Andrew Yang Is Still Trying To Move Forward

For a politician who’s never won anything, Andrew Yang is pretty famous. Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign failed to earn any delegates to the Democratic National Convention after getting about 5 percent in the Iowa caucuses and 3 percent in the New Hampshire primary. He came in fourth in New York City’s 2021 ranked choice Democratic primary for mayor. Despite his political struggles, Yang is now launching a new political party, the Forward Party.

- By Nick Gillespie

While Yang and the Forward Party aren’t libertarian, there are several planks of interest in their platform. It includes not just the universal basic income (UBI) proposal that made Yang famous but also ranked choice voting, nonpartisan primaries, and efforts to make the government more transparent and accessible.

In October, Reason’s Nick Gillespie spoke with Yang about the Forward Party, the libertarian pitch for a UBI, and the government’s response to the pandemic.

Q: You’ve created a new political party. What’s the elevator pitch for Forward?

A: We can tell the duopoly is killing us. It’s turning us against each other. Political stress is at civil war levels. Political violence is becoming more and more of an inevitability. The question is, how can we bring ourselves back from the brink? And I know that libertarians have been arguing for a shift from the duopoly for years and years.