Andrew Yang, Christine Todd Whitman, and David Jolly are forming a new political party, Forward. The party brings together Yang's existing Forward Party with the Serve America Movement and Renew America Movement, led by Jolly and Whitman respectively.
Their website is here: Forward Party
And an op-ed explaining what they want to accomplish is here: Opinion | Most third parties have failed. Here's why our Forward Party won't. - The Washington Post
Given the profile of Forward's leaders and the public's appetite, at least as reported to pollsters, for new solutions, the effort has captured the attention of commentators for the moment. The reaction has not been favorable, at least in my searches.
Here's a representative take: Opinion | Andrew Yang's Forward is another third party going nowhere - The Washington Post
I agree with the general sense of the Paul Waldman's column above:
Their Post op-ed pitching the idea is headlined “Most third parties have failed. Here’s why ours won’t.” Despite their celebrity, they’re almost certainly wrong, and what they’re offering is political vaporware. They’ve located a real problem, but they have the same solution that has been tried before — one that seldom accomplishes anything.
Their party, they say, is “for the majority of Americans who want to move past divisiveness and reject extremism.” ... It’s being presented with the same vapid sloganeering we’ve gotten from every top-down attempt like this to form a third party: What Americans yearn for is a way to “get beyond the partisanship” and find “common sense solutions” to “solve problems” in a way that “brings us all together” and “moves the country forward.” ...
[W]hat’s missing: the actual position of the Forward Party ... They’ve told us Americans want a compromise between Democrats and Republicans, but they hint at their own stance without ever actually revealing it.
I'm not concerned with the lack of policy proposals, if policy is defined as positions on specific issues. Eventually, they'll identify a set of issues where they need policies, task their staff with finding positions that align with the majority position (with a few low-risk crowd-pleasers for Democrats and Republicans sprinkled in), and upload them to the website. It's not hard to articulate the consensus position if that's all you're trying to do, so I'm sure they'll get it done, though I am surprised they haven't already.
Instead, my concern is one articulated by other commentators: Forward doesn't stand for anything. It is true that Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the two major parties and with the degree of polarization in the country, but that doesn't mean we've lost our desire for leadership with conviction, grit, and authenticity. We don't always get it, sometimes because other factors are more pressing and often because we fall for politicians who can fake those qualities. But nothing from the last several decades of American political life suggests that you can inspire voters and build a transformational movement by rejecting those qualities, by saying that you're happy to go along with whatever the average of everyone else's opinion is. As I said in my post on persuasion, compromise is essential, but it shouldn’t be an ethos.
Forward's lack of direction shouldn't be surprising: self-identified moderates are almost by definition not visionaries. They are the indispensable glue of a functional democracy as they find compromises, build consensus, and ease the tensions that could otherwise pull the polity apart. They're the ones that come together to make a last-minute deal on a bill or cross party lines to hold their own side accountable, often showing real courage and devotion to principle, but they're not the ones to see new possibilities in the distance and inspire the people to follow them there. I can appreciate why the trio of moderates leading Forward saw polarization as the nation's greatest problem and therefore saw themselves, in the middle, as the solution, but they're missing the point. A leader has to stand for something.
The challenge we face today is how to break the walls between people, in the way that Forward and similar efforts want to do, without reverting to a formless, lukewarm centrism. Nascent and personal as it is, that's the project I'm working on in this space, by defining a vision for our politics that I believe in, that is challenging, and whose appeal does not align with a left/right spectrum. Not everyone will find that it resonates with their convictions, but it will mean something to those who do.
The worst phrase in politics
A closing note: it's no surprise that the phrase "common sense" appears throughout Forward's materials and in those of the organizations that preceded it. This is an enormously popular phrase in American politics, and I find it insufferable. It says that the answers to the big questions are easy, and that everyone who isn't crazy or stupid would agree. It's not an argument, but a shortcut used to avoid having to make one. The issues that captivate our attention do so because they're hard; they fight back against facile answers. It may be that there are more considerations to the argument than we can see at first glance, or unresolved tradeoffs between stakeholders, or that seemingly obvious solutions tend to have counterintuitive and even counterproductive effects. Hard problems require serious engagement, and the right answers are often unpopular. If you believe in a course of action, explain why. If you tell me it's common sense, that tells me you don't know.