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Comment by realce | Hacker News Reader

1000% agree.

Glad to hear it.

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.

A lot of people worked very hard to build that bridge from the flash of the POTUS run to a more typical "movement" structure, but even in those efforts the disconnect between the motives and trust of the volunteers vs Andrew's crew was omnipresent. Humanity Forward couldn't even convince the volunteer orgs to adopt their name or charter without some extreme pushback due to their treatment of volunteers during the campaign. They further picked that network clean during the mayoral run, either disillusioning members with his poor, corporately-controlled campaign, or trying to leverage supporters that had nothing to do with NYC.

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.

It would be interesting to hear your take on the whole drama a year or three from now. I imagine it's all a bit fresh for retrospect.

Second on doing a second take of the drama 1-3 years later. I bet you'd have some insights into politics, movements, and the nature of collective power that others don't.

> 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?

>> IMO, this is an indictment of the structure, more so than the individual.

> 1000% agree.

So you agree that it's the structure of the organization that's at fault, not Andrew Yang?

Who manages the organization? Where does the buck stop? The statement is "more so than" the individual, not the binary option you provided.

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.

In a sense, this kind of confirms some of the instinctive, "left wing" suspicion that Yang's a naive "enlightened centrist" type. Inclination to bring in experts and consultants to run things via "best practices" and such. The equivalent of hiring Deloitte to tell you how to restructure your operations.

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.

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