powerful and urgent warning” about stepping back from the brink and plotting a new way forward for our democracy. He pointed out how a political “duopoly” between the Democratic and Republican rule has kept the US and its systems in the past. The book will also focus on what he describes as the “priests of decline” among both major political parties. It will follow up his 2018 best-seller “The War on Normal People.”
Yang was particularly known on the Democratic campaign trail for his promise of a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for all Americans. He ultimately dropped out of the campaign due to political inexperience and continued supporting the Democratic Party, eventually endorsing Joe Biden. He then ran for Mayor of New York but had a campaign with a number of gaffes and flip-flops that ultimately placed him in fourth place. He acknowledged defeat to his supporters and said “there was so much about New York City I did not know.”
Yang has come back claiming to have left the Democratic Party and with a new book promising to identify the politicians whose incentives have become divorced from the people they supposedly serve. The book was written in the fall of 2020 and right before Yang’s unsuccessful bid in the New York mayoral race. He did not say what he would call his new party or what offices it would target in future elections. He only tweeted the word “Excited” in response to the initial Politico report announcing his political party.
Sources close to the project reported that the new party will be aimed at moderates and centrists fed up with America’s two-party system. While a source confirmed that the formation of Yang’s party is real, they did not divulge a name for it. Details on the third political party are supposedly being rolled out in his upcoming book. It’s unclear exactly why Yang left the Democratic Party or what role he sees the new party playing in politics, but he has continued to champion Universal Basic Income as a way to prepare against automation.
“By 2015, automation had already destroyed four million manufacturing jobs, and the smartest people in the world now predict that a third of all working Americans will lose their job to automation in the next 12 years. Our current policies are not equipped to handle this crisis. Even our most forward-thinking politicians are unprepared,” Yang’s campaign website reads.
Yang even talked about potentially serving in the Biden Administration during an interview with TIME Magazine. That eventually fell threw when he launched his bid in the New York City race. This might be an opportunity for more Democrats to find a moderate middle. It would give a chance for people on the left who don’t agree with the most radical aspects to come back to the middle. Yang has had a whole lot of bad ideas, but this one might just be a good way to split off a chunk of the radical Democratic Party and what it has become today.
