Andrew Yang Finds a Pulpit for His Forward Party on Tucker Carlson
“We’re never going to make progress if we’re not willing to talk to each other,” Yang says.
On Monday, Andrew Yang wrote an article on Medium, the birthplace of all great ideas, to explain why he was “breaking up with the Democratic Party.” His rationale was predictably lucid:
My goal is to do as much as I can to advance our society. There are phenomenal public servants doing great work every day – but our system is stuck. It is stuck in part because polarization is getting worse than ever...I believe I can reach people who are outside the system more effectively. I feel more...independent.
Now, Yang seems to have taken this independence straight to an hour-long interview on Tucker Carlson’s show, that famous breeding ground for novel ideas like Great Replacement theory. The full interview airs on Wednesday night, but trailers for the episode hint at some of its general themes. “We’re never going to make progress if we’re not willing to talk to each other,” Yang says in one clip, “and that’s what the Forward Party is going to be about.”
Yang has founded his own party with the same name as his new book, Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, as well as his nonprofit organization, the Humanity Forward Foundation. In Silicon Valley, where Yang once achieved very moderate success, that’s called brand synergy.
In case you were wondering how he landed on his Forward-forward messaging, he explains in another clip:
Yang: Right now, this duopoly is not working for anyone. It’s not working for Democrats, Republicans, or Independents — so this is my new project. It’s the Forward Party! It’s not right or left, it’s forward.
Carlson: That’s a third party.
Yang: It is a third party, yes.
There are plenty of reasons to conclude that the Democratic Party is an ineffective monolith in a dysfunctional two-party system that insists on lumping together members of the moderate left and centrist right who, in another country, would rarely find themselves in the same coalition. Many have raised this point before, to minimal impact. I’m sure Andrew Yang — who received 2.8 percent of the vote in the 2020 New Hampshire presidential primary, one percent of the vote in the 2020 Iowa Caucuses, and just over 12 percent in the New York mayoral primary he was once the favorite to win — will succeed better than the guy who invented seatbelts.
But Yang has always been more of a content creator than a politician, and it’s fairly obvious where this will lead. We’re talking about the haven for independent thinkers whose thinking repackages historically conventional thoughts as firebrand anti-establishment heterodoxy — Substack. Perhaps this is already underway: andrewyang.substack.com is taken, albeit by a user called “Mr. Kimchi” who seems to also own domains for Tulsi Gabbard, Chamath Palihapitiya, and FiveThirtyEight.
Unfortunately for Yang, forwardparty.substack.com is also taken, by Gawker, but we are open to negotiations. Much like the newfound Independent, we support talking to the other side.
