I interviewed the presidential candidate Andrew Yang for half an hour before he held a rally in Chicago in the fall of 2018. His candidacy was relatively unknown at the time, so he was taking all the press he could muster. I myself had little to offer, but my intern-y affiliations with a small national labor magazine conferred enough credibility that his people reached out, even after I\u2019d acknowledged to them that no editors anywhere bit on my pitches, and so the prospective piece would likely never land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I first heard of Yang while driving from Walla Walla, Washington to Spokane. I was driving alone. At that point I\u2019d just graduated college and was working part-time as a local newspaper reporter and I was listening to Sam Harris\u2019s podcast, which is a common way to discover Yang. Yang came across as witty and smart. His ideas stood up to the light scrutiny of Harris, who played the friendly skeptic. The main idea about which Harris expressed his skepticism was Yang\u2019s policy proposal to give every American adult one thousand bucks per month without (ostensibly) a solitary string.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Univeral Basic Income attracts strange bedfellows. Libertarians sometimes like the idea because its enactment might be leveraged to gut the bureaucracy; Marxists sometimes like the idea because of its potential, in a living wage form, to liberate individuals from some of the insidious norms and structures that have traditionally defined mainstream economic life. Most normal people like the idea because $1,000 per month would be pretty helpful. The contours here are well-established and if you are interested to learn more you should read Dissent Magazine\u2019<\/em>s excellent piece<\/a> on the complicated history of UBI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having never encountered the concept in Yang\u2019s proposed form, I found it compelling and provocative, and I continued to vaguely track Yang over the following months. And so, out of that unlikely podcast moment, here is Yang, nobody presidential candidate, and here am I, nobody journalist, and we start off inauspicious: I ask him about another place on his \u201cHumanity First\u201d tour\u2014Detroit, where he says he has a \u201cbunch of friends.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cReally?\u201d I say. He was doing something with his briefcase. I ask him what running for president entails, and he took the question literal, explaining the constitutional requirement that one be 35 and a natural born citizen, and the legal requirement that you file some paperwork with the Federal Election Commission. Then he said, monotone and straight, that \u201cthe real challenge\u201d of running for president \u201cis that the whole thing is a giant social construction.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The quick backstory, which you can now get anywhere, including in Yang’s book, which is pretty good, is that he ran a non-profit called Venture for America which looked to train business leaders in regions with stagnating economies. He told me, and has told others that he felt like he was pouring water in a bathtub with a gaping hole in it, and what do you do then? You stop pouring water. You try to patch the hole\u2014especially when said bathtub hole threatens to \u201cdestroy us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I said lots of people might notice a similar sort of bathtub hole and would do a different thing than run for president. He said well, he\u2019s an entrepreneur and a problem solver at heart:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t ever propose something and say \u2018well even if I wanted to do this it would not actually make a difference.\u2019 And so I drew up: \u2018What could you do that would actually solve this problem?’\u2014the fact that we\u2019re quickly automating away the most common jobs in the American economy. And there are very, very few things one can meaningfully do to address that. And most all of them involve control of the government\u2026 because right now the market is the primary determinant of the value of people\u2019s time and how much money everyone makes. And the market does not care at all about displaced truck drivers, or cashiers, or\u2026 accountants or journalists\u2026 If you look at it objectively, America has invested faith in the market for the last several decades, and the market is about to fail us catastrophically. I mean, it has already been failing us in terms of elevating most people\u2019s standard of living, in my own life. But now it\u2019s really going to get catastrophically dark. We\u2019re in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of the world and its already brought us Donald Trump. By the time we get to the fourth, fifth, sixth inning it\u2019s going to be unimaginable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He would later say again, at the rally, as he does at many rallies, that \u201cthird inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation\u2026\u201d thing. He\u2019s very good, at\u00a0least<\/em>\u00a0on a superficial level, at staying on message, at telling a clean story. The story he tells is that the early waves of economic stagnation which he believes have been largely ushered in by automation\u2014and the logic that motivates its spread\u2014are well-upon us and quite ugly, if still relatively inconspicuous in certain privileged enclaves, such that well-positioned liberally-inclined folks can still ignore the rot. His story is that that rapid economic deterioration of this character will continue, accelerate rapidly, and sprawl if we don\u2019t act swiftly. Many economists take issue with this account, but it is a compelling and intuitive-seeming one, and he earnestly makes the case for it in terms of easy-to-understand numbers and trends, colored and bolstered rhetorically with anecdotal attributions to this or that in-the-know friend of his in venture capital or Silicon Valley. He paints himself as a kind of bridge between these elite-types and \u201cnormal people,\u201d and he says these elite folks have told him, over lunch, for example, their dire and presumably well-informed predictions for the trajectory of American capitalism. Yang\u2019s story is that he looks at the situation objectively, and considers dispassionate non-ideological solutions that take as a premise that human life is innately valuable and that the market, left as it has been to its own psychopathic devices, does not share in this premise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It can be difficult to tell what Yang thinks about the amoralism of contemporary American capitalism. He understands and can explain its most brutal tendencies quite well, but it worries some critics that he doesn\u2019t seem to outright condemn these tendencies per se. Yang ultimately identifies as a capitalist, and this sensibility shows up in his corporate-sounding lexicon, by which Yang unironically deploys the rhetoric of \u201cjob-creators\u201d and \u201centrepreneurship\u201d that tends to show up as nonsense to those skeptical of capitalistic platitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He\u2019s not concerned about how he sounds on such rhetorical litmus tests. He told me the \u201centire dichotomy of socialism and capitalism is decades old and anachronistic, and right now the temptation is for someone who sees the problems of capitalism to say \u2018well I hate the stuff so I must want the opposite, which is socialism.\u2019 I\u2019m going to say two things from what a guy named Eric Weinstein said that I agree with wholeheartedly: The first thing he said is that \u2018we did not know that capitalism was going to be eaten by its son, technology,\u2019 and the second thing is that \u2018we need to become both radically capitalist and radically socialist in different arenas.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So Yang says he\u2019s not interested in semantics. I said that some people are, and he said that his policies would be attractive to the average left-wing voter, but that he sees in invocations of socialism a pernicious nostalgia, \u201ca fondness for a world that never existed.\u201d He thinks there are ways to credibly engage with the dark forces of our time\u2014automation and climate change being dark force 1a and 1b on his list\u2014\u201cthat don\u2019t frankly look back on the teachings of someone from like a hundred years ago\u201d\u2014he laughs here\u2014\u201cas, like, the end all be all. Because no one 100 years ago could have foreseen artificial intelligence or any of the technologies we\u2019re currently looking at, and so I quote Joe Rogan on something he said in his recent Netflix special, which is that \u2018if the founding fathers woke up today, their first question would be: You mean you didn\u2019t write any new shit?\u2019 We have to stop looking backwards. We seem to be obsessed with what the scrolls <\/em>say, you know? It\u2019s a stupid way to think about trying to\u201d\u2014he caught himself: \u201cI don\u2019t want to be dismissive, but we have to get with the program: it\u2019s like, 2018 soon 2020. We have to have some new ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cnostalgia\u201d that Yang is somewhat glibly critiquing here consists, he told me in the supposed aspiration among many on the left to return to the halcyon, equitable economies of the fifties and sixties. He says the idea that these economies were in many ways better for the working class is accurate, but that trends regarding globalization, deregulation, automation, contracting\u2014all the forces and avenues by which corporations have found ways to weasel out of any and all genuine civic obligations\u2014have rendered this vision of return a fantasy. Yang went on that Bernie\u2014who he said he would have voted for, had he voted in the 2016 primary\u2014is among those who \u201cunfortunately hue to a vision of the economy that is still extremely institutional and institutionally led.\u00a0 It\u2019s like \u2018get the institutions to treat people the way we want them to be treated.\u2019 Instead we should just provide people directly with the things that would make them better able to accomplish their own goals and meet their own needs and adapt for the future, and just skip the middleman.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I were quicker-witted, I would have pressed Yang on what exactly he means when he dismisses an \u201cinstitutionally led\u201d vision of change, or when he paints the picture of a left stuck in the past. His unchallenged elaboration was that \u201ctrying to pretend that we can massage our current version of the economy into something that seems moral based upon things like increasing the minimum wage or bullying companies into treating people better strikes me as the wrong approach. I think we should look directly at the goals that we have, such as getting money into people\u2019s hands, and just say \u2018okay, we want to put money into people\u2019s hands? The most direct and effective way to do that is to put money in people\u2019s hands.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why is forcing companies to be better the \u201cwrong approach?\u201d The implication here, that we should not try to go through corporations to make our society more moral, because that is a lost cause\u2014just not going to happen\u2014feels like a remarkably radical concession for the government to make\u2014being as it supposedly is the only <\/em>locus of institutional might sufficient to patch the bathtub hole. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For Yang, this may be the reality we live in, and we need new ideas to make this world work\u2014to salvage a modest little bubble of humanity impervious to forces of the market. But for many on the left, this is a deeply pessimistic vision, and it is already when you should stop taking Yang seriously. (Moreover, if critical thinking consists in one part intellectual humility, another in a charitable ear, this ungenerous take on Bernie\u2019s singularly expansive political vision does not inspire much confidence in the man whose sober intellect is the hallmark of his brand, a man who frequently invokes\u2014 albeit with a layer of irony\u2014the nerdy Asian stereotype to bolster his credibility as a foil to Donald Trump.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n But neither are critics on the left particularly charitable to Yang<\/em>, who has taken heat for the absence of explicit class politics in his campaign. Indeed, he does not explicitly engage in the rhetoric of collective action. Critics see his UBI proposal as a mere palliative, an unimaginative morsel bestowed from on high to the masses, who would not, under the new policy ultimately be in a better position to challenge existing structures of inequality and power. For someone who thinks our version of capitalism\u2014with its perverse incentives and market failures\u2014is failing us catastrophically, he doesn\u2019t seem particularly interested in fundamentally challenging its premises. The focus on tone and rhetoric might seem flighty, but this isn\u2019t itself the problem, because it is also kind of all we have to go on to judge the guy\u2019s instincts. For a piece<\/a> I wrote about the New Hampshire family to which Yang, in a publicity stunt is personally giving one thousand dollars per month, I interviewed Kathi Weeks, who wrote a book advocating for a living-wage UBI on Feminist-Marxist grounds. She said the key question for lefty-oriented folks regarding Yang is whether his proposal is framed as a kind of groundwork for broader political transformation, or whether its\u2019 just kind of \u201cblithely\u201d pitched as a \u201csolution\u201d per se that allows us to retain existing structures and economic norms. Nathan Robinson made a good case<\/a> in Current Affairs<\/em> that Yang, if his rhetoric is to be taken seriously, understands UBI in terms of the latter vision (for one, it would be paid for with a probably regressive tax, and by giving people a choice regarding whether to keep their current benefits or take the UBI.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that Yang doesn\u2019t actively speak with a certain progressive lexicon doesn\u2019t necessarily mean his politics don\u2019t engage with progressive moral imperatives. If the contours on which our political divisions are conceived in the mainstream media are mostly nonsense; if as far as ordinary people go, the power dynamics, and thus the lines on which bonds of political solidarity can or ought to be established, in fact have very little to do with someone\u2019s voter registration\u2014which is mostly a reflections of the milieu from which a person emerged\u2014and a lot to do with a person\u2019s education, race, class, gender, legal status, etc., then the eclectic following Yang has forged is worth taking very seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To cast automation as the bogeyman has, for Yang, proven to be an effectively apolitical (in the sense that it does not provoke traditional \u201cpolitical\u201d divisions) rhetorical move, implicitly establishing a new common ground in the form of a collective dark fate to which most working class, and eventually, middle class people will, the story goes, be subjected. That Yang is not actively speaking the language of socialism could then be beside the point. The delineations are clear enough: Inequality will dramatically increase as the owners of said automatons scurry off with the loot, leave the rest to of us to our desolate fates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That in the process of making this point he doesn\u2019t make a moral judgement on the looters, who he says are just doing what any other human in their position would do, is an important aspect of his political sensibility. Some might find it unpalatable\u2014many humans do in fact carry on their lives and negotiate their power without actively fucking over everyone else\u2014but it is also central to his broad appeal. This amoral style is also operative in regards to Yang\u2019s reluctance to employ rhetoric that addresses distinct, non class-based political identities like race or gender: he (not to me, but in other contexts) has said this would not be an effective rhetorical tool by which to win an election, because on its cue\u2014the rhetoric’s legitimacy notwithstanding\u2014he thinks a lot of people who honestly mostly share a similar set of goals lose their shit and get all riled up despite being on the same team where the rubber meets the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yang reminds me of the friends of mine who are into Econ but are not tools: I tolerate their occasional displays of intellectual arrogance, and appreciate their refreshingly good-faith political arguments. Yang wants to apply cold logic to a purely humanistic end, a utilitarian mindset that aims to rise to see the forest, that is more interested in ends than means. And take it a step further, and the resulting tension\u2014of having a basic moral vision but not worrying about the rhetoric that gets you there\u2014actually colors the supposedly objective logic that undergirds his policy proposals with an endearing touch of naiveite, operating as it is out of the implicit assumption that in fact the world works in terms of any logic at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, the dark side of this naivete would be the sort of oblivious, baseless, master-of-universe self-confidence endemic to the consulting\/tech\/econ major milieu with which Yang is so often simplistically grouped. Yang tells a clean story about a messy world. But is it too clean? But does it leaves all of us off the hook? The poor economic circumstances we find ourselves in are, in his telling, almost platonic, entirely detached from the people who largely bear responsibility for creating them. For folks on the left, politics is a messy game, and it leaves everyone\u2014though some far more than others\u2014dirty to the bone. Yang\u2019s vision sounds substantive in theory; but critics argue it lacks moxie, that the notion of rendering corporations irrelevant by working around them becomes absurd upon contact with the material world in which corporate interests abide, that what sounds like cold-blooded pragmatism in fact pales in its fortitude to the broad-based, hard-nosed, vaguely utopian visions espoused by the most prominent and dynamic figures on the left, who refuse to concede unchecked corporate power as a given. Yang\u2019s proposals are certainly big, but they might stand to be a little more ambitious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think people find me interesting in that I contain certain contradictions,\u201d said Yang as the interview was wrapping up. Now just coming off his second debate on the national stage, and poised for a third as his improbable ascension continues, he believed at the time that he could clarify his case to skeptics, that his sometimes flippant amoral rhetoric belied a fertile common ground of concern for capitalism\u2019s dehumanizing impulses. He took pains, in our interview, to present himself as an (innovative) friend of labor. But he says in regards to the labor movement\u2019s prospects, that \u201cno one gives a shit about your point of view, because our country has now been dominated by market-based thinking. And if you are pro-labor, pro-union, you are trying to preserve some inefficient labor practices that belong in the past and have no place here in the 21st century.\u201d He spoke admiringly of the moral high ground on which he believes labor folks often stand, but he thinks that, in the current state of our economy, moral-standing is irrelevant. \u201cWe need to keep fighting, but we need to change the rules of the game,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need a game changer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, here he is. He said he really wants\u2014and needs, he acknowledged at the time\u2014to reach folks on the left. \u201cWe are<\/em> aligned,\u201d said Yang. I may not look and sounds necessarily like the people are used to.\u201d He paused. \u201cBut I want the same things. And I\u2019m convinced that I can add a loooot of value.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yang told me the origin story of his campaign (which may well be a Mangoprism <\/em>exclusive, because I have not read it anywhere else, and all of the articles about him say same thing, so it doesn\u2019t seem to be part of his standard well of anecdotes). He and Andy Stern\u2014the former Service Employees International Union president\u2014met for breakfast in New York to talk about the automation problem that they believe will destroy the American working class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I imagine this as one of those cool lunches Yang recounts sharing with this or that person in the know, who gave it to him straight, no bullshit, and he as a candidate is here to convey the candid message. He and Stern are talking UBI, and the automation problem, which they see as being grossly underrepresented in mainstream discourse. Per Yang\u2019s telling: Yang says \u201cwhose running on this\u201d and Stern says \u201cabsolutely nobody,\u201d and Yang says, \u201cthen I\u2019ll run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhich I knew going in because I\u2019d met with other people I\u2019d thought might run and none them were going to do it,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then I knew, given that Andy is the foremost voice on this issue, that he would know if anyone was running or not.\u201d So going in to the lunch Yang says he was thinking, \u201c\u2019well if he tells me someone else is gonna run on it, then great: I don\u2019t have to drop everything and do it myself.\u2019 I kind of expected him to say \u2018nobody\u2019 though, because I understand how the world works. Like most of the time nobody does shit. And then you have to do it yourself. That\u2019s just the way the world works, most of the time.\u201d \u25a9<\/p>\n\n\n\n I interviewed the presidential candidate Andrew Yang for half an hour before he held a rally in Chicago in the fall of 2018. His candidacy was relatively unknown at the time, so he was taking all the press he could muster. I myself had little to offer, but my intern-y affiliations with a small national […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"contributors":[489],"seasons":[480],"class_list":["post-3548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","contributors-andrew-schwartz","seasons-480"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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