DRAFT ARTICLE

Is the Forward Party Ready to Embrace Equity and Liberty in Order to Make Progress?

By Sean Diamond

At the age of 36, I’m technically old enough to serve in any position in the government - even to be elected as the president. However, more importantly, I am now twice the age for voting eligibility. As I hit this milestone in the latter part of 2021, I reflected upon the never-ending tumultuousness of American politics to ask: Is this normal?

Have the past 18 years of political stagnation (with the term “bipartisan” becoming encoded as “infeasible” in the minds of at least one and possibly more generations) been how the country operated for the preceding 200 years before I was eligible to vote? If so, how did the United States ever accomplish anything of significance - let alone remain united in the aftermath of a civil war, a century of civil and economic struggle that followed, and another half century of escalating “culture wars” that bled into my experience as a voting adult?

In trying to answer these questions and to decide what to do with the next 18 years of my voting eligibility, which are in theory the years in my life where I (and others of the “millennial” generation) should expect to experience peak levels of social and political influence, I began to consider - as many other politically lost souls do - the need for a “third” political party, researching the mechanisms and regulations required to do so. I mused about the practical aspects of launching such an endeavor: Do you start at the local level and build momentum? Do you start at the state level to combat (or take advantage of) the unique role of state legislatures in redistricting and other key levers of real power? Do you dive in at the federal level with a ten year path to the presidency, building a coalition with just enough senators and representatives to prevent either major party from holding a simple majority - effectively allowing the “third” party to play kingmaker in each major policy decision? It may seem difficult to imagine a political party doing this, but think of the role that Joe Manchin has been playing since the Democrats took the majority in the Senate and then multiply that by 6 senators and 30 representatives and you start to get the picture.

I took note of what Andrew Yang was doing with his attempt to start the Forward Party, centered on his own personality and a series of specific technocratic fixes to improve the way government functions. I reflected on the enthusiasm garnered by Bernie Sander’s Our Revolution organization, which has channeled a great deal of enthusiastic supporters into political activity but only within the narrow limits of a self-defining, self-reinforcing echo chamber that has a tendency to alienate anyone that was not already predisposed to agree that socialism is inherently better than capitalism. In each of these 2 nearly/semi-successful examples, I observed nascent factions built around a cult of personality, each of which unlikely to be capable of fully competing as one of the two major parties in the United States at large. One faction has been so focused on the ability of “experts” - such as Yang himself - to deliver “solutions” to the people (the original definition of being politically “progressive” before it was co-opted to mean something totally different) without reckoning with the fact that the nation has yet to agree on what “the problem” is that needs solving. The other faction has been doing the legwork to organize at the each level of politics from local to national for several years now, but it is based on a philosophy that is so focused on the downtrodden (the part of the body politic that I’ve come to think of as politically “invisible”) that it works in many ways to the exclusion of any other faction that it might otherwise build a coalition with to make progress.

Upon closer examination both of these potential models for starting a third party seemed doomed to failure from the start, which is when in December of 2021 I stumbled on to an article by Frank J. Distefano on the website American Purpose entitled “How to Build a New Political Party” that outlined the mathematical impossibility of a simple-majority-democracy (like the United States) ever supporting more than two viable political parties for any significant amount of time. In the article, Distefano goes on to highlight the need for a “new” political party rather than a “third” political party. I was so intrigued by the article that I bought and quickly finished his book The Next Realignment, which is a mix of American history and political philosophy rolled into a captivating 400 pages.

In The Next Realignment, Distefano provides the details of the rise and fall of five eras in American politics, which he calls “party systems” in recognition of the fact that in a democracy (unlike a communist, theocratic, or fascist autocracy) it is the dynamics between the coalitions rather than the direction of a single party that drives politics forward or causes it to stagnate. In Distefano’s telling, American politics has been in a state of stagnation since 1995 when the Clinton Democrats and the Gingrich Republicans reached a compromise that settled the great debate of the New Deal party system, which started with FDR’s attempt to remake the Democratic Party (forging an alliance between the expert-driven “progressives” and the put-the-people-first “populists”). That new Democratic Party was designed to be a political force that could rise to the occasion and solve the Great Depression (and eventually a second world war). As someone born in the 1980’s I was slightly surprised to learn that the Democratic Party of the early New Deal era was essentially unopposed from a philosophical or practical perspective by any coherent political force until late in the Cold War era when a series of political and economic disasters resulted in the formation of Reagan’s Morning in America coalition of virtuous religious “conservatives” and the liberty-minded fiscal “conservatives” that went on to peak in the mid-nineties, achieving an economic policy detente that continues to hold sway even as the political stagnation of the post-New Deal era set in.

In effect, the New Deal debate over government involvement in economic markets and monetary policy has been settled - it’s allowed but only up to a point. Push too far in the direction of deregulation and the market falls apart. Push too far in the other direction and regulations result in undesirable unintended consequences. Anyone saying otherwise in the past twenty years is just participating in political theater.

Deconstructing the Political Spectrum

For those interested in the gory details of the political sausage making process, Distefano’s 400 pages is well worth a read, and it drove my thinking about what comes next in American politics. It was during this reading that I gained the vocabulary to finally pluck the splinter from my mind - the one postulated in The Matrix - helping me to make sense of the false binary of the Left-Right, Liberal-Conservative, Democrat-Republican spectrum that has been festering since I was in grade school. It allowed me to start thinking in terms of factions that form coalitions rather than the naive but convenient notion that we have two static political parties.

Using this new way of viewing the world, I began to consider - in light of the past eight election cycles - what factions are lurking below the surface of our bipartisan big-tent parties. Who are - and who were - the factions in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party? How have they evolved since 1995 in the post-New Deal era? Where are those factions likely to go next? And most importantly, where should they go next to break the political stagnation without stumbling headfirst into a civil war (like when the Whig Party collapsed in the 1850s)?

Akin to suddenly understanding that molecules are built from atoms that each have their own chemical characteristics, I realized that to understand how the coalitions that we call political parties work I needed to understand and be able to define the factions (and sub-factions) that could be combined to form a “new” political party and set in motion America’s sixth party system. I started with the framework of factions laid out by Distefano but recognized a need to update the language and fill in some of the gaps that he left in The Next Realignment.

As far as I can tell from my past 18 years of experience, reading, and observing the news, here are the significant political factions in America [factions being defined by the primary political principle(s) driving a person’s or group’s motivation to act politically - whether that means voting, demonstrating, organizing, or donating]:

Equity - driven by fairness, equality*, and social justice

Ironically, in today’s political parlance the group most focused on equity is commonly referred to as “progressive” regardless of the emphasis on progress or mere virtue-signaling about the need for equity. Across the many sub-factions of Equity, there are a wide variety of opinions about how much should be sacrificed and by whom in the name of fairness.

Liberty - driven by rights, freedom, and free speech

In America, the language of liberty is often co-opted by many other causes/factions when it suits them. The test to determine whether someone is actually driven by liberty or using it as a smokescreen is to see how quickly they abandon those ideals when the liberty of “others” is at stake.

Progress - driven by solutions, science, and pragmatism

As political drivers go, this faction can be very productive, but it is only helpful when aimed in the right direction. When left unchecked or combined with a poorly matching faction, it can result in the stuff of science fiction nightmares.

Virtue - driven by faith, religion, and absolutism

On its own this faction can seem noble, but without guardrails it can quickly lead to oppression of those that disagree with the (perceived or actual) majority. Also, virtue is not limited to purely religious individuals or groups. Any movement or organization that is built upon a single “right way” or an unwillingness to compromise is likely part of a Virtue-first sub-faction.

Supremacy - driven by rage, indignation, and (self-)segregation

The most well known and active sub-faction in America is White Supremacy as a result of the country’s original sin, but the history of individuals driven by revenge is not limited merely to those of European descent. Each form of “me and my group are more important than others” is dangerous and can seep into the psyche of any other faction that is not vigilant.

Invisible - more of a designation than a driver but consisting of the traditional populists, the overlooked, the underserved, and the left behind

This faction is often ignored politically until they are enticed or manipulated by one of the other factions into action. Those that view themselves as invisible are often more motivated by issues of baseline survival than a clear sense of political purpose. However, the feeling of being invisible can itself be a powerful motivator that has the ability to drive cohesion across traditional political boundaries.

[*As a clarification about the distinction between “equity” and “equality” which are sometimes used interchangeably: The difference between equity and equality is that one is a process and the other is a result. Equity is the process of building up the people who have been knocked low or held down. Equality is merely the result of people ending up in the same situation. Equality can be achieved without equity by simply knocking down anyone who has already climbed up or been raised out of the pit of poverty. This is just a vulgar form of vengeance. Instead, those driven by equity strive to help others by giving them the tools or helping hand to get out of the pit - and then working to fill in the empty pit, so that no one else can fall back in.]

With this list of factions in mind, it’s important to recognize that no individual person is solely driven by just one of these core philosophies - or at the very least the people who are so singularly focused are in the extreme minority. Instead, I approach the personal identification of which factions someone agrees with as a messy political version of Punnett Square analysis that you may recall from middle school or high school biology lessons. In this political version of the Punnett Square, we are not talking about a tidy pairing of two genes that you inherited from your parents with each parent contributing either a dominant or recessive gene, but rather a six-by-six grid of political drivers that have been combined and are recombined over the course of a lifetime of experiences for each individual.

The similarity to the Punnett Square comes to an end with the understanding that whether they recognize it or not people generally have a primary driver (their politically dominant gene) and one or more secondary drivers (their politically recessive genes) as they approach decisions about their political activity. The result of this personal political genealogy leads each person to gravitate toward a particular political faction or coalition of factions that most appeal to us. As a result, the people with a sub-factional alignment that matches one of the coalitions in one of the major political parties feel most at home in the current party system. For the rest of us, we can feel politically adrift, striving to make a third party or remake one of the major parties into our own political image.

I encourage you to pause for a few minutes, review the list of factions above again, and consider what two or three factional ideals resonate the most with you. There is no right or wrong answer, and it is entirely possible that your choices today would not have been the same earlier in your life or remain the same a decade from now. It is merely an opportunity for self-awareness.

Once you have identified the two or three factions that you have the greatest affinity for, keep them in mind as you consider the modern history of factions in American politics below. Then, to determine if my hypothesis above holds water consider: (1) whether your own personal factional affinities match or cut-across the factional coalitions in the current political parties and (2) whether or not you currently feel at home in either the Republican Party or Democratic Party.

The Modern History of Factions in American Politics in Two Parts: Part 1 - The New Deal Era

As I mentioned earlier (and you can read an entire chapter about in The Next Realignment), at the dawn of the New Deal era the Progress-first faction (i.e. the original “progressive” faction) that thought that experts should make decisions about how to solve society’s issues formed an alliance with a faction of the Invisible (i.e. the “populists” of the time), which thanks to the economic horrors of the Great Depression constituted a near-majority of the population. Because of the plight of so many in the 1930s, ideals of equity, liberty, and virtue all took a back seat in a way that is not really captured in high school history textbooks or Hollywood blockbusters, and (other than calls for extreme-virtuous-equity in the form of Communism and a continuation of the White Supremacy faction that was running rampant in the 1920’s) I was surprised to learn that - despite the nominal partisan changes in presidential administrations - from an ideological perspective FDR’s New Deal Democratic policies were virtually unopposed at the federal level for nearly 50 years.

As economic concerns abated in the 1950s and over the course of the civil rights era in the 1960s, the Progress-Invisible coalition in the original New Deal Democratic Party slowly transformed into a Progress-Equity coalition, which opened the door to Nixon’s Southern Strategy. However,  by-and-large the New Deal ideology held sway over the “establishment” policy choices of both parties until the Carter Administration. At which point, runaway inflation opened the door to a new mindset about the Liberty ideology of deregulated free market capitalism that collided with a moral panic for those rooted in Virtue ignited by the decriminalization of abortion (i.e. the Rowe v. Wade decision in 1973) and the broader push for the Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution. For those looking to catchup on this period in American political history, I highly recommend watching the TV mini-series Mrs. America.

In the wake of the 1980s, the Democratic coalition remained a predominantly Progress-first party but with a spinning moral compass. Each of the Equity sub-factions such as the Equity-Invisible (i.e. “blue collar”) and Equity-Virtue (i.e. “woke”) constituencies as well as the just plain Invisible and the single-issue voters (e.g. environmentalists) had to battle for the time and attention of the dominant Progress faction. This ultimately led to a Clinton Administration that was ready to collaborate with the Gingrich Republicans for the sake of Progress in the form of capitalism to repeal the truly draconian vestiges of the original New Deal in order to form something that most Americans could live with - at least until the financial crisis of 2008 where it was discovered that some of those repeals may have gone too far neglecting the needs of the Invisible in the name of the great “bipartisan” Liberty-Progress bargain.

Based on the evolution of New Deal party system over the twentieth century, the coalition in the Democratic Party in 1995 best represented Progress and Equity factions (and the compromises between the two of them). At the same time the Republican Party was an uneasy coalition between Liberty and Virtue factions (mixing free markets with pro-life concerns, with the term “religious freedom” creeping into everything imaginable). In the mid-nineties, each party had an unspoken truce with the Supremacy faction: Democrats trying to hold onto the votes but not the voice of the its Jim Crow legacy from before the Civil Rights era and Republicans embracing Nixon’s Southern Strategy to hide any suspicious ideas behind a veil of states rights or religious doctrine. For the most part, in that decade where the Internet just started to take off, the Invisible remained largely unnoticed and ignored except as it served a political talking point (such as the bipartisan “war on drugs”).

The Modern History of Factions in American Politics in Two Parts: Part 2 - The No Deal Era

Starting in 1996 the country entered the post-New Deal era (what I will call the No Deal era), the core factions of the Republican and Democratic coalitions seemed mostly stable - in part because “liberal” came to be used as a self-defining term for “what Democrats believe” and likewise “conservative” was a stand in for “what Republicans believe” as Distefano points out repeatedly in The Next Realignment. With superficially clear lines drawn, neither party was looking to seriously compromise, and the few politicians that were willing to buck a party line vote when it mattered such as John McCain (or more recently Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney) were considered mavericks for being willing to risk a primary challenger. But behind the scenes (and sometimes openly on Fox News, MSNBC, and eventually social media) these two major coalitions were being reshaped.

To understand how, we need to recognize that just as political parties are coalitions and not monolithic, factions consist of sub-factions that start to drift in different directions when they are no longer unified by a strong political current. For example, two people that predominantly identify with the Equity faction could include someone who is pulled toward a more pragmatic conception of equality (i.e. an Equity-Invisible orientation) and another person that approaches equality from a moralistic standpoint (i.e. an Equity-Virtue orientation). In the poor vocabulary we’ve developed in modern American politics, that first person (Equity-Invisible) might be more akin to a “Blue Dog Democrat” like a front-line union organizer pressing for a livable wage, and the second person (Equity-Virtue) would likely be appalled by the term “virtue” but might take pride in the term “woke” like a college student that is more likely to post on social media than show up to the ballot box on Election Day.

In our modern concept of “liberal vs conservative” both examples are likely to be considered traditional Democratic voters, but as we move further into the No Deal era, our assumptions about their loyalty to the previous coalition make less and less sense. In the myopic scope of a social media-based news cycle, it can be hard to see the forces that this cause this drift in the daily and weekly horse race of politics; however, looking back at our past 18 years of politics, which have included 8 congressional election cycles and another that is rapidly approaching, and using the kaleidoscope of factions and sub-factions it becomes apparent that two major political currents are pulling the outdated New Deal coalitions apart.

The first political change agent of the No Deal era was launched by the Republican coalition as “REDMAP” (or Redistricting Majority Project) and has long since been expanded with the explosion of social media and the re-sale internet cookies. Republicans realized that they could use “big data” to make the Invisible faction visible or rather to make them feel seen.

Since the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, everyone has been watching the stream of dark money flowing into politics turn into a river. However, for the most part, only political insiders have been watching the tidal wave of data - personal data - flowing in the other direction. By this point, even Americans with very limited education are familiar with the concept of Gerrymandering, the practice of reshaping political districts to optimize them for the electability of a particular political party, but Republicans have taken the concept much further while no one was looking - or at least while no one could tell what they were looking at.

Since the 2016 election cycle, many Americans have recognized that “something” about how Facebook was serving up content didn’t feel right and may have been contributing to the political tensions in the country. However, it is unclear how many Americans were able to link that feeling of unease with the bigger picture beyond the headlines about the misdeeds of Facebook and other social media companies. With the power of big data at the fingertips of partisan pundits and operators, why wait for a district boundary to change as a result of a decadal census, when everyday you can reach out thru social media and traditional media to folks that feel overlooked and underserved to make them feel wanted. On its own, this sounds wonderful: giving a voice to the Invisible to “make America great again” … What could be more noble?

The problem is that once you’ve bought all the available personal data about not just one person but an entire district, an entire state, an entire nation - well, once you’ve done that - you don’t actually need to listen to them anymore. You just need to tell them what they want to hear, and when that stops working (or is politically inconvenient) you just tell them exactly what they don’t want to hear about the opposing political party. If you do that long enough and regularly enough, as Mitch McConnell learned and as Donald Trump already knew, then you can pretty much get away with whatever you want.

But what does that mean for our six factions and their many sub-factions?

From a Republican perspective, it has meant that certain parts of the Democrat’s Equity faction could be picked off (or at least kept home) on Election Day by driving a wedge between the woke virtue-signaling sub-faction (that to a certain extent can’t help themselves because they are blinded by their own version of Virtue) and the pragmatic survival-minded blue-collar sub-faction (which strives for Equity precisely because they feel that they or their community are Invisible and want to see a piece of the progress that is all around them). How do Republican partisans take advantage of this fissure in Equity-based dispositions? By picking at the raw scabs of the much smaller but much more visible Supremacy faction, which for more than a century has preyed on the alienation that comes with feeling invisible and helpless as “others” around you appear to prosper - especially those that might appear less deserving.

By stoking fears (or sitting back as a Trumpian candidate does so) about “others” such as immigrants, which do have practical economic implications for the Equity-Invisible sub-faction, the partisans in the Republican establishment know that (without a doubt) it will bring the Equity-Virtue sub-faction out of the woodwork. Then, it is just a matter of time until an “outrageous” tweet or video clip provides fodder to keep people engaged in the conversation. It is - as literally as possible - political theater, designed to steal people’s time and attention, so that a real meaningful political debate can occur backstage.

But why is the No Deal Republican Party willing to make this pact with the Supremacy faction in the first place? Why not continue to rely on the same alliance between Liberty and Virtue that made Reagan an icon of American political history? The answer lies in the fundamental principle at the heart of the Virtue faction: absolutism.

An absolute devotion to something means that the ends always justify the means. Even before Reagan was elected, the part of the country that put religious values first and foremost in politics made a bargain with the Liberty faction (and all of its Capitalist and Libertarian sub-factions) out of necessity. They saw the “culture war” as exactly that, with room for only as much compromise as was necessary to get what they wanted. From their perspective, what they wanted is what God demands: virtue in all aspects of life and society - equity, liberty, and progress be damned (literally). Who needs any of that when God will save the righteous among us?

By definition, that is an extreme view to take (an extremely extreme view), and most religious Americans - most people for that matter - have room for and even a preference for some balance. Balance in life, balance in society, and balance in politics. As a result, when Donald Trump won the presidential primary in 2016, some Republicans in the Liberty faction began to question their sense of belonging in the No Deal alliance, but many Republicans in the Virtue faction saw a once in a generation opportunity to “retake” the Supreme Court. As 2016 proceeded, the pincer maneuver by Mitch McConnell’s virtuous iron curtain to hold Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat vacant and Trump’s success in the general election sealed the fate of the country in a way that many only fully realized in 2022 with the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion.

As the Trump presidency proceeded, many Liberty-first Republicans found that they were getting just enough juice (in the form of tax cuts and de facto deregulation) for the squeeze to be worth it as the culture war messaging escalated and the court was packed with “conservative” justices over the objection of “liberal” losers. Those that were Virtue-first and Liberty-second-or-not-at-all Republicans were happy to hold their noses and endure whatever Supremacy antics Trump threw their way as long as pro-life Justices filled the Supreme Court. The fruits of an effort 50 years in the making were coming to bear, and the pursuit of Virtue no longer required the compromises of Liberty. Then the 2020 election cycle and the subsequent 2021 insurrection made any further pretending for true Liberty-first Republicans completely untenable. Many Liberty faction adherents are now adrift - some breaking in party affiliation entirely and others floating more passively, which begs the question: what’s next?

It’s Time to Decide

Since Obama’s re-election in 2012, these two major No Deal parties of ours have struggled to find a debate that fits the old structure of the decaying “liberal vs conservative” (i.e. Progress-Equity vs Liberty-Virtue) New Deal party system. They have each been unable to inspire anyone enough to drive major improvements to the way that government, business, and society operate. As a result, the only major policy changes have arguably come as a result of judicial decisions (such as the validation of gay marriage or the recent repeal of reproductive healthcare rights). The remainder of the political action has happened under the strain of executive orders from the party that temporarily holds the presidency (with the force of implementation lasting only as long as the administration), the repeal of regulations in the gray areas of existing legislation (at least up until a court challenge invalidates them), or under the guise of pandemic relief. It is possible that some genuine legislative progress may have finally started to happen in August of 2022 with the Democratic Party squeaking in a straight party-line vote on the Inflation Reduction Act with meaningful climate and energy provisions being passed, but considering that it took essentially an entire legislative session to accomplish a compromise within a single party it’s hard to see how this will change the No Deal dynamics we’ve seen over the past decade.

The result of the two political currents (personalized political messaging delivered by big data and a ruthless 50-year absolute fixation on revoking reproductive healthcare rights) of our No Deal era has been at least a decade of stagnation and corruption, some of which has come to light and some of which is either unknown or hiding six levels down in a subreddit comment that nobody is going to take seriously. To figure out what comes next to break us free from this political rot, we (as a country) need to answer two key questions.

1. What is the next great debate that will force a major realignment of the major political parties?

2. What event or series of events will prompt us to take that debate seriously?

To start with the second question first: It is up to all of us to collectively decide that “enough is enough” about something that we can generally agree is a problem. Only then can we come together to collectively decide how we want to solve that problem. If we don’t collectively decide on a problem that is worth solving, there’s a good chance that the course of events will eventually decide this for us.

There have been two previous times in American political history when we collectively decided not to decide which problem was worth solving. The first was during the lead up to the Civil War when we collectively decided to ignore the problem of slavery, and the second was during the lead up to the Great Depression when prohibition seemed like a more important debate to focus on than economic policy and regulation. It can be argued that we can only recognize moments like these after the fact, but I suspect that most Americans — with the possible exception of the most extreme fringes of certain sub-factions within the Supremacy faction (e.g. the violent parts of the White Supremacist groups that bought into the insurrection or its oxymoronic Equity-Supremacist counterpart that has advocated not just for defunding the police but instead abolishing police departments) — don’t want to deal with the uncontrolled descent into the chaos that would inevitably accompany a forced realignment.

For over a decade, many sub-factions and even more niche special interest groups have been arguing for their specific concerns to take center stage as the next great debate, and there are many such topics to choose from: racism, climate change, capitalism vs socialism, gun access vs control, immigration, the rise of China, pro- vs anti- reproductive healthcare rights. Many of these topics have some decent potential to be the triggering event of the next great debate. As someone who has spent my entire adult life learning about and working to address climate change, I have been among those desperately hoping that “my” concern will be the next great debate and get the deserved attention that is required to solve it.

Each of these topics (and many more) have the ability to strike a visceral cord with people that feel strongly about that particular issue, but they fall short in one crucial aspect — it is too easy for sub-factions within the larger 6 factions to fall on different sides of the argument. Even when an entire faction can cleanly agree that a topic is “the” next issue to tackle, it has difficultly gaining traction and common ground with other factions in a way that fits within the faltering New Deal era “Liberal vs Conservative” dichotomy.

As crazy as it may sound, I’ve come to the conclusion that even with something as pervasive as racism, as existential as climate change, or as personal as reproductive healthcare, these “major” issues are too narrow to serve as the foundation of the next great debate in American politics. They are simply not cohesive enough to cause multiple factions to rally together and overcome the momentum of the past 80 years of the New Deal (and now the No Deal) party system.

To break thru with enough momentum to proactively and deliberately induce an intentional realignment, we need to identify a question that is broad enough to build a consensus around both at the ballot box and in legislative chambers, but that same question also cannot have a single obvious right-vs-wrong answer once all of the facts of the matter are known. Instead, it must be something complex enough to require careful consideration, reasonable debate, and eventually some level of compromise to achieve.

The next great debate needs to be something that will unify at least one solid party around the obvious need for a solution (but potentially has enough gray areas to cause a serious debate about the optimal solution) with a second opposition party forming out of the remaining factions either immediately out of necessity or over time as the first party goes just a bit too far for comfort. The next great debate needs to be founded on a single question that is both personal and global, that is both immediately apparent and has lasting implications, that can provide an overarching frame of reference for all of the other major issues of our time (like immigration, gun access vs control, or the rise of China).

The Forward Party’s Initial Approach

After writing an initial draft of this article (and then editing and re-writing it several times), I decided to take a closer look at the Forward Party beyond the initial bluster of Andrew Yang’s failed mayoral bid in New York City. Starting in April 2022, I dove into the details on their website (forwardparty.com) to find out what substance was there. What I found was a very narrow set of technocratic solutions without a coherent unifying story. There was mix of potential solutions (such as ranked choice voting, election reform, and universal basic income) to a question that went unasked. Upon further investigation, I was able to find both a subreddit (r/ForwardPartyUSA), which proved to be active but underwhelming in substantive content, and a Forward Party Discord server that fostered some level of pro-active coordination that is atypical on major social media platforms.

Over the past several months, I dug further into the Discord server to get a better sense of the community of folks that were interested and actively participating - both on the platform and in real life. I asked probing questions in the “platform chat” thread to test the understanding and intentions of the members, including many who identified themselves as “state leads” or “volunteers” in different locations. Over the course of several weeks of monitoring and actively participating in the conversation about the Forward Party’s platform, a few things became clear:

First, the Forward Party has a broad geographic appeal with regular active participants in most of the 50 states in the country. As part of joining the server, the instructions provided encourage new participants to identify the state that they are joining from. Once identified, additional conversations with others in the same state are unlocked to allow for local coordination. However, there are some threads that are open to everyone (such as the platform chat) that allow people from across the country to compare and challenge each others’ ideas.

Second, the Forward Party is drawing in roughly equal number from folks disillusioned with the gridlock within the Democratic Party and folks who might traditionally be considered “conservative” by political pundits but who also feel uncomfortable with the current Virtue-Supremacy coalition within the Republican Party. This is not to say that no one is Virtue-leaning, which was made abundantly clear in the platform chat after the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Many Liberty/Progress-first and Virtue-second proponents argued strongly to stay away from the topic all together for fear of alienating others who might otherwise agree, feeling that the Forward Party should take no stance on any issues (especially not reproductive healthcare rights) outside of those narrow technocratic solutions related to election reform. Thus, the folks that have Virtue as one of their guiding principles (and have also self-selected to participate in the Forward Party) appear to be willing and even eager to put aside any questions that they perceive as divisive in favor of a purely Progress-based agenda, focused on election reform for fear of being labelled as the “Democratic-Lite” party.   

Third, the Forward Party takes its commitment to Grace and Tolerance seriously. While there were several instances that have become familiar to anyone who has read the comment sections of common social media platforms, the participants appeared to be mostly self-correcting (either thru self-awareness or based on the reminders of other participants), leading to a different tone than other types of online encounters. While not required, participants are encouraged to identify their real names and the city and state they live in. When someone veers away from discussing ideas to making things personal, gentle reminders are provided by others to approach the conversation differently.

On more than one occasion the attempts to re-enforce a commitment to Grace and Tolerance has been done a bit heavy-handedly, with a person designated as a “state lead” suggesting that the platform discussion should be limited to discussing election reform. Each time such suggestions have generally been ignored or reproached as a hypocritical attempt to limit the democratic process. Then, the conversation moves on quickly. Yet this highlights a central tension that has plagued the initial iteration of the Forward Party: should the party focus exclusively on election reform to avoid alienating people that can agree on the need to improve the electoral process but nothing else — or — should it define a broader set of priorities to build a coalition that will be able to actually enact election reform?

The Forward Party’s New Approach

On Wednesday, July 27th of 2022, the Forward Party took a step toward resolving that tension. On a joint call with leaders of the Renew America Movement (RAM) and the Serve America Movement (SAM), Andrew Yang the founder of the Forward Party announced a merger of the three organizations and the launch of FWDtogether.org. Both RAM and SAM were formed in the wake of the 2016 election cycle by politicians and partisan activists that were fed up with the way the Democratic and Republican parties were operating (or failing to operate). Each organization bringing to bear a staff with experience organizing political campaigns under the banner of the Forward Party.

This new joint leadership coalition made it clear that the Forward Party needed to go beyond mere election reform, calling on its members to develop an officially recognized political party in all 50 states by 2024. It also announced plans for an upcoming road-tour in several major cities and a national convention in 2023. Even more importantly, this new coalition has pared down the former laundry list of technocratic solutions on the Forward Party website to three core principles: Thriving Communities (i.e. Equity), Free People (i.e. Liberty), and Vibrant Democracy (i.e. Progress).

In its attempt to pull away from the current duopoly, the new Forward Party coalition appears to have unearthed (but not yet named) the splinter in everyone’s mind, a question that in the age of the Internet is so simple and pervasive that it has been overlooked by everyone since 1995:

How do we as a society respect everyone’s time and attention?

A lack of respect for everyone’s time and attention is at the heart of labor rights campaigns, concerns about social media company business models, and the bureaucratic nightmares of red-tape that people complain about. When you consider who is included as part of “everyone” this simple question expands to encompass racism (does everyone include just people that look like me) and immigration (does everyone include just citizens or people from other countries). When you recognize that “everyone” really means everyone for all time, the question becomes about balancing and prioritizing competing demands for respect to address climate change (how do we prioritize respect for the time and attention of current generations compared to that of future generations). When you realize that the sum total of conscious life is attention applied to a series of experiences over time, the question becomes about balancing the quality of those experiences within a family to address reproductive healthcare rights (how do we balance respect for the quality of life of the family members that were already born with the future potential quality of life of the unborn) or across an entire society to tackle concerns of big tech companies run amok (are we okay with corporations selling our time and attention to make a profit while providing services that are nominally free of cost).

By recognizing that the current disrespect for everyone’s time and attention is at the heart of the political malpractice in the No Deal era, the Forward Party can clearly articulate how pursuing thriving communities, free people, and vibrant democracy are how we as a society can show respect for everyone’s time and attention — the important part is that the Forward Party leadership needs to state the question out loud.

Respect for everyone’s time and attention needs to be the Forward Party’s why. Equity, Liberty, and Progress in the form of thriving communities, free people, and vibrant democracy need to be the Forward Party’s what. Only then will the how become not just obvious but inevitable.

The Red Pill, the Blue Pill, or the New Pill

As it stands today, the No Deal Republican Party is now fundamentally a Virtue-Supremacy alliance that is actively courting the Invisible faction and negligently pushing the Liberty faction out of the coalition (while holding onto its rhetoric as a fig leaf to justify the Supremacy side of its agenda). Meanwhile, the No Deal Democratic Party has been rendered dangerously close to ineffective as the Equity-Virtue (i.e. “woke”) sub-faction is pushing for policies that nominally support the Invisible faction but is doing so in ways that are often impractical and fly in the face of the less vocal but still dominant Progress-Equity alliance that has been the core of the party since the 1960s.

With both of the current major parties in their own state of flux, I would propose that there’s an opportunity for a new Equity-Liberty-Progress coalition to be built around respecting the time and attention of the American people, the citizens of the world more broadly, and the future generations that will have to deal with what we leave behind. Based on the current dynamics, it is clear that the current Republican Party is not in a position to lead this charge (unless there is a truly stunning resurgence of Liberty energy that has been all but drained over the past decade). However, it is not entirely clear if the current Democratic Party is ready to champion this shift either, because doing so would be risky and certainly alienate or take for granted the staunchest Equity-Virtue supporters. If the Democratic Party has the stomach for this, it may well remain a household name for generations to come as the champion of respect for everyone’s time and attention. If not, it seems plausible (however hard to imagine today) that the Forward Party could emerge as a strong ELP coalition over the course of the next decade.

For an Equity-Liberty-Progress coalition to emerge (whether under the brand name of the Democratic Party or the Forward Party), the more pragmatic sub-factions of the Equity and Liberty factions would need to overcome a half century of propaganda and recognize a fundamental truth that equity and liberty are two sides of the same coin, two counterweights that are needed to keep a free and prosperous country in balance. You cannot have liberty without equity, and you cannot have equity without liberty - at least not for any significant amount of time.

There’s a word for liberty without equity: it’s called greed. There’s also a word for equity without liberty: it’s called death. Neither greed nor death seem like laudable goals to build a political party on - let alone run a country.

As much as the Equity and Liberty factions seem at odds with one another in the old New Deal paradigm based on the question: “How much should government intervene in monetary policy and the economy?” They quickly appear natural allies when we turn our focus on the question: “How do we as a society respect everyone’s time and attention?” Liberty is a demand for respecting an individual’s time and attention. Equity is a demand that we should respect each individual’s time and attention without showing an unjust preference. Whenever there’s a chance that you might be on the unjust side of that preference, it is easy to see that Liberty and Equity belong together.

The other thing that needs to happen is that the Progress faction (personified unironically within the Forward Party by Andrew Yang’s staunchest supporters the “Yang Gang”) needs to recognize that progress is a measurement and not a target to aim for. Before you can measure the how and what of progress, the Progress-minded individuals in the coalition need to understand the why that will unify the other members of its coalition. Why are people demanding change in the first place? The answer to that lies in the blindspot of the Progress faction: the assumption that experts know better than the Invisible people they are trying to help. As a result, the Progress faction has tended to look down on the Invisible, and in turn the Invisible have looked for other outlets for their frustration as they - accurately - feel patronized.

The Forward Party is not immune to this potential self-induced division. I’ve witnessed it many times in the Discord discussions about the party’s platform: experts (or folks that perceive themselves as experts) putting forward solutions without context and drawing arbitrary lines around what is worthy of including in the party platform or not and as a result alienating the very people that they claim to be trying help (even as those people directly tell them that they disagree) — meanwhile people that feel invisible ask to stay focused on a narrow scope of election reform until “leadership” declares other topics to be within the party platform (perhaps feeling as though they themselves are not worthy of making this decision for themselves).

Resetting the Matrix

Again, in the question of “How do we as a society respect everyone’s time and attention?” I see an opportunity to bring together the Equity and Liberty factions to provide a more accurate target for the Progress faction by encouraging the experts to actually listen to the needs and desires of the Invisible members of our society since they are the first to feel burden of a system where equity and liberty are in short supply. In the wild expanse of the deregulated free market capitalist system that has grown rapidly since the great bargain of 1995, expecting experts to lower themselves to serve the overlooked and left behind can seem very outlandish, especially when “progress” has been measured in stock prices and profit margins for as long as almost anyone alive can remember. However, I do see a glimmer of hope in a certain type of expertise buried in (of all places) the tech industry - user experience design (or UX design).

UX design is a methodology that prescribes listening to and observing the needs of a user and then designing a product or service to optimize the user’s experience - in other words the product or service is designed to respect the time and attention of the person using the product or service. Done properly, the user won’t even notice the experience has been “designed” at all. They will simply be able to accomplish the task or receive the benefit that they want. The tech industry has shown that it can be applied to websites, apps, hardware, and even manufacturing physical objects. Given even a modicum of effort and the right guidance, UX design can also be applied to legislation, regulation, and bureaucratic policies - as long as the experts are actually willing to listen to the people!

Finally, an ELP coalition can take a lesson from the breakdown in the current Democratic Party: the rift caused by the Equity-Virtue sub-faction. Members of the ELP coalition need to realize that each of us have our own inner beliefs and a tendency to assume that our inner beliefs are “correct” and that the beliefs of others are “incorrect” - this is fundamentally the definition of a virtue. (This assumption is rooted in confirmation bias, a term that all good ELP supporters should be aware of.) Due to its very nature, confirmation bias is easier to spot in others than in ourselves, especially when we notice others projecting their virtues outward into the world under the guise of free speech. As a result of the disrespect for everyone’s time and attention that are baked into the algorithms of the major social media platforms, the Equity-Virtue sub-faction has been stuck in echo-chambers that have allowed them to filter-out and ignore any hypocrisy in their thinking that might otherwise be uncovered in a different setting.

In short, by projecting one’s inner virtues outward into society without listening to the feedback society offers, individuals and groups are susceptible to ideological stagnation (i.e. a lack of progress), especially when they are more interested in being proven right than building coalitions. Instead, the future leaders of an ELP coalition must call upon its potential members to put aside self-righteousness in favor of self-reflection. Put another way:

If you listen to others, keep your virtues in your heart, let liberty be your left arm and make equity your right arm, then you will find progress easy to obtain. However, if you ignore others and try to arm yourself with virtue or progress, you will soon lose liberty, equity, or both.

The Way Forward is Fraught with Many Dangers

With a strong influence of Liberty faction former-Republicans joining the ranks of Andrew Yang (a Progress-oriented former-Democratic presidential candidate), it is clear that the Forward Party is not intending to retreat into a Progress-only approach. At a minimum, the new coalition inside the Forward Party could develop into a Liberty-Progress party (a la Clinton-Gingrich of the 1990’s). For many former-Republicans scrambling to find a new political home, this may feel like the best way forward (excuse the pun). However, if instead the Forward Party decides to name and prioritize the debate over respecting everyone’s time and attention in government, business, and society at large (embracing a broader Equity-Liberty-Progress approach as its core principles of thriving communities, free people, and vibrant democracy appear to point towards), it will have a much greater chance to become the next major political force to emerge in America.

To do so quickly (in political terms), the nascent party will need to overcome the traditional barriers that have held back other more niche, single-faction and single-issue “parties” over the past 80 years. This means it will need to proactively avoid a “third party” mindset and foster a “new party” mindset, since being a “third” party will pigeon-hole the Forward Together coalition into having two other parties ahead of it in the minds of the American voters. Focusing on its third-party-ness will have a lot of appeal for people that don’t understand the complex math that goes into forming a congressional majority and the electoral college process of choosing a president. It will also be a major driver for folks that are going to latch onto the party and its attempt at election reform as a means to having a multi-party utopia. This will be especially tempting for those that wish to focus on single-issue or single-faction ideals. However, a decade from now, the success of the Forward Party will not be measured in the number of other parties in America’s sixth party system, but rather in its ability to serve the American people well.

The “leadership” of the Forward Party (including not only Yang but also the individuals acting as thought-leaders or state and community organizers) will need to balance the idealistic desire to have more parties with the practical desire to have better outcomes. Acknowledging this publicly will also help to combat the “spoiler effect” narrative. If anything, the Forward Party should aim to implement an Equity-Liberty-Progress agenda so successfully that it will relegate the existing Virtue-Supremacy Republican Party to irrelevance at a federal level and induce the current Progress-Equity Democratic Party to start courting the Liberty faction vote in a bid to remain competitive.

Finally, and potentially most painfully to Andrew Yang personally, the Forward Party needs to get the timing just right. As the leaders on the Zoom call announcing the Forward Together coalition acknowledged, despite the excitement in the current moment, it is too late in the 2022 congressional election cycle for the Forward Party to start getting new candidates on the ballot. With this same understanding, the Forward Party leadership should consider making a similar and very public statement that it will NOT nominate a candidate for a presidential election until the 2028 election cycle.

In a recent episode of the Forward Party podcast (prior to the merger announcement), Andrew Yang indicated support for an open-primary, allowing essentially anyone to campaign as a presidential candidate with the backing of the party. It is possible that this truly novel approach to nominating a candidate will be transformative and unifying. However, it has an equal chance of being polarizing and ineffective without already-established party infrastructure in place across all 50 states.

Instead, publicly declaring that the Forward Party will NOT nominate a presidential candidate until 2028 will be equally bold but have the dual effect of putting to rest the “spoiler effect” argument by Democratic and Republican political machines and also allow the party membership room to make meaningful in-roads in state legislative races (which hold the keys to making substantive changes on election reform) and in state-wide races (which are a key factor in being officially designated as a political party in most states). Thus, setting the stage for an epic rise to prominence in the latter half of this decade.

By considering all of the advice above, the Forward Party will be able to answer the question “How do we as a society respect everyone’s time and attention?” with its core principles: Thriving Communities, Free People, and Vibrant Democracy - using them to guide the country forward over the next decade and if successful the next century.