Politics of the Future
Why Andrew Yang’s Forward Party is exactly what our country needs today.
“Make America great again.” “Build back better.”
Why are our political slogans focused on the past? Was there truly a time when America was great? Is there something that has been destroyed that needs to be rebuilt? A short skimming of any history book will tell you the answer. Turmoil, problems, outrage, and division have been the norm throughout the history of our country and the world. We often see the past through rose-colored glasses. When we do this, we imagine a lost ideal that has only ever truly existed in fictionalized tellings of past events.
The idyllic pasts we portray are never based on reality. They are not true or accurate representations of the way that things were. In fact, these ideals are often painted by those who would rather some of the dark and gritty details remain uncovered and forgotten. Anybody who has ever fought for any form of equality, rights, or civility knows this at their core. Yet, we continue to vote for political leaders who tap into our human instinct to retreat to a time and place we once knew, to return to a feeling that we think we once had. Why do these politicians do this?
Political Division
Both major parties in our modern politics industry are incentivized to appeal to the most extreme wing of their own party. This allows candidates up and down the ballot to lean further into the most extreme viewpoints of their party and deters them from engaging in practical, solutions-oriented dialogue about the issues we collectively face. The advent of social media has not helped this situation. Research has revealed that the fastest and easiest way to engage users on social media platforms is to appeal to users’ limbic systems. In other words, to make them angry.
The easiest way to make people angry is to make them believe that something has been taken away from them. Our sense of justice is intimately tied to our sense of what we have, own, or have owed to us. By appealing to the past, political operatives on both sides appeal to the extreme and moderate wings of their parties at the deepest levels of their psychology and physiology. These politicians state, “there was something that you used to have, and those people took it away from you! Vote for me, and you can get it back.” This logic is flawed. There never truly was a great time or a better to build back to, even though it may have seemed that way from various vantage points.
As long as we continue appealing to the past for political ends, we will continue to be divided. Our differing values and desires and our personal, regional, and national versions of history diverge to a huge degree. Ask an economically struggling 40-year old man from Alabama and a wealthy 25-year-old woman from san-Francisco about their family histories, and you will hear vastly different versions of what the past looked like, change the economic status, birthplace, age, race, etc. of either of these individuals and the answers you get will continue to diverge even more. The past is a divided prism through which each of us sees an entirely different pattern. It is also set in stone and unchangeable. For these reasons, the past is by no means a good reference for our future.
An exponential age
We are entering an exponential age; technology is propelling our lives, societies, and civilizations forward at a blinding pace. Every week there seems to be a new device, app, smart car, space-faring billionaire, or a myriad of other sci-fi-esque developments. It is a chaotic and beautiful symphony, and if there’s one thing we can be absolutely certain of, it is this; the future will look absolutely nothing like the past. There is nothing from the past that will happen “again.” There is nothing from the past that can be “built back.” Why would you build a model T when you can have a Tesla? You wouldn’t. So as our political duopoly continues to reinforce the same old tropes that they have spouted for the past century or so, the population is becoming increasingly disillusioned. We want a democratic governing body that is aware of and able to confront the challenges we now face as a civilization. We want leaders who present a vision of the future and have the competence and ability to actually execute on that vision.
Not left, not right, Forward
Andrew yang just announced the Forward Party, a political party aimed at thinking differently and addressing the root problems of governmental dysfunction and division. Their first goal is to fix a broken voting system that incentivizes the same type of backward thinking that has become the status quo in political races. The party plans to support candidates who will institute open primaries and Ranked-choice final-five voting.
In open primaries, candidates from all parties run against one another at the same time. This encourages open dialogue and intellectual honesty among the candidates, seeking to inspire the middle, rather than pandering to the extreme wing of any given party. Ranked-choice final-five voting means that the top five candidates who receive the most votes in the primary election are ranked by voters. This type of voting encourages candidates to maintain clean races, as negative remarks can hurt your chances of being ranked second or third by supporters of a different candidate. Ranked-choice candidates must do even more at this stage of the election to appeal to the majority of the voter base on both sides of the aisle, rather than appealing to an extreme minority.
This shift to the voting system would encourage elected officials to actually execute on their campaign promises and vote their conscience in order to stay in office rather than towing the party line to retain their funding. These reforms would discourage candidates from appealing to the extreme minority of voters in order to keep their elected position. Changing the structure of elections in this way sits upstream of nearly every other important issue of our time. This modern innovation on an outdated system of government is vital if our democracy seeks to continue. More importantly, these policies presented by the Forward Party, alongside the rest of the party platform, are the first steps towards a comprehensive vision for a future that we can all believe in.
It is impossible to find a past that will unite us. This has been proven by the political duopoly. Meanwhile, the future is approaching at an ever-increasing pace. The only thing everyone seems to be able to agree on is that one fact. It is in this fact that the wisdom of the Forward Party shines. We cannot solve our problems by harkening to some long-lost fantasy of times that never were. The only way to solve the modern problems we face is through collectively imagining a vision of a better future and working tirelessly towards it. What will that future look like? We can only know by moving forward.