A New Kind of Party: Disrupting the Political Spectrum

      

                         

Introducing the New Forward Party

With the July announcement of the merger between Forward Party, SAM and RAM, the new Forward has experienced a substantial increase in both interest and media attention. Naturally, not all of it has been positive. In particular, one oft-repeated critique is that Forward does not have a sufficiently clear and detailed policy platform to be taken seriously. While this reaction is understandable, and even expected, I firmly believe that Forward’s values-based, platform-less posture is the answer to the question we didn’t even know we were asking. It isn’t a third party effort in the mold of the major two parties. It’s a new kind of party that is poised to disrupt today’s toxic political landscape. Disruption will come by way of a truth that few have yet to fully appreciate. Namely, that the existing left-right spectrum is a poor representation of the country’s diverse political views and an obsolete way to define and consequently represent the people. A more important distinction is between solution-seeking and obstruction-seeking. On that spectrum, Forward’s platform is crystal clear. Forward is the party of Getting Sh*t Done.

A Label Without a Meaning

In a country of over 300 million, we are bound to have a vast array of moral, practical and strategic opinions on how our mutual nation should be governed. Yet, as we sit here in 2022, our two major political parties would have the country cleaved into two buckets: conservative and liberal. As such, we are all accustomed to measuring ourselves and others on an axis with these two poles. How far left (or liberal) am I? How far right (or conservative) am I? Do I lean left overall but sit right on a particular issue? Etc. 

And each of these buckets is nominally headed by one major political party. The Republicans champion the conservative cause. Democrats lead the liberals. So it has been for all our collective living memories. 

But how meaningful and fixed are those poles, in truth? What does it mean to be “conservative”? Surely the GOP, which was a brand new party in the mid-1800s when it first placed a President, one Abraham Lincoln, in the White House, could not then be considered “more conservative” than the Democratic Party which dated back to the nation’s founding. The regionally north, anti-slavery Republican Party and the regionally south, pro-slavery Democratic Party of the Civil War Era bear little resemblance to the 21st Century version of these parties. 

And it’s not just a matter of cultural shifts over long time periods. Even today, the so-called “left” and “right” include people within them that harbor wide ranging and often logically inconsistent views. How close are the political takes of Donald Trump vs the previous Republican Presidential nominees in Mitt Romney and John McCain? How close are the views of Democrat congressional member Joe Manchin to those of colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

In reality, the “left” and “right” at any given time are simply momentary snapshots of semi-random groupings of people and views that are transitory and not especially meaningful in the abstract. The left of today may not be the left of tomorrow and the right of New York may not be the right of Texas and so on. What’s more, we have little ability to predict how these labels will change over time because there are no underlying values that bind our concepts of left and right together. The left might say they are pro-choice, but when it comes to taking vaccines they quickly justify why, in that case, choice is no longer a defining value. The right might say they are pro-capitalism, but when a private social media company wants to ban their leader they come running to government to overrule the decisions of the free market. 

All this to say, the concept of placing a person or a party on the left-right spectrum is well-established but largely meaningless in any fundamental way. It’s simply a short-hand method of forming tribes. To ask if someone is left or right is not really to seek any insight into their character, it is just another way of asking if that someone is on your team. You can see this reality at work, as, for example, Donald Trump brands anyone who opposes him as a Republican-in-name-only (RINO). It doesn’t matter how much or little the two might agree on questions of political policy. What matters today is that Trump is the current leader of the Republicans and if you don’t fall in line with his wishes, you are off the team.

A Case of Bad Incentives

It isn’t hard to see why this is the case. All the major relevant incentives support this phenomenon. The vast majority of congressional districts are firmly conservative or liberal, meaning the eventual winner is determined by the primary rather than the general election. And politicians have discovered that the path of least resistance to winning a primary is maximum belligerence towards the opposing team. So that’s what we get. 

Similarly, mainstream media works under an advertisement-based business model, meaning success is directly correlated to eyeballs on screen. And it turns out the easiest way to get eyeballs on screen is to pick a side and then demonstrate maximum belligerence toward the other side. Social media is even worse, as it is not bound by even the most remote sense of journalistic ethics that might rein in the excesses of cable news.

And this is the fundamental problem with our political dynamic today. Everyone acting according to their own reasonable incentives leads inexorably to ever-increasing belligerence, polarization and conflict. Until, ultimately, that conflict becomes violent on a large scale. That is the crisis which looms in our future if we don’t reform the incentives that have us locked in this doom spiral.

A New Hope

Enter the Forward Party. A group dedicated to the reform of these bad incentives. A collection of folks who have tried to pinpoint the structural deficiencies which drive us down the path of civil conflict and address them directly. Ranked Choice Voting. Non-partisan Primaries. I covered why these issues are so critical to our future in my previous blog.

But where does Forward stand on abortion? On guns? On universal healthcare? On UBI, Andrew Yang’s signature policy from his Presidential run in 2020?

There is no party position. And that has drawn a deluge of criticism. But I humbly submit that this criticism misses the point entirely.

A party does not need a uniform set of left-right spectrum policies. 

A Better Spectrum

The left-right spectrum is, as we’ve discussed, meaningless as a measure of character or logic. It may have been useful in a pre-internet age when it wasn’t feasible to research politicians in depth. In that era, a uniform platform could give voters some color as to how candidates might vote on key issues. Insight not otherwise available at the time. But today, a two minute Google search can answer that question about any politician under consideration. 

If you are concerned about an issue, and you can vote in a given election, you can quickly ascertain how any candidate in that election, Forward or otherwise, feels about it. And Forward candidates will, of course, have policy preferences. They just might not be the same from candidate to candidate.

Why take this approach? It’s because Forward believes it has latched onto a spectrum that is more meaningful in today’s environment. Rather than left-right, Forward recasts the entire political edifice as a solutions vs obstruction spectrum. And, on this spectrum, Forward is distinct from the other two major parties. Both Republicans and Democrats sit firmly in the obstruction camp, whereas Forward looks to champion solutions. 

Solutions-Oriented

Okay, but what does that mean? It means that the focus is outcomes, not methods. By being method agnostic, Forward-aligned candidates can experiment, negotiate, collaborate and compromise on the road to finding the best solutions. It sounds simple, but it’s hard to overstate how radical a departure this represents from current American politics. 

Current politics is all about methods. When people demand Forward release a platform, they want an answer to the question “How does Forward feel about minimum wage?” as opposed to the better question, “What are Forward’s ideas to address working class poverty?” Outcomes are what matter, but methods are the nature of the “party platform.”

Perhaps, you’ll argue, that’s because both sides already agree on the outcomes and the only argument is one of methods. To this, I have two responses.

First, when you have found both sides can agree to anything, even basic facts? Unless it involves stopping a new party from entering the fray, you can hardly get Republicans and Democrats to agree what day of the week it is. To suggest that the outcomes are so universal that they need not even be addressed is an unsupportable stretch. 

Secondly, if the focus were on solutions today, there would be a lot more compromise. It is plain that, whatever your ideal method is to address a crucial issue, certainly NOT ADDRESSING IT ALL cannot be a better solution. The choice to obstruct every single initiative of the other team is a huge blinking alert, warning you that parties aren’t seeking solutions. 

I’d like to offer an alternative explanation. Perhaps the reason the current parties focus on methods is because neither really want solutions. Given how tightly our system is captured by heavily partisan primaries, maybe our “leaders” have come to realize that the easiest way to win a primary is NOT to solve a problem. It’s to rant and rave about a problem to turn out votes and donations. Solve the problem, you don’t have the thing to rant and rave about. And so raving continues and problems remain unsolved. Could it be that this behavior is a feature, not a bug, of the current electoral framework?

Take Roe v Wade. After it was overturned, Democrats far and wide wailed and gnashed their teeth about the injustice and insisted you turn out to vote in November to fix the problem once and for all. Yet Democrats could, if they wanted, fix the problem today. They control both houses of congress and the White House. The only thing standing in their way is the filibuster, which they could also remove at their leisure. 

So why don’t they? 

For this all important, seminal issue at the heart of the liberal morality, they allow respect for a procedural norm to hold them back? They have no such qualms when jamming things through reconciliation, or in the President issuing Executive Orders to achieve something that couldn’t be achieved the correct procedural way in congress. Is the filibuster really that sacred? Especially given that Republicans could also toss it next time they take power? 

Perhaps the truth is that Democrats would rather you be angry and scared about a new slate of anti-abortion laws than to actually end the problem once and for all. Because anger and fear get you to the election booth. Solutions, no so much. Especially during primary season, where only the most activated voters participate at all.

A Way Forward

This, in a nutshell, describes the failings of contemporary politics. Because the primary system heavily favors obstructionism, we have leaders on both sides of the left-right spectrum but we have near universal allegiance to the obstructionist mantra. 

That is why the Forward Party need not stake out a universal position in left-right territory. Candidates will have to, but the Party won’t.

It need not. Voters can easily learn the politics of any given candidate, even without a universal Forward platform. 

But more importantly, it should not. To have such a universal platform would be self-defeating. The true use of that spectrum today is to identify and parse teams, but Forward doesn’t want to be on either team. It seeks to change the game entirely, from 2-player co-op to multi-player. 

To do that, it should not attempt to fit itself into the worn out left-right spectrum. That is a trap to enable people to try and jam Forwardists into a peg on a landscape with the existing teams, a landscape Forward is working instead to re-shape. 

Far better to allow diverse voices that fit under the same value umbrella to come together and collaborate. A true, honest competition of ideas at the Party level. If you believe diversity of viewpoints leads to better outcomes, why do you abandon that view with regards to your political party of choice?

Sadly, we’ve mostly been trained to expect uniform party platforms. That is the posture of obstructionism, which dominates today’s discourse. Forward, to succeed, must convince voters that the more important spectrum is solutions-obstruction. And that its policy of non-ideological, solutions-oriented, collaborative governance across the old left-right spectrum is a much more critical platform than any left-right policy position.  

If you would prefer that government Get Sh*t Done, I encourage you to hear them out.

Opinions my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Forward Party. 

 

 

The Need to Move Forward: Election Reform

A Time For Renewal

What does it mean to be American? More importantly, what do we want it to mean?

I suspect that, in a country of 330 million people, you’d have millions of different answers. We are all unique. We have unique views, unique preferences and unique weightings of those preferences. And yet, in my experience, there’s more common ground between us than one might think.

Don’t we all want to live in safety, free from the constant danger of physical attack?

Don’t we all want a society anchored in justice, where the same rules apply to all citizens regardless of wealth, race, religion, creed or politics?

Don’t we all want the actionable opportunity to advance based on our own merit?

Don’t we all seek prosperity for ourselves and our families?

Don’t we all feel some degree of empathy for people less fortunate than we are?

And in the end, don’t we all want the freedom to choose our own courses through life, knowing that we must assume responsibility for the outcomes of those choices?

If you agree with me that, by and large, this is the type of nation we want, then I think we have space for a conversation. Whether you are liberal or conservative or something altogether different, we can discuss an updated approach to the American Dream. A renewed vision for our nation. We share a whole lot of common ground, and I think we’ll find that our expectations and needs are not all that different from one another. 

It’s time to talk about updating the American system for the 21st century and beyond. We’re all in this together. 

A House Divided

That said, division is all around us. Hope and optimism are hard to come by. 

A recent poll found 72% of respondents felt the country was moving in the wrong direction. 61% say their family income is falling behind the cost of living. A stunning 76% of respondents believe that democracy in this country is in jeopardy. And, perhaps most tellingly, 70% of people believe the country has become too polarized to solve major issues.

How can this be? If we really want the mostly the same things, how can we be so divided? How can we be so powerless in the face of a changing future?

The answer is - we aren’t as divided as we think, but many of the vested interests we rely on are incentivized to make us think that we are.

The Power of Incentives

People respond to incentives. It’s as simple as that. And while we may want certain outcomes, something along the lines of the national identity I described above, there is no magic wand that can make it so. Regardless of what we want in the abstract, what we will do, for the most part, is follow where our short-term incentives lead. And right now, our incentives do not lead to our desired outcomes. 

For example, I proposed that we want a land of opportunity. I would be surprised if you could find any number of Americans who would disagree with that statement. And yet, when it comes to a third party candidate wanting to run for a political office, both major parties will find a rare bipartisan spirit in making that as hard as possible. Sure, they want a land of opportunity, but when the specific opportunity in question is one that threatens the paradigm by which they personally thrive, you’ll find altruistic values quickly shunted into the back seat. We want a land of opportunity, but less so when it means giving an opportunity to someone else who might threaten our own interests.

We have values, we have a vision for our country, but those values and that vision will amount to nothing if the incentives are not arranged to support them. 

The Misalignment

So here is the problem. To realize our collective vision for the country, we need to arrange the facets of our lives such that the incentives lead us toward that vision. And that arrangement is largely dictated through our democratic government, either by direct legislation or by the restraint not to legislate and let civil society incentives reign.

And that all makes sense! It should all work beautifully. Political leaders need to win popular elections, and so they are incentivized to arrange things, to set the table so to speak, so that the daily incentives of our personal lives align with the achievement of our vision. If they fail in this job, they will become unpopular and be replaced. If they succeed, they will grow in popularity and remain in office. Over time, the governmental structure under which we live will be shaped to lead us toward our desired end state.

The problem is that the feedback loop between election victory and delivering positive political outcomes is broken.

This is the central flaw in our current system. It is responsible for our increasing polarization and resultant dysfunction. And it derives from our arbitrary and poorly conceived party primary system. 

Primary Problems

In today’s America, upwards of 80% of districts are either solid Republican or solid Democrat. Which is to say, the result of the general election is largely known prior to the election occurring. If you live in a solid red area, for example, you can bet that the winner of the general election will be whoever wins the Republican nomination through the Republican primary.

Yet, party primaries do not have the same dynamics as general elections. And because of the unique ways in which we choose to hold primaries, the incentives are all wrong for picking leaders that will need to serve the majority of their constituent population to remain in office.  

First of all, primaries are mostly confined to members of the party, meaning only those who have registered Republican can vote in Republican primaries and only those who have registered Democrat can vote in Democratic primaries. That is not universally true in all states, but it is mostly true today.

Off the bat, that cuts out 40ish % of voters who are not registered for a either party. That 40% tends to be independent minded and/or more centrist. By virtue of choosing candidates through partisan primaries, we’ve already effectively excluded the moderates from having a voice in selecting the candidates. One simple, arbitrary and frankly un-democratic decision on how primaries will operate has already slanted us heavily towards increasing polarization. 

Additionally, think about how primaries are decided. You typically have several candidates. With our current system, it is likely that none of those candidates win a majority of primary votes. Votes are split five, six, seven ways etc. So the winner might have only, let’s say, 20% of the primary total.

What does that mean? It means primaries are particularly beholden to special interest groups and extreme partisan wings. The former because special interest groups can deliver blocks of votes for candidates who reward their particular cause, and extreme wings because by definition extreme candidates will be more rare than moderate candidates. Since moderate voters are more likely to vote for moderate candidates and there are likely to be a greater number of moderate candidates, it is fair to expect that the moderate candidates will split votes of like-minded voters more extensively and leave extreme candidates with bigger pluralities.

There is no reason primaries have to be run this way. There are other, equally or more democratic ways to choose candidates. But because this is our predominant system for nominations, we are naturally inclined to nominate extremist candidates or candidates that represent special interest groups. 

An Example

Imagine the following. We live in a heavily blue district where the Democratic nominee for our house seat is assured to be the winner of the general election. Therefor the party primary will, for all intents and purposes, decide our next congress rep.

Among registered Democrats, who are the only eligible voters in our primary, our district is 75% moderate and 25% extreme.

Now imagine we have five candidates. One is an extreme socialist who wants to abolish private property and nationalize all major industries. The other four are moderate democrats who support an enhanced social safety net and more federal benefits for workers. The four moderates have various views on how those things are achieved. 

How would this hypothetical primary turn out? We should expect that the four moderate candidates divide the moderate 75% of voters, each getting around 19% of the vote. And the extreme candidate would capture the 25% of extreme voters. Despite only 25% of primary voters being considered extreme, the extreme candidate is expected to win the primary. 

From there, the candidate walks through the general election, as our district is heavily blue and would vote for virtually any Democrat over any Republican. 

This simple example illustrates why our current primary system is set up to reward extreme candidates and punish moderates. And why, in most cases, incumbent politicians are more afraid of being attacked from the more extreme end during a primary than they are of losing the general election.

Unpleasant Implications

So what does it all mean?

It means that the whole contraption is broken, twisted beyond recognition and the original intent of the Founders. Though we live in a democracy where politicians should, theoretically, need to serve broad swathes of their constituents, the primary system has in fact bypassed that necessity. Instead, politicians must serve the powerful special interests and extreme wings of their parties, who have outsized power in party primaries.

It’s hard to overstate how insidious the implications of this are. Like anyone else, politicians will strive to have success in their careers. That means winning elections and fundraising to win future elections. They will, consequently, exhibit the behavior that gives them the best chance at winning elections and fundraising.

But, as we’ve seen above, the success optimizing behavior does not entail pleasing the majority of independent/centrist voters. It doesn’t even entail pleasing registered partisans. Because of how our primaries work, success optimization comes from pleasing special interests and extremists. 

Here is a roadmap to primary success:

1. Advocate for a particular powerful special interest group, even at the expense of all other causes and interests
2. Position yourself as the most extreme candidate and then prove it by relentlessly attacking, opposing and ruthlessly obstructing anything being pushed by the other party
3. Display outrage about but make sure to never solve any hot button issue, keeping your primary supporters motivated to donate and vote

On the other hand, here is a recipe for primary defeat:

1. Work on behalf of all constituents, even those who vote against you
2. Compromise for the greater good
3. Actually solve problems

Is it any wonder, then, that the politicians we elect are all about confrontation and outrage and not at all about compromise or problem solving?

Secondary Consequences

The consequences of our primary system should be clear to anyone who cares to consider them. 

I reaffirm my earlier theory, that most people by and large want safety, justice, opportunity, prosperity, empathy and freedom. The weightings may differ, and the beliefs about how to achieve these things may differ, but I maintain that average Americans are pretty united in the desire for these outcomes. 

The problem is, our election system is not designed to reflect the will of average Americans. It is designed, through the use of partisan primaries, to reflect the will of only small and often non-mainstream portions of the nation. And so the mechanism of popular elections that should ensure that the government works for the people has broken down. 

Electoral Reform

Luckily for us, as the problem is actually quite simple, the solution is also simple. We need to reset the way elections work so that, in order for politicians to win election and reelection, they are incentivized to do the greatest good for the greatest number.

We need non-partisan primaries and ranked-choice voting.

Non-Partisan Primaries

If we want our nominees to be productive, to get things done, to be reasonable, etc, then we shouldn’t choose them through processes where only the most partisan ends of society can participate.

Today, according to Gallup, 40% of voters consider themselves independent. That’s a higher number than either Republicans or Democrats. And yet those people are generally excluded from the primary process.

If we want our candidates to be reasonable and to answer to the will of the people, what sense does it make to have those candidates chosen only by the partisan extremes?

We need to abolish partisan primaries and require all states to allow independents, at the very least, to participate in the process. 

Ranked-Choice Voting

We need to reform our methodology for choosing winners. By taking plurality winners in multi-candidate fields, we inevitably empower the most extreme candidates.

Ranked-choice voting solves that problem. It’s simple and its benefits are clear. Here’s how it works:

1. Voters choose and rank as many candidates as they want, from 1 up to whatever number they prefer
2. After votes are cast, a winner will not be chosen until a candidate has a majority of #1 votes
3. If no candidate has 51% of #1 votes, the candidate with the fewest #1s is eliminated
4. Ballots with the eliminated candidate selected as #1 automatically promote the #2 choices (where one exists) to #1
5. Ballots are re-tallied
6. Repeat from step 2 until a candidate has 51% of #1 votes.

It’s simple, it is self-working, and it nullifies the advantages of interest groups and extreme wings during primaries. 

Let’s revisit our hypothetical scenario. We had extreme voters representing 25% of the primary electorate and moderate voters representing 75%. We had four moderate candidates and one extreme candidate. 

In the existing system where the highest plurality wins, we showed why it was likely that the extreme candidate would carry the primary. But with ranked-choice voting, the advantages are flipped. Ranked-choice voting makes it highly likely that a predominantly moderate electorate will choose a moderate candidate.

Instead of the moderate candidates splitting moderate votes, the moderate candidates are methodically eliminated and their voters are recycled, likely to other moderate candidates until one has a majority. The extreme candidate likely never gets much higher than the 25% take they got under the plurality system. 

Ranked-choice voting has other benefits, such as solving the “spoiler effect,” but I don’t even want to focus on those benefits right now. I want to stick with the primary advantage: Ranked-choice voting is a more democratic way to choose candidates and a better reflection of the will of the people-at-large.

Bottom Line - the Call to Reform

Our country is divided. More divided than I can ever remember it being. But we don’t need to be. We want mostly the same things. We have debates ahead on how we manage trade-offs between our values and what methods most effectively achieve our desired ends. But, if we are to have any hope of achieving anything of meaningful, lasting worth, we need to reform how our leaders are chosen. It starts with this.

Non-partisan primaries - include a wider and less partisan portion of the electorate in the process to choose candidates.

Ranked-choice voting - reform the methodology for picking a winner so that it better reflects the will of that electorate.

This is what we need to replace our existing, obstructionist, hyper-polarized leaders with reasonable people who are ready and willing to compromise when it will make a positive impact.

From there, we can all debate and arrive at mutually agreeable approaches to realizing our objectives. We can revise them as time goes on based on the successes and failures we experience in practice. We can work together, even if none of us get exactly what we want, because by working together we all get something better than what we have. That is the fundamental value of a free society, it is the formula for a renewed national opportunity, and it is achievable at benefit to all except for the politicians who thrive in the current, polarized and polarizing system.

But it starts here. As it stands, our politicians are not rewarded for compromise and achievement. They are rewarded for obstructionism and outrage theater. So obstructionism and outrage theater is what we get. If you want something better, change the incentives. 

Reform elections. Identify better leaders. Then we get to work.