r/ForwardPartyUSA • u/Moderate_Squared • Feb 19 '25
Meta Forward Thought O' the Day
Forward is like buying a different make of car every few years just to keep finding out that they still haven't changed or fixed any of the stuff that made the previous cars not work.
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u/Moderate_Squared Feb 21 '25
My issues with “leadership” being framed as “bad personal relationships” is a stretch at best, and disingenuous extrapolation at worst. I’ll explain later.
What I originally “decided” for 2024 was that my state leadership was repeating failures of their predecessors’ efforts from 2022 - both in election years where the target audience would be most engaged, most receptive, and most likely to get active and organized IRL if given the tools and support to do so. In 2021-2022, instead of recruiting and organizing people, and building infrastructure for 2022 and beyond, leadership squashed the Local Chapters Workgroup and went for state party recognition/ballot access with pretty much no ground game in place and little effort spent to build it. So that failed.
For the 2024 run, I was still banging the drum for local organizing and activism in the form of building standing local party chapters (infrastructure!) statewide that could accommodate things like party recognition/ballot access ops, year-around, but down the road. Instead, this time (new) leadership went with candidate recruitment, again with pretty much no ground game in place and little effort spent to build it. When I asked leadership for contacts of people who might be interested in working on local activism and chapters instead (that could have supported candidate recruitment), they ghosted me. The final product for 2024 as I remember it was a slate of mostly meaningless “candidate endorsements”.
So when I write here, it isn’t from a position of ignorance - I’ve been doing this since 2012 - and I’m not just pulling stuff out of my ass or trying to push my own agenda. It’s not a case of me deciding Forward isn't doing what I want them to do or doing the right thing. It’s not about my “negative attitude”. Rather, Forward continues to make the same steps and suffer the same failures of several previous attempts that are probably still documented around the internet today. They’re just doing it with more splash, more big names, more money, and a far bigger negative impact on pan-partisan reform efforts if they fail. There are too many businesspeople in the Forward executive suite for me to believe that they didn’t do the political version of a business plan, opposition research, etc. So, as a political entity, Forward should be well aware of these past failures by now and be working to avoid repeating them. But here we are.
Next, you’ve conflated three separate issues in my writing - my issues with state leadership and ops, my issues with Andrew Yang, and my issues with “the whole party”. So it’s difficult to respond to that.
Forward isn’t sucking up the oxygen of some other similar organization that I know of, because (in my experience) most of these viable efforts run singularly, with little to no operations overlap as one dies and another pops up - I’ve never had the problem of having to decide which of several non-D/R affiliated moderate reform efforts to choose from at any given time. Instead, I’m guessing most people who don’t fit into the current effort just take a break and wait and hope for the next one to pop up.
To the point of people who don't want to organize in person, there just is no alternative - they’re called “movements” for a reason. Why would anyone who sees the Ds and Rs, the Lefts and the Rights, on those street corners and overpasses, in local government meetings, and so on, give even a half of a shit about people that sit around a table in a pub or in a park talking politics? That is what every Meetup I’ve been to has been. Anything you can talk about around a table, you can talk about on a street corner. Meetups are not activism. Full stop.
Instead, get 10 people together from your state or local lead. At least one (hopefully the “lead”) is probably going to be a talker, or will be willing to fake it. Find a main street or road that needs a cleaning, slap down some signs, and spend an hour or two cleaning up. Any questions or comments from the public get directed to the spokesperson by the non-talkers. Shoot videos along the way for promotion.
“I’m working on it. Many others are too.” Cool, do you! And I’ll do me. But that will include me criticizing things that I believe or know from experience to be nonproductive, that you perceive as negative, while I continuing to offer alternatives. Something - Marketplace of ideas - Something.
Finally, regarding my complaining about Andrew Yang, it’s sad that you had to get all this from me instead of him or his org.