Drop Out, Andrew Yang!

Yang decries identity politics as divisive on the one hand and embraces stale ideas of being Asian on the other

As he has continued to campaign, it’s become even clearer that his supposedly post-partisan platform—one of his slogans is “not left, not right, but forward”—is an attempt to appeal to a swathe of largely young, white men by sidestepping pesky matters like racism and sexism. Yang decries identity politics as divisive on the one hand and embraces stale ideas of being Asian on the other, which goes a long way towards explaining his recent eyebrow-raising defense of comic Shane Gillis, who was hired and then quickly fired by Saturday Night Live after recent clips of him mocking Asian people—Yang himself included—surfaced. Offering to sit down with Gillis, Yang then shared on Twitter, “For the record, I do not think he should lose his job. We would benefit from being more forgiving rather than punitive.” He then followed up that interesting take with an even more cringey analysis on what is being called “cancel culture” and what I would call entirely appropriate consequences for shitty racist behavior:

It’s also the case that anti-Asian racism is particularly virulent because it’s somehow considered more acceptable. If Shane had used the n word the treatment would likely be immediate and clear.

To Yang, racial slurs are merely “offensive.” He entirely misses the point about the power of racial slurs, which, as Jamelle Bouie put it, are “verbal affirmations of the idea that you, as a member of targeted community, are not quite human, a second-class citizen who does not deserve respect or dignity.” Yang’s muddled posture here is telling, and a line can be drawn from his incoherent stance on Gillis and his position against what he calls “identity politics” to his policy proposals, which purportedly aim to tackle pressing issues of inequality but fail to address one of the fundamental aspects of the way our economy works—which is to say, how racialized inequity has not only accrued over time but is central to capitalism. In words Yang might understand: it’s built into the system, and not a bug.

None of which is to say that he doesn’t also experience racism on the campaign trail: Yang has been treated badly by pundits and cable news networks, who can’t even print his name correctly for chyrons and cut him out of candidate round-ups, despite his polling narrowly above people like Cory Booker. These insults can either be read as people dismissing him and his campaign as that of a wacky outsider or as upsetting reminders that Asians in politics, whether as voters or as politicians, are often an afterthought. (Or likely some combination of the two.)

Still, you can see his lack of perspective on racial justice in his much-discussed UBI proposal. I personally find most UBI evangelists extremely suspect, given that noted humanitarians Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg are among them. (Who’s dumb enough to trust our techno-dystopian would-be autocrats these days?) While Yang’s is not the only UBI proposal out there, and there are champions of different versions of UBI from the left, there are major problems with his. Primary among them? As Yang himself has noted about his UBI plan, one would have to make the choice between accepting the “Freedom Dividend” or keeping one’s existing benefits, like SNAP and disability payments. Instead of becoming a piece of a more robust safety net, Yang’s UBI proposal would help destroy it. There is, too, the separate question of whether a solidly upper-middle-class family would need the infusion of $1,000 per month, or whether it would be best put to use it to, I don’t know, fix our crumbling schools.

His vision, to put it mildly, is bleak.

So what’s Yang’s motivation for pushing UBI? His vision, to put it mildly, is bleak. “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society,” Yang told the New York Times in an early interview, describing it as an event that would “create riots in the streets.” “We have five to 10 years before truckers lose their jobs,” he warned, “and all hell breaks loose.” (To audiences of voters, he describes his UBI plan a little more cheerily as “trickle-up economics.”) According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, truckers make on average about $44,000 per year, far more than what Yang’s Freedom Dividend would provide, which is just a touch under the federal poverty rate. As for automation’s potential to destroy millions of people’s jobs, some experts are increasingly skeptical of that idea, and new research has come out that has dialed down previous estimates of its impact. As Eric Levitz summed it up in New York magazine, “[T]he biggest flaw in Yang’s grand theory is that its foundational premise is (almost certainly) wrong.”

I’m of the personal belief that the only people we should take seriously during the Democratic primary are those with a clear-eyed understanding of how power operates and not only a deep desire to shift more of that power towards the 99 percent, but actual ideas to do so. Andrew Yang is not that person. Consider how he characterizes our corporate overlords’ ruthless drive for ever-increasing profits in his 2018 book, The War on Normal People. “Right now some of the smartest people in the country are trying to figure out how to replace you with an overseas worker, a cheaper version of you, or, increasingly, a widget, software program, or robot,” Yang wrote. He continued: “There’s no malice in it. The market rewards business leaders for making things more efficient. Efficiency doesn’t love normal people. It loves getting things done in the most cost-effective way possible.”

Here, we’re reminded that Yang’s ethos is that of Silicon Valley, where he was incubated, both chirpy technocrat—Freedom! Dividend! To! Unlock! Our! Potential!—and doomsday prophet—ROBOT APOCALYPSE! There’s nothing really in his writing or platform to suggest that Yang understands the real forces driving this ever-increasing push towards productivity and efficiency, nor does he point the blame squarely at the actual people who are making those decisions. As one critic of his UBI proposal put it recently in Longreads, “By talking about disappearing jobs rather than stagnant wages and degrading working conditions, Yang plays into the grandiose self-image of Silicon Valley. Technology only solves problems, according to this view, it doesn’t cause them.” What would Yang’s vision of UBI—which one writer for the New Inquiry described as “a subtle kind of doomsday prep for the tech billionaire”—really fundamentally change? The “smartest people in the country” would get to continue partying on their private islands, stocked with lavish bunkers, while the rest of us “normal people” get our UBI crumbs.

Yang, of course, has other ideas—his policy page lists dozens of them, a weird grab bag of the sensible (making election day a federal holiday) and the hmmm-inducing (the American Mall Act) But I focus on Yang’s UBI plan because that’s what he has focused on as the singular, defining issue of his campaign.

Still, let’s take a look at another issue that he’s spoken about at length—climate change. And here again, I plead: Andrew Yang, please drop out. “This is going to be a tough truth, but we are too late. We are 10 years too late,” Yang said of efforts to curb climate change at a debate at the end of July. He then offered his Freedom Dividend as the solution, positioning a massive, complex issue that requires at minimum a massive government intervention into one best tackled by individual choices: “We need to start moving our people to higher ground, and the best way to do that is to put economic resources into your hands so you can protect yourself and your families.” As Max Read of New York magazine summed it up: “Andrew Yang 2020: The world is fucked, you’re on your own, take some money, head to higher ground. Or as Brian Kahn of our sister site Earther put it: “The Heritage Foundation called, and it wants its white paper back.”

Yang then released his actual climate change plan in August. Again, I trust our friends at Earther when they wrote of it (emphasis mine):

So what are we to make of Yang’s plan? If Bernie’s is a revolution, and Inslee’s was dubbed a blueprint, then Yang’s is Silicon Valley’s entry into how we do this whole climate change solutions thing. It combines unproven technological fixes and magical thinking while also having a bit of a blind spot for environmental justice. It’s a plan that at once makes solving climate change feel hopeless and yet the solutions feel breezy when in some cases, they’ll be anything but. And that heady, strange brew is what still makes this whole thing feel like a house of cards on the beach with a hurricane swirling on the horizon.

Yet Yang’s brand of fake redistributive politics and technocratic fixes is proving remarkably durable. His latest stunt, where he announced a lottery in which he’d select ten families who’d get $1,000 per month for a year, helped him net a cool $1 million in donations and almost half a million new email sign-ups.

It’s clear that Yang is resonating with people who feel left behind. “He got the problems right,” Yang is fond of saying about Donald Trump—his solutions, he adds, were just wrong. This is an incredibly stupid thing to say about the president. But like him, Yang doesn’t get the problems right either. But hey, the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math, right?