By now, you might have heard about Andrew Yang, the insurgent Democratic candidate taking social media by storm with promises of a $1,000 monthly check for every American.
In a short time, Yang has built up an army of online supporters calling themselves “Yang Gang.” It’s hard to tell how much of Yang Gang is sincere, and how much is motivated by irony and despair. The most zealous Yang Gang-ers are young, jaded alt-righters who have given up hoping that Trump will build the wall and put America first. At least with Yang, they’ll get paid to sit home and play video games while the country falls apart.
Sporting pink meme hats, the Yang Gang likes to joke about “securing the bag,” that is, of $1,000. At least some of these Yang Gangers hail from the fringes of the Right, Richard Spencer among them. But if Yang’s campaign has attracted some racist chuds, it would be a mistake to write off his ideas as a joke. Far from it, Andrew Yang is running the most interesting and serious campaign of any Democratic candidate.
Yang’s central preoccupations are automation, artificial intelligence, and the impact they will have on the economy. To help the workforce transition through the coming tidal wave of mass labor displacement, Yang has proposed giving every American a universal basic income. To pay for UBI, Yang plans to consolidate welfare spending and slap a value-added tax on the Big Tech companies profiting from automation.
Yang is not the first politician to think up a universal basic income, but his policy goes further than most. It is not an idle fancy, but the centerpiece of an ambitious and detailed platform that treats automation like a political problem of the first order.
Here is something that Yang understands: America is in the midst of a profound crisis. The country is slowly committing suicide. Decades of automation have eviscerated the working class and destroyed American communities. How bad is it? Yang cites a study from Mckinsey, which estimates that one-third of Americans will have their jobs automated by 2030.
Alarmist? Perhaps. Luddites have been saying these things for centuries, right? Except this crisis isn’t new. Millions of jobs have already disappeared, and more will follow. Yesterday it was factory workers; tomorrow it will be retail workers and truck drivers.
Some might complain that Yang’s warning is gloomy, but so is the future. How has the establishment responded to America’s death spiral so far? Shrugs. Platitudes. Banal rhetoric about diversity and coming together. In such a time, one would expect politicians to rise to the occasion. The Democrats running for president are not even talking about this stuff.
Yang’s political thinking comes much closer than most to addressing America’s present malaise. Headline-grabbing unemployment numbers do not tell the full picture. America is not doing well. Thousands of Americans are dying every year from opioids. America is experiencing record-low fertility rates and record-high suicide rates, a housing crisis, a student loan crisis, a drug crisis, dwindling opportunity for retirement, stagnant wages, a crisis of social trust, of trust in institutions.
Yang’s concern for America’s institutional, economic, civic and social collapse has attracted supporters from Left and Right. His platform is progressive on abortion and immigration and all the rest, but he talks about the trends crushing the middle and working classes with a rare frankness.
It’s hardly a wonder that he has won over market-skeptic conservatives like Tucker Carlson. Here is something Yang understands that Trump doesn’t: the GDP is not a measure of how well people are doing. If the economy is doing so well, then why are so many people dying from drugs and killing themselves? Yang proposes shifting economic thinking away from the GDP and towards a more inclusive measurement of human flourishing, by factoring in things like mental health, life expectancy, and deaths of despair.
This is part of what Yang calls “human-centered capitalism.” The idea, and it’s a doozy, is for markets to serve humans, not the other way around. While Yang’s economic and political thinking is certainly more imaginative than that of establishment free-market Republicans, his worldview is also far bolder than the majority of Democrats, who are for the most part unabashed capitalists who want a more generous safety net. Virtually none are willing to curb immigration to protect jobs, and while Yang isn’t either, he has put a lot more thought into protecting American workers and communities than most in his party.
Yang’s platform shows a keen interest in mitigating the negative effects of technology and protecting the middle and working classes from the larger forces that are crushing them, particularly the market. While UBI is his central idea, Yang has a dizzying array of idiosyncratic policies. For all their strangeness, they are certainly timely. There is the Department of the Attention Economy to address the deleterious effects of smartphone use on children. There is a policy to punish predatory pharmaceutical companies, repurpose America’s zombified shopping malls, and forgive student loans. To combat the opioid crisis, Yang considers taxing the companies that benefited from creating this modern blight.
Why is a venture capitalist with no prior political experience the only candidate talking about these issues with the urgency they deserve? Why are they not front and center in our national debate?
Conventional wisdom holds that Trump won because Hillary Clinton ignored those left behind while Trump listened. For whatever reason, Democrats have shown more interest in hitting the abolish-the-electoral college eject button than fixing the mess that decades of irresponsible leadership created.
It is a testament to Yang’s originality, and the present political system’s utter corruption, that he has attracted a broad coalition of supporters from Left and Right. In this day, to have such a wide appeal would seem difficult indeed. But Yang’s slogan, “Humanity First,” throws the crisis ahead in stark relief. Will the robot revolution bring right and left together, to protect the worker?
Yang likes to present himself as neither Left nor Right, and while most of his policies are unmistakably left-wing, his politics casts a wide net. His understanding of what politics should aim to achieve goes beyond what most politicians are capable of imagining these days. Yang speaks like the Democrats used to speak, when they cared about the working-class. His rhetoric sounds strange, but it really shouldn’t. It only does because the rest of the political establishment, Democrat and Republican alike, have sold out.
Yang has now picked up enough donors to qualify for the Democratic primary debates. However far he goes, he’s not an alarmist or a meme. Standing among establishment hacks spewing platitudes about diversity and unity, Yang stands out for his serious engagement with America’s present malaise, and a coming crisis that could make it much, much worse.
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