First, a campaign is a makeshift setup, staffed just in time and fired shortly after. Second a campaign is a campaign. It's about media attention, hammering messages and getting elected. Anything but a messy collapse, post election, is unlikely.
I'll suggest that what you wanted to be involved in isn't an individual campaign, it's a party or something that you could join. Something that is supposed to last, and where members are supposed to have influence. Otherwise, there's no room for daylight between the candidate and people supporting them and every crack is structural doom.
Yang Gang had a lot of self organising, organic aspects to it. But, it framed itself as a fan club. Yang Gang should have never been subservient to The Campaign, which is really just a bunch of underpaid youngsters run by a handful of professional, non-ideological experts. The campaign should have been subservient to Yang Gang.
"Support for Yang among Yang Gang" is a nonsensical frame. That's not sustainable.
It seems to me that someone who wants to change the way the country works should at least be able to do a little better with how their campaign works and treats it's people. Yes, the work is short term and I think people know that going in. But mistreatment & broken promises? Not acceptable. Again, for someone trying to change the country, changing those aspects of their campaign, where they have much more control, had better be easy.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/03/andrew-yan...
The fact that Yang acknowledges the issue doesn't make it better.
Yang Gang had/has the seeds of an interesting political paradigm, and a lot of that just emerged as people showed up on the sub. The paradigm was just not built to last, grow or evolve.
Do you see a path from A to B? It would be a shame to see a general dispersal, without any form of continuity.
The path from A to B has already happened IMO. Andrew gave a certain group of people the ability to rise above their cynicism and feel politically useful for once. That feeling frees people and makes them uppity in the face of entrenched power, which is great. The next step of this whole game is YG ownership of this "party" instead of acting like it's Andrew's property, leading to a distribution of power throughout the network. Then you attack localities, like city councils and mayoral races, and build a new narrative closer to a "people's party" than "Andrew Yang's Party"
The party has to feel like the internet did: Anyone with the grit and intelligence can break through, meritocracy be damned.
Sorry to write a book about it lol.
UBI isn't a pipe-dream for NEETs, which is what it was in 2016.
> The party has to feel like the internet did: Anyone with the grit and intelligence can break through, meritocracy be damned.
just fyi - meritocracy is the ability for people with grit and intelligence to push through, I think you mean autocracy?
> 1000% agree.
So you agree that it's the structure of the organization that's at fault, not Andrew Yang?
I get that you're offended by my complaints, I don't want to be a messenger of total cynicism and I apologize if I haven't framed my experience in a way that's more helpful to you. I like Andrew personally, I support the majority of his ideology. He's a bad manager and my experience working deeply within the campaign, the volunteer orgs, the SM accounts, the Discord, etc, has proven this to me to my sincere displeasure many many times. Hell - he's written about it over and over again himself.
That doesn't mean he's not worth supporting if he's who inspires you to engage with the political structure of the nation though. Whatever works. There are WAY MORE good people out there than there are good managers, and Andrew's just a plainly good person individually. His institutional aptitude isn't great though.
Hope I got my intention across, apologies if I'm fumbling. I don't mean to be a grouch, but I've seen reliance on the central pillar of "Andrew Yang" waste so much of the energy his ideology inspires.
It's the kind of thing that stings a lot of left wing movements, which is now why they are now all crazy paranoid of being "co-opted."
It might be interesting to see if forward learns, or repeats the error.
Andrew is a smart guy, and he seems to come up with smart ideas when he focuses on them. OTOH, he seems to overlook other things and then default to a generic. A party is not a corporation or even a non profit, at least a democratic party can't be. You can't just hire employees, appoint executives and run it like that.
I think americans have difficulty envisioning a party. You have so few. Republicans and Democrats are so old, big and established that it's impossible to imagine them without a ton of power. The libertarians & whatnot are so quirky that they seem more like a convention than a political party.
Ultimately though, a party is a political club. There are members. They interact with one another, nominate candidates, develop policies & such. There's always/usually a two tier system. Actual candidates, campaign managers and whatnot obviously have more power, are more engaged, etc. But, at least the concept of membership exists. It's not supposed to operate as a fan club. It isn't the Foo Fighters.
I heard some of his interview. He has policy ideas. I didn't hear him say anything about the party itself, or got the impression that he has thought about it much.
He also fired them one day before dropping out of the race just to send a message. I don't know that that's great leadership, but to me that shows he had some idea of what was going on at least.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/06/yang-fires-dozens-o...
That's definitely not to undermine the rest of OP's message, just adding a little extra color.
Everything else, including the idea that an honest candidate can "climb out of nowhere" and win hearts and votes, is a pipe dream because of PACs, political parties, and obvious corruption. Been that way for almost forever if you ask me...
The two party duopoly ganged up on him and the Reform Party (as he was opposed to their globalization) and quashed any opportunity for him to succeed.
These parties don’t shoot themselves in the foot, they adapt to and coöpt any threat.
"Not left, not right, forward" had been Andrew's slogan throughout his presidential campaign. The PAC may have come up with it (I have no knowledge either way), but it is as much Andrew's branding as it is the PAC's.
As to putting everyone out of a job, I had no idea that Andrew, or any candidate, could guarantee someone a lifetime job once they joined his PAC.
Andrew's presidential bid ultimately failed. There's bound to be disappointments all around. But your allegations ring hollow base on this comment alone.
Sorry, but I'd like some proof about, really, any of this. For example, that you were a moderator of his official subreddit. I dislike Yang making a third party, but this is a pretty hefty charge.
oh you can't do that here - my mistake
-- this is where proof went, but I'd like to keep my reddit username kinda separate from here, hope yall understand.
> created: October 4, 2020
> karma: 258
https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/q2khwm/...
Not sure if it will stay up or not, but it's convinced me.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/05/andrew-yangs-israeli...
Do you have any examples of this?
> And he never pays off on what he promises
Are you speaking about his campaign promises in particular? If so he lost so I'm not sure what you were expecting.
> YangGang social media
Eh. The "but some of his supporters are jerks" argument is emotionally potent but doesn't contain much substance in my opinion. Jerks are often very outspoken no matter what their opinions are. I'm not sure why that has anything to do with the person they're supporting. I remember people doing this with Bernie also.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/03/andrew-yan...
What's suspect about that?
He stopped a guy assaulting a photojournalist and you have issues with it??
To be specific, on one side the "bad guy" was a staten island guy wearing a cowboy hat in the midst of a hate crime epidemic soon after the capitol riots. On the other side, with pictures, a mentally ill person of color. The assaulted photographer was there shooting Yang, with many other campaign people and other photographers. All the accounts and pictures were released by the campaign, nobody pressed charges, and as far as I know nobody helped the guy get some help.
I hope that's a bit clearer. I wasn't there and don't really know what happened for a fact, but after looking at multiple sources my best guess was between cheesy embellishment and distasteful stunt.
Now I don't know what to think anymore... I thought it was widely discussed at the time, but I'm having a hard time finding the original coverage of the event on youtube, and the written articles I find seem more balanced than what I remember hearing. So maybe fake news got me on this one.
That said, the Israel comments and the CNN job had a lot more weight in changing my opinion (which to reiterate, is not "Yang is the worst", just "Yang is like his peers").
Given the assailant was black, I doubt most politicians would get involved or publicise it.
Memorable quote was: Mistreatment of campaign staff is common (I think for similar reasons as artists and video game programmers often get abused? the short-term pressure and passion project nature encourage exploitation)
He kept going on and on about taxing "tech" to fund UBI. And it would work out and it would be like Alaska with their oil fund thing.
But, when you get down to it, what is "tech"? How is it different from just anything? We use the word "tech" to essentially describe any business that is based primarily on software. Where software is a major focus.
Because, like chemicals, technology is literally everything. The wheel is technology. A car is technology. "Tech" isn't an industry, it's a catch-all term for businesses we don't want to define.
So how do you define Google as "tech" in a way that doesn't include other advertising companies or other companies that run their business with software (which is pretty much all of them now)?
So with that and everything else I've learned about him, he really seemed like someone who was very articulate, but ultimately empty.
His big thing was "MATH" but what he really needed was "ENGLISH".
If he said front and centre "I want to personally dangle Jeff Bezos and Sergei Brin over the edge of a tall building and shake until their wallets fall out" that gives one clear target to fight over. Starting with an amorphous blob target lets everyone involved say "Oh, we'll exclude X, Y, and Z...." and feel like they won something, while still getting what you really wanted in the end.
It's why they always talk about the budget proposals as "$3.5 trillion" or "$1.8 trillion" without anyone ever saying "my real red-line is the $12k of subsidies to the local dirt farmers."
_why_?
There's other stuff - I strongly support a VAT and stuff like that, but the poverty>hatred pipeline is what I'm truly interested in.
Reddit moderation, esp for large subs of like over 50k, is outrageous. The power you can muster to influence debate and exposure at that level is immense, and there's basically no repercussions for abusive mods. The amount of time you have to devote to managing a community is immense, the ability to keep your mod team on point is hardly possible. It's really hard and thankless and can totally twist your head up.
I volunteered when I thought the mods did a poor job on something and DM'ed them, and one invited me to help.
So every day or three, I hop on and help clean out the report queue if it's stacked up.
Being a decent person, modding can be difficult because the internet is full of bad-faith people and idiots. Applying a consistent standard in a way that keeps the sub clean while allowing real conversation is tough, so it is a lot of judgement calls.
I could go on, but it is a tough job. I do it because I want the "chatroom of the city" to be as friendly as possible. I tend to let "merely stupid" comments get downvoted to oblivion, but name-calling or straight-up disinfo (I tend to look at their profiles for context) gets deleted quickly.
And yeah, I step away from it a few days a week, simply because caring too much will keep you steeped in horrible comments and stupidity far too much.
That makes me extremely nervous. One can imagine a perverse mod who simply deletes comments based on which political subs they post in.
I personally don't care where you post if you're being polite on the sub I moderate. I try to think of it like being the chairperson of a meeting, or the bartender at a local bar: Let people debate and disagree and even say stupid stuff, but if they say something obviously offensive or start name-calling, you get modded.
And if I then look at your comment history and see a stream of vitriolic behavior, that shows me it wasn't "just one time" you got out of hand, but a pattern of undesirable behavior.
I do know other subs, mostly political, that will instantly ban you if you have a different set of beliefs than they do. It's very frustrating. But that's not what I'm discussing here.
However, different subs run differently. I may well engage in a nuanced and sourced debate in one subreddit, and frankly tell someone off in another. Subreddits are communities and communities have different standards of behavior.
Likewise, community membership is a terrible proxy for actual opinions or beliefs. I belong to many communities I disagree with, but I find monitoring them to be useful and sometimes engage in debates. I've found my debates with anti-vaxxers to be very enlightening - I still think people should get vaxxed but I understand my opposition.
All of this to say that a top down examination of a profile without context is worse than useless - it is actively misleading.
Have a public moderation log.
Reddit is unfortunately woefully under-equipped for moderators so the above is a strictly out of band process for Reddit specifically.
In any case, he is right about the duopoly. In order to overcome the duopoly, we need the involvement of major public figures. I haven't seen many volunteer--I'll take what I can get. I would prefer he advocate for approval voting though: https://electionscience.org/
I still like some of his ideas, and I'm thankful he led to more Americans learning about UBI from the presidential race.
And I also know how he failed in the presidential and New York City mayor race. And I also know his history with his non-profit. And I also know his performance in ventures before that.
I sometimes wonder: is idealism good knowing that you will be disappointed every single time or is aloof cynicism and sarcasm the way to enlightenment?
From Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Virtuous: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm#link2...
Note: am not a Yang supporter, just offering a different perspective.
[0]https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-politicians/democr...
Voting makes this more obvious of course, we get the elected leaders we deserve.
The man was running for POTUS. Do you expect the men who lead the world to uphold your own moral standard?
From Machiavelli's The Prince:
>Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft . Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word. [...] A wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Prince_(Marriott)/Chapter...
Yes?!? It’s insane to me how little some people expect of their elected officials. Yes, the cynical side of me knows it’s never going to 100% live up to expectations once they're in power but good grief.
"things can never be good, here is a 16th century essay that proves my point" is just self-fulfilling prophecy. The Prince mirrors the politics we see today because we keep electing people who read The Prince and use it as an instruction manual.
And against the Putins and Xi Jipings of the world, I would not want a virtuous saint upheld by a tight moral code as a leader for my country.
Relevant case in point: I live in New York, where until recently we had a governor that was all about ruthless assertion of power and ruled by personality. Then, when he ran into problems everyone turned their back on him because everyone hates him.
Absolutely! I would like to see a political entity led by Kantian ethical formalists. My opinion is that such a faction couldn't come into power. Let's hope I'm wrong.
>Relevant case in point: I live in New York, where until recently we had a governor that was all about ruthless assertion of power and ruled by personality. Then, when he ran into problems everyone turned their back on him because everyone hates him.
Sure, the history is littered with the corpses of the Hitlers and Mussolinis (and the mountains of corpses they have caused), the small petty tyrants who thought brutality and charisma it was ALL you needed to rule. They meet their ends alone at a moment or another, but this doesn't make a case for the success of ethical leaders either.
The popular readings for The Prince focus on the passages about scheming, ruthlessness, the palace intrigue basically. It's only a blip in the actual book.
If you do come away with a cynical reading of the Prince, it's not only about the supposed celebration of the amoral ruler, but also (maybe more) about the stupidity and fickleness of their subjects, or the gaggle of untrustworthy sycophants and rivals at court.
That said, while Machiavelli has a point, the opposite is also true: that many leaders have fallen due to losing the trust of their key supporters. No king rules alone, knowing how to keep your supporters happy while still being flexible is a vital talent for a democratic leader. Even more so, many states have fallen due to their allies deciding they can no longer be trusted in negotiations, and the president is the face of the US. You can see the consequences untrustworthy presidents have had in our weakening bargaining power with many of our allies, such as the EU’s many talks of becoming more self reliant. Having a president that at least knows how to appear to be keeping their word to people that interact with them is incredibly important in our current geopolitical climate.
Basically, trust isn’t valueless. A good manipulator knows how to weigh the positives and negatives of breaching trust.
Thanks for this shard of realpolitik in this discussion among people disappointed that their hero turns out to not be the hero they thought. Who would have seen that coming?
This is something really strange. If you work for a campaign, it is very very very very different from working for the Mcdonal's. You work for a campaign because you support its ideology, and you want it to win. You are not trying to make a living by working for a campaign.
I would even say, you are not working for the campaign, you are working for yourself! It's like you are donating to the campaign with your own labor. The relationship between you and the campaign is mutually beneficial. The campaign gets help from you, and you get to use the campaign to fulfil your personal belief. There is no way for you to get the same kind of fulfilment by working in the Mcdonal's. The campaign provides you a platform to express your ideology, a network to find ideological friends.
So, no, you are not exploited by the campaign, nor is the campaign exploited by you. It is a voluntary exchange between you and the campaign for mutual benefits.
This means we need to pay people like campaign workers enough to live so they don't need to be independently wealthy.
This doesn't extend to every person. There are volunteers who just seek donations and such.
Every time someone tries to make a case for paying people not enough to survive they just seem to forget that externalities exist...
Oh no. I don't like to work for the Mcdonal's! I hate the job! I want to work for the campaign and it must pay me the same! It's a win-win for me!
Yes. That's rather the point of the concept of minimum wage.
Campaign staff can work 60-80 hours a week during the life of a campaign. This is an actual job.
The campaign team was full of fools who squandered almost every good turn received, most campaign workers were paid less than minimum wage, and Andrew eventually stole the pac's name and branding - Humanity Forward - put everyone out of a job, and then did basically nothing with the organization.
I've given so much time to this person it's insane. He's not trustworthy, he's a horrible manager of people, and he never pays off on what he promises. Just dip your toes into YangGang social media and see how his former fans act now, or the stories of abuse within the campaigns that Andrew hardly acknowledged.
Inspiring message, but I've been close enough to the sausage factory to know it's fluff.
Beware. If you are interested in this endevour do the best you can to build your own power base, do no rely on Andrew's circle to help you in any way other than a retweet.