“In interviews with Reason and elsewhere, Andrew Yang, the most recently prominent of the Forward Party organizers, comes off as a sincere, solutions-oriented guy. But it’s not obvious that he recognizes that Americans of conflicting values and preferences want to live in different ways and by divergent rules. That blindness is apparent in the claim that “Every problem has a solution most Americans can support (really).” What if we can’t even agree on what constitutes a problem? What happens when the solutions embraced by some repulse others?
Like most centrist technocrats, the organizers of the Forward Party mistake governance for an engineering problem that requires a few tweaks to get it properly running. But governing involves messy moral arguments over the use of coercive force. Political debate assumes ongoing disagreement, and if people are sufficiently at-odds, there may be no easy solutions, let alone “commonsense” ones.”