The Forward Party: A Liberal Mirage

My Friend (love him to death) is a Forward operative, and I just couldn’t stand it!
Read these (much better) pieces from Jacobin and Current Affairs instead.

The current administration within the United States is embracing fascism, eroding fundamental civil liberties and engaging in an ongoing genocide. The Forward Party has emerged with much fanfare and zero substance. Marketed as a “new kind of politics,” the Forward Party is nothing more than a rebranding of the same tired liberal centrism that helped pave the way to our current crisis. The Forward Party offers voters “an unusual and utterly unique political platform” defined by complete ideological emptiness.

At a glance, the Forward Party might seem appealing, offering vague promises of unity, moderation, and “common sense solutions.” But behind this slick marketing lies a movement that offers no meaningful analysis of power, no understanding of class struggle, and no vision for genuine transformation. In fact, the Forward Party’s very existence depends on ignoring the root causes of our crisis.

“Not Left or Right, but Forward.”

Their platform reads like a list of platitudes ripped from a management consultant’s slide deck: defend democracy, fix polarization, restore trust. The Forward Party platform is made entirely of feel-good buzzwords only used in the corporate world.

The Forward Party’s founding ideological Priorities are “free people, thriving communities, and vibrant democracy.” But these declarations are so vague as to be essentially meaningless. Almost everyone can agree that recognizing freedom and individual choice is a good thing, but some Americans see the right of a woman to secure an abortion as a choice that a “free” person should have, while others don’t. Some Americans see freedom in having unrestricted access to guns, while still others believe that freedom from gun violence requires some regulation. Everyone wants a thriving, safe community, but some people believe that safety comes from funding already bloated police budgets, while others believe addressing poverty has a better chance at lowering crime. A reasonable person could read this list and ask, So what exactly does this party stand for? What policies do they support? When people don’t know where you stand on policy, it’s not a good thing.

A reasonable person could read this list and ask, So what exactly does this party stand for? What policies do they support? When people don’t know where you stand on policy, it’s not a good thing.

It's the same misdiagnosis that Democrats make. The problem isn’t “the extremes on the left and the right” as a recent Forward Party tweet announced. The real divide is top versus bottom.

Current Affairs

Of the six guiding principles put forth by Yang as the pillars of his party, four have nothing to do with policy. “Fact-based governance,” “effective and modern-day government,” and “grace and tolerance” aren’t just boring and nonspecific propositions; they’re totally indistinguishable from the empty bromides uttered by mainstream politicians on a daily basis. “Human-centered capitalism,” meanwhile, sounds like the kind of yarn you’d hear spun by someone like Bill Gates at an Aspen Ideas Festival panel sponsored by a consortium of tech companies — as sure a clue as any that this would-be antiestablishment project is mostly operating on the same wavelength as the very system it claims to be challenging.

Yang’s other two structuring principles — open primaries and a universal basic income (UBI) — are at least semi-fleshed-out policy ideas. As to the former, there’s at least a coherent case for it. Party primary contests are a highly restrictive model of electoral competition, and Yang’s accompanying proposal for ranked-choice balloting could conceivably be an improvement on the status quo. It’s hardly revolutionary, though, and a somewhat frail scaffold on which to build a new political party. The same goes for Yang’s trademark proposal, which formed the basis for his 2020 Democratic presidential run.

Insofar as it does convey anything, “going forward” is a kind of lazy appeal to an unspecified but vaguely positive direction of travel, an empty signifier for broad good intentions that generally illuminates very little.

Jacobin

How will they do all this? Through ranked choice voting and open primaries? Through “listening to all sides”? The party preaches bipartisanship at a time when one major party openly embraces authoritarianism and the other has clung to proceduralism and corporate donors. This framing damages any left movement and detracts from the real issues. They’ve abandoned even the pretense of caring about inequality, LGBTQ+ rights, or racial justice—retreating from the Democrats’ already-performative gestures.

The reality is that inequality, voter alienation, and the collapse of trust in political institutions are not the results of incivility or partisanship—they are the logical outcomes of a system that prioritizes profits over people, of a political class owned by corporate interests, and of decades of bipartisan neoliberalism. The Forward Party refuses to name these forces, let alone confront them.

“[Yang] identifies the problems that are inherent to capitalism, yet somehow believes that the same market forces that create those problems can also fix them.”

Instead, they cling to the myth that the system is fundamentally sound, just in need of better “management.” They treat inequality like a slight issue in the otherwise perfect United States, not a feature of the system’s design. They see the erosion of the social fabric as a communication problem, not the direct result of austerity, imperialism, wage stagnation, and mass exploitation.

By refusing to take sides, the Forward Party effectively takes the side of the status quo. In a world where billionaires hoard wealth while millions go without healthcare, housing, or a living wage, neutrality is complicity. In choosing “moderation,” they ignore the suffering of the working class and obscure the need for structural change. The Forward Party has left the most vunerable groups, that are currently being deported and imprisoned left to dry,. The Forward Party’s obsessive neutrality operates as cover for complicity. In a moment when the GOP is openly flirting with authoritarianism, violently targeting immigrants, queer and trans people, and women, and the Democratic Party continues to support unlimited genocide in Palestine, corporate hegemony, and the slow suffocation of public services, claiming the “middle” is not a stance it is an abdication. To refuse to pick a side is to side with the fascism. In times of moral crisis, so-called centrism becomes a lubricant for fascism. As the saying goes: scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.

Moreover, the Forward Party utterly fails to understand why so many people have turned away from both the Democratic and Republican parties. It is not because they crave civility or centrist compromise It is because they are tired of being lied to, sold out, and left behind. The Democrats have failed to recoginze the material conditions creating this alienation and the Republicans have redirected this anger towards marginalized groups, in violent raids and the sweeling of bigotry. People want power over their lives, economic security, dignity, and a future. Forward offers no answer to any of it.

Utterly Unusual

An appalling line on many state’s program reads

“Forward Party offers voters an unusual and utterly unique political platform—distinct from any other major or minor party in the state. In that vein, the party will not take positions on specific policies.”

Forward’s only innovation is a more polished brand of surrender. No support for queer lives. No interest in racial justice. Even worse than Democrats, they are a stripped-down, sanitized clone.

Their ideology is rooted in managerial liberalism, where problems are best solved by consensus of the elite and smarter algorithms, not by mobilization or democratic control. They believe the system is fundamentally sound—just inefficient. They do not ask who has power, why, or at whose expense. They are less interested in justice than in governance—governance that keeps markets happy and conflict minimal. It is a direct extension of their founders background, embracing technology as the solution to all inquality.

In the end, the Forward Party offers a technocratic mirage, a feel-good alternative for suburban liberals and disaffected conservatives who are uncomfortable with both Trumpism and radical change. But we don’t need more political ambiguity. We need a mass movement activley defending the targets of fascism, defending actual democracy and working class people.

Fascism in an outgrowth of Capitalism in decay.

Vladimir Lenin