It is interesting to think about the psychology behind why so many progressives seem to dislike Yang but not the more conservative Adams. For DSA types, I guess it's simply because Yang is a Businessman and that's bad. Also he's Ivy League educated which is also bad. For "woke" (for lack of a better word) types, there doesn't seem to be a strong desire to actually compare Yang's and Adams' positions on policing and what not, even though Adams' positions appear to be further to the right. This could be because Adams is black and as a result they are either (1) inaccurately assuming that Adams is more progressive than he really is, or (2) accurately (?) guessing that an Adams win would be perceived in the media as more social justice-y (or at least less anti-woke) and if you are immersed all day in a world of hot takes, then projecting a social justice-y feeling or vibe does more to change society than enacting social justice policies.
I think the left wing types tend to be the more obnoxious gatekeeping personalities and so when someone encroaches on their “turf” they get irrationally vicious. You saw it with Warren and you’re seeing it with Yang.
It’s weird in the Yang case because RCV means you don’t have to worry about a vote for Yang taking a vote away from Wiley or Morales. Honestly it just seems like it’s more about projecting an identity rather than actually wanting to capture political power. Like the cliche example of liking a band before they got big.
Also an Ivy Leaguer! Good point. I vaguely recall there was one viral tweet from the primaries where some guy who had gone to middle school with Buttigieg bragged about once having dunked Buttigieg's head into a toilet. The tweet received a very large number of likes.
You'd think the middle school neanderthal vote would better fit a right-wing psych profile. Which has to make you wonder how many members of this particular subset of "progressives" are really all that progressive at heart, and how many of them will end up being David Horowitz.
Not sure about Yang, but with Buttigieg the progressive disdain was said to skew young, toward GenZ and millennials. Maybe what it really is is not-so-thinly-veiled "privilege or accomplishment envy." Ivy league schools have never been easy to get into it, but I'd imagine its now a good deal harder to gain entrance to one than it was for GenXers, or, needless to say, baby boomers. And, critically, in our increasingly "winner take all" society, it's perceived (accurately or not) that the advantages flowing from fancy school degrees are bigger (and thus more "unfair") than ever before. So, maybe a lot of it is resentment. (Which possibly might be overcome by a candidate who is truly uberwoke and hard-left, but otherwise he/she comes in for savaging).
For sure. And so you also see a lot of energy committed to advancing the notion that Ivy League admission is purely a sign of generational wealth or even flat-out cheating. So you see people start by citing problems with legacies and Jared Kushner types, but then sweep in all or nearly all admittees so as to blur the distinction between bribing the school with donations or getting a high SAT score. Both are portrayed, with a lot of hand-waving, as nothing more than different forms of cheating.
Buttigieg and Yang both grew up moderately affluent but obviously neither fits the "generational wealth" category at all. But that doesn't seem to affect their hateability quotients. Which would support your "accomplishment envy" thesis. I guess that shouldn't be surprising considering that so many left-wingers these days feel no compunction about opposing the interests of even *non-affluent* urban Asian immigrant families with high-achieving high school kids, although I don't think the left-wingers have gone so far as to define the immigrant families as enemies - they usually portray them more as dupes.
In principle a cop is even worse than a businessman for my comrades at the DSA. But Adams as a relatively conservative Black man who doesn't have a fancy education or appeal to voters with fancy educations. They never met somebody like him at college.
He doesn't compute for them, neither does the rather large slice of culturally conservative, low-income-but-not-destitute NYC politics he represents. The joke is that he runs Brooklyn! If there is one place besides Cambridge, MA where you think they'd get the local politics...
Nah - the absolute, vitriolic hate for Yang is because he’s an outsider. All these major candidates have spent years, if not decades, climbing a greasy pole to mayor - and now here swoops in a guy who’s never even voted in a mayoral election before, to take what’s rightfully “theirs”.
I think in that crowd the key is you have to be loudly contemptuous of other Ivy Leaguers and of the value of elite education in general. Which certainly can be done. But Yang is just a regular Ivy League alum who studied hard, majored in econ, and became an affluent normie white-collar professional. That makes him extremely hateable for them.
Nah - the absolute, vitriolic hate for Yang is because he’s an outsider. All these major candidates have spent years, if not decades, climbing a greasy pole to mayor - and now here swoops in a guy who’s never even voted in a mayoral election before, to take what’s rightfully “theirs”.
"If you will, imagine explaining to someone who knows what words mean but who was in a coma for the last year, that the progressives are the ones who want to divert money away from public safety to pay for cash transfers, while the moderates want to tax unproductive landowners to pay for it."
Literally LOL (in enjoyment, that was very well-said).
I don’t think people aren’t taking his *ideas* seriously, they aren’t taking Yang himself seriously (other than that his star power has won over many people including Marc, which makes him a serious threat to win). And that lack of seriousness is with good reason.
On every other issue besides UBI, Yang largely seems to be a coin flip - he agrees with whoever he talked to last. Like on the bus lane in Flushing, one day he thought it was great and then one day he said it was terrible (because he talked to some shop owners who want parking and don’t understand how many people come by bus). Who knows what he really thinks.
If elected it’s very likely he will either have random views on other issues, based on whoever he hires, or rapidly fluctuating ones. I wouldn’t take that chance just because my candidate was best on one issue that matters to me.
Experience does matter in a role like mayor, because the mayor does a huge amount more than just proposing one big idea. And Yang has comically little experience.
Finally, I wouldn’t use Ritchie Torres’ support as all that much evidence of anything. Individual politicians support candidates for a lot of reasons including personal connection and ambition to get a role in an administration, not just policy. I don’t know Torres’ reasons and don’t want to impugn his motives, but it isn’t persuasive that Yang’s policies are necessarily best for his constituents.
I am a former resident of New York, consider myself a progressive, and generally like Andrew Yang and find him more funny than offensive. However, this article didn't really come off as a great defense for him.
First, the sweeping generalizations about the progressives just seem like a bit much. I don't feel a subgroup to the greater progressive left should be really be framed as representing the views of the entire progressive left.
Second, I gave Yang a chance when he was running for president, but I found some of him unappealing, frustrating, and overall unserious. His mayoral campaign has been an improvement, though.
Some of the things he does kind of make me feel he is not ideologically disciplined. The first politician I knocked on doors for was Barrack Obama. There were a lot of things he said I disagreed with. A lot of decisions he made I didn't like. However, he seemed like a serious person that reached the conclusions he did after serious deliberation. On the other hand, Andrew Yang comes off to me as someone saying shit in the moment, which gives me pause. Criticizing left-wing messaging is one thing, but I often felt he was acting in bad faith. For example, the appearances on right-wing media criticizing the left's identity politics in 2019, yet now he uses identity politics messaging on the campaign trail. He said one of his motivations for running for president was that he didn't feel he met politicians who really cared about the issues facing regular people. Yet, he mentions Cory Booker as one of his good friends. He complained that American society was too unforgiving when a comedian denied a job on SNL because of past racist comments. Yet, on the campaign trail, he takes issue with a racist caricature of him (which he should have, I agree with him on this). So I think it is essential to acknowledge differences between presidential candidate Yang and NYC Mayoral candidate Yang.
My interactions with his campaign people and Yang himself a couple of times left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I don't need a candidate to be "woke" (I don't even know what that word means anymore, to be honest). Still, there a numerous civil rights issues facing people of color, and Yang's people seem to think that his economic policies, especially what seemed like a slapped-together UBI policy, were a panacea. Him being an upbeat, optimistic polularist sometimes works. Still, him being constantly surprised at information voters were telling him about how bad certain things were for them was not a good look for Yang. It was at best frustrating, at worse condescending. If you start talking about UBI when I ask about voting rights, you lost me. I think the Yang Gang were just as out of touch in their own way. Just like some of the activists left, they often criticize.
Also, I am a black man that lived in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Harlem during the Bloomberg. I have no issue with the NYPD budget staying the same in an effort to fight crime, especially violent crime because the harmful effects of crime affect minority communities the most. However, the NYPD needs a lot of oversight, or they will operate as a racist, oppressive street gang that doesn't respect many of the minority residents they are sworn to protect. Getting my constitutional rights violated constantly was not fun, nor was having a gun in my face because they mistook me for someone else. My concern with Yang as mayor is his habit of courting right-leaning support and doing what is politically convenient for him will lead him to have a blind spot with the NYPD. If the NYPD can get the crime figures where he wants them, he will not hold them accountable. That is a significant worry for me.
Again, I generally like Yang and think he has some good ideas. But I think people a justified to have concerns about him and his judgment. Yang entered the race with a large amount of name recognition and a built-in fan base. Yet only being able to win a primary because of a larger weak field, abandoning much of your previous political messaging, and a unique primary system working in your favor doesn't seem like a major endorsement of Andrew Yang's politics.
I'm skeptical and but hopeful. I told my mother she should vote for him over Adams. I hope the right instincts kick in at the right time, and he does not do anything stupid while in office.
I appreciate your response and your insight here. I'm not a New Yorker at all, but I was a supporter during the presidential campaign and was involved in helping with the Melanated Council of Yang group and YouTube channel (I'm a black supporter myself in Mass). As for his mayoral run, I'm glad you see it as an improvement because I was afraid that there were a lot of ppl who liked him in the presidential who didn't like his "less progressive" mayoral campaign or his very touchy comments on Israel / Palestine.
Either way, I hope Yang wins and doesn't do anything stupid in office like you said!
The point about progressives speaking like they are appealing to program managers at funds is super interesting. A while ago Perry Bacon Jr. wrote an article talking about how you determine if a leader actually speaks for the community they represent, saying it’s tricky to tell but you should think about who they are accountable to. It definitely sounds like Yang and Adams talk like they want to be accountable to the people of NYC, not just their self-selected peers. I wonder if a big challenge for progressives now is to figure out how to make sure their leaders are accountable to the masses.
It really is weird how many progressives prioritize accountability to activists over accountability to voters. Especially when they're presenting their policies as things that will help the average voter.
Here we go again. Only 50 years after the New York City fiscal crisis, we seem to have forgotten that you can’t erect a comprehensive welfare state on a municipal basis, cash-driven or not, because you don’t have sovereignty and the tax base can easily flee. There is a reason that the successes have been Federal programs.
Most of the mayoral candidates (Yang included) are very specific in their ideas about how to spend city tax money on social welfare, but pretty vague or unrealistic on where the money is going to come from. or on how the budget will do this spending while also supporting the commonweal for the great majority of the City’s residents. Until the latest string of atrocities in the subway, most of them also cared more about being seen as sufficiently anti-police than about dealing with the creeping breakdown in law and order in the City.
Yet those two things - the economy and security - are going to be virtually the only important things in the next Mayor’s term. Maintaining any kind of progressive vision depends utterly on success in handling those two things. I can’t see Yang doing that. Instead I see a lot of small-bore stuff that gets some attention because it's out of the box. It merely goes to build his brand.
Yang is proposing we give $1 billion to poor people. The budget is almost $100 billion https://www1.nyc.gov/site/omb/index.page . I don't see how the tax base would flee over that. And I agree it's not as easy for the city government to do welfare, but that's why it's good it's just cash!
I feel this is a complacent attitude. The City budget won't be $90+ billion when the post-Covid property tax reassessments and the income and business tax shortfalls hit the scene. Hard decisions will need to be made over basic stuff like schools, police, sanitation as well as the plethora of other social services (with its jobs) that the city provides. A $1 billion cash giveaway to a small fraction of the city population at a time when basic services are being cut will not be viewed well.
There has been a rash of gruesome and frightening slashings, pushings, and beatings in the subway for the past year. A week or two ago there were three of them in one day. Like the bad old days. With much arm-twisting the MTA has gotten the City to send more police into the system. For social justice reasons the police can't stake out the turnstiles any more, so they're stuck trying to run down potential criminals in the stations and on the trains. There will never be enough cops to do that effectively.
"At many times, it feels like the point of the progressive movement in 2021 isn’t to gain power and then enact reforms to ameliorate suffering, but rather to impress each other by saying the most inoffensive words in the most inoffensive order and then if you predictably lose in a landslide, so what, because everybody who didn’t agree with you from the start is racist anyway."
This so true, and it drives me nuts. Yesterday I talked to an older progressive mayor who had been inspired to go into politics by the civil rights movement. In describing his work he immediately talked about how he had been steadily accruing power. That's when I knew I liked the guy.
UBI made a lot more sense as a proposal from Yang the presidential candidate than from Yang the mayoral candidate. As it now stands, his municipal UBI isn't universal. It's only for the poor, so it creates exactly the kind of cliff-edge disincentive that a real UBI would avoid. (There are understandable reasons of cost not to make the program universal--but again that's a reason UBI should rely on the federal tax base, not the tax base of a single city.)
I don't really think aggressive income redistribution can work at the local level, so the candidates in this or any other municipal race ought to be judged by their positions on other issues.
It was done in America and it helped! UBI is better than income-targeted cash transfers. However, income-targeted cash transfers are still good. Stimulus checks! Periodic child tax credit in the form of checks!
I'm not opposed to UBI; I'm opposed to UBI financed by city-level taxes. The Stockton experiment was funded by donors and it's proof of concept for a tax-funded national program. But if some cities institute UBI and others don't, poor people will move to the cities that have it and non-poor people will move away.
A federal UBI wouldn't create the same kind of adverse selection--although I'll get on my usual hobbyhorse here and say that in general, the US should require immigrants to have four-year college degrees.
Because I'm in favor of a very redistributive welfare state, either via UBI or some other approach. Low-skilled immigrants may not be a net negative under current circumstances, but they would be if we had a better tax-and-transfer system.
I'm an immigrant. Part of getting my green card required me to get a sponsor who guaranteed that they would pay back the government for any means-tested assistance I accepted until I had worked for 10 years. Making immigrants ineligible for UBI until they have paid enough into the system seems feasible.
They would be contributing to the economy. Also, I don't think we should assume that we can know who will contribute what. It's very possible for someone to come without a four-year degree and start a small business or get a degree or something like that
Aggressive income redistribution won't work at the municipal level. However, if this cash transfer program does well, that opens the door to it happening in more cities and more ambitious versions happening at the state level. And you kind of need that to happen before the Federal government is going to entertain anything like a UBI seriously.
Universal UBI is an accounting fiction. Yes, everyone may get it on paper, but anyone earning any significant income will in fact be funding other’s UBI. The advantage of the universal UBI is that if one loses their job, there’s no paperwork to file to get UBI.
Overall good article. But, I don't think that you can really compare a one time stimulus check going to 95% of people to a means tested annual check going to 5% of people in terms of popularity.
I guess that's fair. A Yang pollster that I talked to sent me their polls that suggested their specific plan of paying only the poorest 500,000 was polling at 72-17 in NYC in January
I think the bigger issue, over and above whether a program is universal or not, ongoing or not, is that for a couple of generations it's been verboten in politics to really even talk about direct cash transfers to needy citizens. It either had to be done in weird backhand tax code ways, or it was seen as better for the government to provide services directly (that way the undeserving poors couldn't spend it on drugs or whatever). The opening up of space for direct cash transfers to those in need is a sea change.
I think as 'informed citizens,' there's a real internal pressure to rank five candidates, which you're welcome to do, and in theory, should. But in practice, if the race doesn't go through a major shift in the next few weeks, and you still want to rank those three candidates as your first three, the likelihood that they all get eliminated before the last round is essentially 0. You're talking about the final round being like Stringer vs Wiley. That does not strike me as a real possibility.
I am a Yang vs Garcia undecided voter who will vote Stringer #3 to keep Adams out. I don't want a gun-toting mayor who explicitly defends placard abuse by city officials.
The placard abuse stuff is serious, if you *make a campaign issue* of how it is OK, you will never reform any department of the city. I think Yglesias calls it "broken windows for cops" - if they can publicly flaunt how the rules don't apply to them in a small-medium issue, you won't get them to believe the official rules apply anywhere else.
Adams and his staff park illegally outside of Brooklyn Borough Hall in incredibly conspicuous positions. He says that they will stop when other city departments stop doing the same thing, and that Yang is a suburbanite for complaining. It would be a minor issue if he just did this hypocritically, but he is defending this bad dangerous practice publicly, *as a campaign issue,* and calling his opponent a weenie for complaining about it.
Adams is an interesting man with many sides, I don't want to demonize him. But I can't vote for somebody running in a platform of "cops have the right to park illegally in bike lanes."
I’m a big McGuire fan. All the good parts of the Bloomberg years with a more socially progressive vision.
McGuire, Garcia, Adams, Yang, Stringer (or Donovan, but he’s just so out of touch…). Hoping McGuire catches on, but running out of time.
Most important thing with RCV in a wide open race is making sure that you end up voting for one of the final 2.
On Yang, he has (some) good ideas, but worry about his ability to manage a tough city government. Also concerned about Basic Income — I am not sure how I can square “giving people $300/week in unemployment & $2000 checks is contributing to people not working” with “giving people basic income won’t contribute to people not working”. Seems like a backwards way of recreating the (unsuccessful) welfare state that existed before the mid-90s.
If the extra unemployment and stimulus checks are keeping people from working, it is probably those people who have additional resources to make not working more tolerable or because they can avoid large expenses like rent because of the eviction moratorium. There’s also the transient disincentives from the pandemic. $2000 a year is not enough to live on but could also make it easier to find a job: buy a cheap car to make commuting easier, get child care, etc.
To my understanding, Yang has suggested (by saying he'd appointing her Deputy Mayor) that a vote for him is lowkey a vote for Garcia and she'd run a big chunk of his administration. So the series "Garcia, Yang" makes sense if you're going to put Garcia in your list.
Does Matt have more than one intern? It would be nice to see a Slow Boring pitch for Eric Adams, whose blend of hopelessly-unpopular-but-actually-popular ideas, mildly corrupt behavior in office and solid working-class appeal strikes me as something Max Weber would respect.
Second, I think you're making a quite unfair comparison to Biden with your use of the "nothing would fundamentally change" quote. It seems pretty clear in context that Biden was talking about the living standards of the wealthy people in the room (who Biden was and is planning to tax to pay for various progressive causes that will raise standards of living overall).
I think the thing I'm getting at is that when candidates (or their aides for that matter) talk to business interests, they are going to downplay their support for higher taxes. I think it's fine to worry about what candidates tell them, but I think it's better to listen to the candidates directly. Here's Yang's proposal on raising various taxes https://www.yangforny.com/policies/raising-revenue-for-new-york-city .
I don’t live in NYC so I haven’t been paying super close attention to the details of this race, but you’ve done a pretty good job moving my vague intuition that Yang is bad into a vague intuition that maybe Yang is good. Also I’m shocked that Yang is not even nearly as rich as Bernie or Warren were; it’s amazing the way narratives get constructed around candidates that have little bearing on the facts.
In general I’ve been struggling so much with people who call themselves progressives lately. I used to be one, and I really don’t feel like I’ve changed much, but what that word means feels like it’s changed around me. Definitely feeling this here in San Francisco where I think it’s hard to argue that the “progressives” on the Board of Supervisors are anything other than its most conservative members in terms of their complete resistance to any change in the status quo. Interesting to see something similar happening in NYC and across the country.
I think you have to be really careful about the label "progressive" in this context. We have a tendency to look at the term through the lens of "people I hear about on Twitter", but they aren't necessarily representative of all the individuals that use the label.
One of the key takeaways of the this election is that even in a Democratic primary for a very Democratic city, the activist/non-profit aligned candidates don't seem to be making much headway. This was the same trend we saw in the presidential primary too -- not only are loud activists not representative of the average voter, they aren't even representative of the average progressive voter!
Sanders had a clear path to victory in both primaries (in a "this might work" sense not a "sure thing" sense), and very clear plans for how to govern differently than a centrist Democrat, especially on foreign policy. Warren's path to victory made sense on its own terms (tho' it was clearly based on mistaken assumptions), and she also had a very clear sense of what she could make the federal government do. In Congress AOC stands for a clear set of positions and moves the conversation in her direction.
The NYC municipal left seems mostly to be interested in talking a certain way. They don't *want* to win (look at the Morales campaign falling apart in a symbolic fight about unionizing jobs that will be gone in June), they don't plan to do anything different from De Blasio if they do (who is also on "the left" for whatever that's worth). If they had the least sense of urgency about what they claim to care about they'd be alarmed by Eric Adams. Instead they are offended by Yang, without understanding why he is popular or making any real effort to stop him.
Also no normal gay person was offended by Yang's remarks at Stonewall. (He talked about re-opening gay bars at an event at a famous gay bar! My God!). He was speaking to a group of gay *senior Democratic party operatives who hate his guts.* Christine Quinn was offended but she'd be offended by anything he says or does. Of course it was up to the media to decide how to react to this.
I'm a Garcia #1, Yang #2 voter for now, but the reaction to Yang strikes me as completely crazy.
This may be dumb, but given that Stonewall Dems are literally named after a gay bar (and the riots that happened there) It was funny to me to hear them argue that gay bars aren't important.
If I thought Yang was somehow worse for Black trans teens than the others I'd hold that against him. This was a bunch of professional Democratic operatives and fundraiser types who were committed to other candidates & just looking for an excuse to be offended by Yang.
He even said our vibrant gay community contributes to the NYC culture scene and makes it a more attractive tourist destination, I can't imagine anything more homophobic than that.
It is interesting to think about the psychology behind why so many progressives seem to dislike Yang but not the more conservative Adams. For DSA types, I guess it's simply because Yang is a Businessman and that's bad. Also he's Ivy League educated which is also bad. For "woke" (for lack of a better word) types, there doesn't seem to be a strong desire to actually compare Yang's and Adams' positions on policing and what not, even though Adams' positions appear to be further to the right. This could be because Adams is black and as a result they are either (1) inaccurately assuming that Adams is more progressive than he really is, or (2) accurately (?) guessing that an Adams win would be perceived in the media as more social justice-y (or at least less anti-woke) and if you are immersed all day in a world of hot takes, then projecting a social justice-y feeling or vibe does more to change society than enacting social justice policies.
I think the left wing types tend to be the more obnoxious gatekeeping personalities and so when someone encroaches on their “turf” they get irrationally vicious. You saw it with Warren and you’re seeing it with Yang.
It’s weird in the Yang case because RCV means you don’t have to worry about a vote for Yang taking a vote away from Wiley or Morales. Honestly it just seems like it’s more about projecting an identity rather than actually wanting to capture political power. Like the cliche example of liking a band before they got big.
The vibe I get is a lot progressive dislike for Yang is highly similar to the progressive dislike for Buittigieg.
Also an Ivy Leaguer! Good point. I vaguely recall there was one viral tweet from the primaries where some guy who had gone to middle school with Buttigieg bragged about once having dunked Buttigieg's head into a toilet. The tweet received a very large number of likes.
You'd think the middle school neanderthal vote would better fit a right-wing psych profile. Which has to make you wonder how many members of this particular subset of "progressives" are really all that progressive at heart, and how many of them will end up being David Horowitz.
Not sure about Yang, but with Buttigieg the progressive disdain was said to skew young, toward GenZ and millennials. Maybe what it really is is not-so-thinly-veiled "privilege or accomplishment envy." Ivy league schools have never been easy to get into it, but I'd imagine its now a good deal harder to gain entrance to one than it was for GenXers, or, needless to say, baby boomers. And, critically, in our increasingly "winner take all" society, it's perceived (accurately or not) that the advantages flowing from fancy school degrees are bigger (and thus more "unfair") than ever before. So, maybe a lot of it is resentment. (Which possibly might be overcome by a candidate who is truly uberwoke and hard-left, but otherwise he/she comes in for savaging).
For sure. And so you also see a lot of energy committed to advancing the notion that Ivy League admission is purely a sign of generational wealth or even flat-out cheating. So you see people start by citing problems with legacies and Jared Kushner types, but then sweep in all or nearly all admittees so as to blur the distinction between bribing the school with donations or getting a high SAT score. Both are portrayed, with a lot of hand-waving, as nothing more than different forms of cheating.
Buttigieg and Yang both grew up moderately affluent but obviously neither fits the "generational wealth" category at all. But that doesn't seem to affect their hateability quotients. Which would support your "accomplishment envy" thesis. I guess that shouldn't be surprising considering that so many left-wingers these days feel no compunction about opposing the interests of even *non-affluent* urban Asian immigrant families with high-achieving high school kids, although I don't think the left-wingers have gone so far as to define the immigrant families as enemies - they usually portray them more as dupes.
Whoa, I never heard of this. Can you post a link to the tweet? I'll look for it too
In principle a cop is even worse than a businessman for my comrades at the DSA. But Adams as a relatively conservative Black man who doesn't have a fancy education or appeal to voters with fancy educations. They never met somebody like him at college.
He doesn't compute for them, neither does the rather large slice of culturally conservative, low-income-but-not-destitute NYC politics he represents. The joke is that he runs Brooklyn! If there is one place besides Cambridge, MA where you think they'd get the local politics...
Nah - the absolute, vitriolic hate for Yang is because he’s an outsider. All these major candidates have spent years, if not decades, climbing a greasy pole to mayor - and now here swoops in a guy who’s never even voted in a mayoral election before, to take what’s rightfully “theirs”.
No one thinks an Ivy League education is bad when they're talking about people that agree with them.
I think in that crowd the key is you have to be loudly contemptuous of other Ivy Leaguers and of the value of elite education in general. Which certainly can be done. But Yang is just a regular Ivy League alum who studied hard, majored in econ, and became an affluent normie white-collar professional. That makes him extremely hateable for them.
Nah - the absolute, vitriolic hate for Yang is because he’s an outsider. All these major candidates have spent years, if not decades, climbing a greasy pole to mayor - and now here swoops in a guy who’s never even voted in a mayoral election before, to take what’s rightfully “theirs”.
"If you will, imagine explaining to someone who knows what words mean but who was in a coma for the last year, that the progressives are the ones who want to divert money away from public safety to pay for cash transfers, while the moderates want to tax unproductive landowners to pay for it."
Literally LOL (in enjoyment, that was very well-said).
I don’t think people aren’t taking his *ideas* seriously, they aren’t taking Yang himself seriously (other than that his star power has won over many people including Marc, which makes him a serious threat to win). And that lack of seriousness is with good reason.
On every other issue besides UBI, Yang largely seems to be a coin flip - he agrees with whoever he talked to last. Like on the bus lane in Flushing, one day he thought it was great and then one day he said it was terrible (because he talked to some shop owners who want parking and don’t understand how many people come by bus). Who knows what he really thinks.
If elected it’s very likely he will either have random views on other issues, based on whoever he hires, or rapidly fluctuating ones. I wouldn’t take that chance just because my candidate was best on one issue that matters to me.
Experience does matter in a role like mayor, because the mayor does a huge amount more than just proposing one big idea. And Yang has comically little experience.
Finally, I wouldn’t use Ritchie Torres’ support as all that much evidence of anything. Individual politicians support candidates for a lot of reasons including personal connection and ambition to get a role in an administration, not just policy. I don’t know Torres’ reasons and don’t want to impugn his motives, but it isn’t persuasive that Yang’s policies are necessarily best for his constituents.
I am a former resident of New York, consider myself a progressive, and generally like Andrew Yang and find him more funny than offensive. However, this article didn't really come off as a great defense for him.
First, the sweeping generalizations about the progressives just seem like a bit much. I don't feel a subgroup to the greater progressive left should be really be framed as representing the views of the entire progressive left.
Second, I gave Yang a chance when he was running for president, but I found some of him unappealing, frustrating, and overall unserious. His mayoral campaign has been an improvement, though.
Some of the things he does kind of make me feel he is not ideologically disciplined. The first politician I knocked on doors for was Barrack Obama. There were a lot of things he said I disagreed with. A lot of decisions he made I didn't like. However, he seemed like a serious person that reached the conclusions he did after serious deliberation. On the other hand, Andrew Yang comes off to me as someone saying shit in the moment, which gives me pause. Criticizing left-wing messaging is one thing, but I often felt he was acting in bad faith. For example, the appearances on right-wing media criticizing the left's identity politics in 2019, yet now he uses identity politics messaging on the campaign trail. He said one of his motivations for running for president was that he didn't feel he met politicians who really cared about the issues facing regular people. Yet, he mentions Cory Booker as one of his good friends. He complained that American society was too unforgiving when a comedian denied a job on SNL because of past racist comments. Yet, on the campaign trail, he takes issue with a racist caricature of him (which he should have, I agree with him on this). So I think it is essential to acknowledge differences between presidential candidate Yang and NYC Mayoral candidate Yang.
My interactions with his campaign people and Yang himself a couple of times left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I don't need a candidate to be "woke" (I don't even know what that word means anymore, to be honest). Still, there a numerous civil rights issues facing people of color, and Yang's people seem to think that his economic policies, especially what seemed like a slapped-together UBI policy, were a panacea. Him being an upbeat, optimistic polularist sometimes works. Still, him being constantly surprised at information voters were telling him about how bad certain things were for them was not a good look for Yang. It was at best frustrating, at worse condescending. If you start talking about UBI when I ask about voting rights, you lost me. I think the Yang Gang were just as out of touch in their own way. Just like some of the activists left, they often criticize.
Also, I am a black man that lived in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Harlem during the Bloomberg. I have no issue with the NYPD budget staying the same in an effort to fight crime, especially violent crime because the harmful effects of crime affect minority communities the most. However, the NYPD needs a lot of oversight, or they will operate as a racist, oppressive street gang that doesn't respect many of the minority residents they are sworn to protect. Getting my constitutional rights violated constantly was not fun, nor was having a gun in my face because they mistook me for someone else. My concern with Yang as mayor is his habit of courting right-leaning support and doing what is politically convenient for him will lead him to have a blind spot with the NYPD. If the NYPD can get the crime figures where he wants them, he will not hold them accountable. That is a significant worry for me.
Again, I generally like Yang and think he has some good ideas. But I think people a justified to have concerns about him and his judgment. Yang entered the race with a large amount of name recognition and a built-in fan base. Yet only being able to win a primary because of a larger weak field, abandoning much of your previous political messaging, and a unique primary system working in your favor doesn't seem like a major endorsement of Andrew Yang's politics.
I'm skeptical and but hopeful. I told my mother she should vote for him over Adams. I hope the right instincts kick in at the right time, and he does not do anything stupid while in office.
I appreciate your response and your insight here. I'm not a New Yorker at all, but I was a supporter during the presidential campaign and was involved in helping with the Melanated Council of Yang group and YouTube channel (I'm a black supporter myself in Mass). As for his mayoral run, I'm glad you see it as an improvement because I was afraid that there were a lot of ppl who liked him in the presidential who didn't like his "less progressive" mayoral campaign or his very touchy comments on Israel / Palestine.
Either way, I hope Yang wins and doesn't do anything stupid in office like you said!
The point about progressives speaking like they are appealing to program managers at funds is super interesting. A while ago Perry Bacon Jr. wrote an article talking about how you determine if a leader actually speaks for the community they represent, saying it’s tricky to tell but you should think about who they are accountable to. It definitely sounds like Yang and Adams talk like they want to be accountable to the people of NYC, not just their self-selected peers. I wonder if a big challenge for progressives now is to figure out how to make sure their leaders are accountable to the masses.
It really is weird how many progressives prioritize accountability to activists over accountability to voters. Especially when they're presenting their policies as things that will help the average voter.
Here we go again. Only 50 years after the New York City fiscal crisis, we seem to have forgotten that you can’t erect a comprehensive welfare state on a municipal basis, cash-driven or not, because you don’t have sovereignty and the tax base can easily flee. There is a reason that the successes have been Federal programs.
Most of the mayoral candidates (Yang included) are very specific in their ideas about how to spend city tax money on social welfare, but pretty vague or unrealistic on where the money is going to come from. or on how the budget will do this spending while also supporting the commonweal for the great majority of the City’s residents. Until the latest string of atrocities in the subway, most of them also cared more about being seen as sufficiently anti-police than about dealing with the creeping breakdown in law and order in the City.
Yet those two things - the economy and security - are going to be virtually the only important things in the next Mayor’s term. Maintaining any kind of progressive vision depends utterly on success in handling those two things. I can’t see Yang doing that. Instead I see a lot of small-bore stuff that gets some attention because it's out of the box. It merely goes to build his brand.
Yang is proposing we give $1 billion to poor people. The budget is almost $100 billion https://www1.nyc.gov/site/omb/index.page . I don't see how the tax base would flee over that. And I agree it's not as easy for the city government to do welfare, but that's why it's good it's just cash!
I feel this is a complacent attitude. The City budget won't be $90+ billion when the post-Covid property tax reassessments and the income and business tax shortfalls hit the scene. Hard decisions will need to be made over basic stuff like schools, police, sanitation as well as the plethora of other social services (with its jobs) that the city provides. A $1 billion cash giveaway to a small fraction of the city population at a time when basic services are being cut will not be viewed well.
Nota New Yorker. What happened on the subway?
There has been a rash of gruesome and frightening slashings, pushings, and beatings in the subway for the past year. A week or two ago there were three of them in one day. Like the bad old days. With much arm-twisting the MTA has gotten the City to send more police into the system. For social justice reasons the police can't stake out the turnstiles any more, so they're stuck trying to run down potential criminals in the stations and on the trains. There will never be enough cops to do that effectively.
"At many times, it feels like the point of the progressive movement in 2021 isn’t to gain power and then enact reforms to ameliorate suffering, but rather to impress each other by saying the most inoffensive words in the most inoffensive order and then if you predictably lose in a landslide, so what, because everybody who didn’t agree with you from the start is racist anyway."
This so true, and it drives me nuts. Yesterday I talked to an older progressive mayor who had been inspired to go into politics by the civil rights movement. In describing his work he immediately talked about how he had been steadily accruing power. That's when I knew I liked the guy.
UBI made a lot more sense as a proposal from Yang the presidential candidate than from Yang the mayoral candidate. As it now stands, his municipal UBI isn't universal. It's only for the poor, so it creates exactly the kind of cliff-edge disincentive that a real UBI would avoid. (There are understandable reasons of cost not to make the program universal--but again that's a reason UBI should rely on the federal tax base, not the tax base of a single city.)
I don't really think aggressive income redistribution can work at the local level, so the candidates in this or any other municipal race ought to be judged by their positions on other issues.
To volunteer for Kathryn Garcia, go to kh4.nyc/phonebank
It was done in Stockton CA and it helps
It was done in America and it helped! UBI is better than income-targeted cash transfers. However, income-targeted cash transfers are still good. Stimulus checks! Periodic child tax credit in the form of checks!
I'm not opposed to UBI; I'm opposed to UBI financed by city-level taxes. The Stockton experiment was funded by donors and it's proof of concept for a tax-funded national program. But if some cities institute UBI and others don't, poor people will move to the cities that have it and non-poor people will move away.
A federal UBI wouldn't create the same kind of adverse selection--although I'll get on my usual hobbyhorse here and say that in general, the US should require immigrants to have four-year college degrees.
I think poor people are an asset. So a city can benefit from poor people. We have evidence that poor immigrants help.
What evidence is that?
Best is the Marial boat Lyft studies. This is like 500k uneducated immigrants all coming in at once. And the overall economy grew. The worst anyone will say is the overall economy grew but one or 2 sectors struggled. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/23/15855342/immigrants-wages-trump-economics-mariel-boatlift-hispanic-cuban
A UBI could also help the economy of the place that has it by creating more demand.
Also, why do you think immigrants should have to have four-year degrees?
Because I'm in favor of a very redistributive welfare state, either via UBI or some other approach. Low-skilled immigrants may not be a net negative under current circumstances, but they would be if we had a better tax-and-transfer system.
I'm an immigrant. Part of getting my green card required me to get a sponsor who guaranteed that they would pay back the government for any means-tested assistance I accepted until I had worked for 10 years. Making immigrants ineligible for UBI until they have paid enough into the system seems feasible.
They would be contributing to the economy. Also, I don't think we should assume that we can know who will contribute what. It's very possible for someone to come without a four-year degree and start a small business or get a degree or something like that
Aggressive income redistribution won't work at the municipal level. However, if this cash transfer program does well, that opens the door to it happening in more cities and more ambitious versions happening at the state level. And you kind of need that to happen before the Federal government is going to entertain anything like a UBI seriously.
Universal UBI is an accounting fiction. Yes, everyone may get it on paper, but anyone earning any significant income will in fact be funding other’s UBI. The advantage of the universal UBI is that if one loses their job, there’s no paperwork to file to get UBI.
It's not "Federal tax base" vs "city tax base" it's "printing press" vs "no printing press".
If you don't understand how this works, please read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton.
Good luck to your candidate!
80-90% of economists believe her views on money and deficits are lunacy. There's nothing to read- MMT is a fringe, far-out view
Kelton is a fringe economist and while her work is currently in vogue it’s far from established as fact (to put it lightly).
Overall good article. But, I don't think that you can really compare a one time stimulus check going to 95% of people to a means tested annual check going to 5% of people in terms of popularity.
I guess that's fair. A Yang pollster that I talked to sent me their polls that suggested their specific plan of paying only the poorest 500,000 was polling at 72-17 in NYC in January
I think the bigger issue, over and above whether a program is universal or not, ongoing or not, is that for a couple of generations it's been verboten in politics to really even talk about direct cash transfers to needy citizens. It either had to be done in weird backhand tax code ways, or it was seen as better for the government to provide services directly (that way the undeserving poors couldn't spend it on drugs or whatever). The opening up of space for direct cash transfers to those in need is a sea change.
Does Slow Boring (or anyone else) have a rank list of the five NYC mayoral candidates I should vote for?
Currently thinking Garcia, Yang, Adams, ???, ???
I think as 'informed citizens,' there's a real internal pressure to rank five candidates, which you're welcome to do, and in theory, should. But in practice, if the race doesn't go through a major shift in the next few weeks, and you still want to rank those three candidates as your first three, the likelihood that they all get eliminated before the last round is essentially 0. You're talking about the final round being like Stringer vs Wiley. That does not strike me as a real possibility.
I am a Yang vs Garcia undecided voter who will vote Stringer #3 to keep Adams out. I don't want a gun-toting mayor who explicitly defends placard abuse by city officials.
The placard abuse stuff is serious, if you *make a campaign issue* of how it is OK, you will never reform any department of the city. I think Yglesias calls it "broken windows for cops" - if they can publicly flaunt how the rules don't apply to them in a small-medium issue, you won't get them to believe the official rules apply anywhere else.
What is "placard abuse"?
Using city credentials to part illegally: https://nypost.com/2021/04/15/eric-adams-ripsyang-for-focus-on-parking-placards-over-crime/
Adams and his staff park illegally outside of Brooklyn Borough Hall in incredibly conspicuous positions. He says that they will stop when other city departments stop doing the same thing, and that Yang is a suburbanite for complaining. It would be a minor issue if he just did this hypocritically, but he is defending this bad dangerous practice publicly, *as a campaign issue,* and calling his opponent a weenie for complaining about it.
Adams is an interesting man with many sides, I don't want to demonize him. But I can't vote for somebody running in a platform of "cops have the right to park illegally in bike lanes."
I’m a big McGuire fan. All the good parts of the Bloomberg years with a more socially progressive vision.
McGuire, Garcia, Adams, Yang, Stringer (or Donovan, but he’s just so out of touch…). Hoping McGuire catches on, but running out of time.
Most important thing with RCV in a wide open race is making sure that you end up voting for one of the final 2.
On Yang, he has (some) good ideas, but worry about his ability to manage a tough city government. Also concerned about Basic Income — I am not sure how I can square “giving people $300/week in unemployment & $2000 checks is contributing to people not working” with “giving people basic income won’t contribute to people not working”. Seems like a backwards way of recreating the (unsuccessful) welfare state that existed before the mid-90s.
If the extra unemployment and stimulus checks are keeping people from working, it is probably those people who have additional resources to make not working more tolerable or because they can avoid large expenses like rent because of the eviction moratorium. There’s also the transient disincentives from the pandemic. $2000 a year is not enough to live on but could also make it easier to find a job: buy a cheap car to make commuting easier, get child care, etc.
To my understanding, Yang has suggested (by saying he'd appointing her Deputy Mayor) that a vote for him is lowkey a vote for Garcia and she'd run a big chunk of his administration. So the series "Garcia, Yang" makes sense if you're going to put Garcia in your list.
For me it's Garcia, Yang, end of list.
Same here. Maybe 3. Donovan and 4. McGuire, because I really don’t like Adams, but the elimination process won’t get that far I think.
Vote for not sure!!!
Wow and here I thought Slow Boring was a Garcia blog... this institution is in disarray!
Does Matt have more than one intern? It would be nice to see a Slow Boring pitch for Eric Adams, whose blend of hopelessly-unpopular-but-actually-popular ideas, mildly corrupt behavior in office and solid working-class appeal strikes me as something Max Weber would respect.
Lol progressive don’t want to win. They just want to be as inoffensive as possible. Fun stuff
They certainly don't seem to mind offending me.
Good article Marc, here are a couple reactions from your local anti-Yang progressive:
First, while the vacant lot proposal sounds good, Yang himself seems pretty skeptical of most taxes increases, not just the lobbying firm running his campaign: https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2021/04/01/yang-cautions-against-taxing-the-rich-in-front-of-pro-business-group-1371337
Second, I think you're making a quite unfair comparison to Biden with your use of the "nothing would fundamentally change" quote. It seems pretty clear in context that Biden was talking about the living standards of the wealthy people in the room (who Biden was and is planning to tax to pay for various progressive causes that will raise standards of living overall).
I think the thing I'm getting at is that when candidates (or their aides for that matter) talk to business interests, they are going to downplay their support for higher taxes. I think it's fine to worry about what candidates tell them, but I think it's better to listen to the candidates directly. Here's Yang's proposal on raising various taxes https://www.yangforny.com/policies/raising-revenue-for-new-york-city .
So its the vacant lot tax (with two paragraphs on excluding community gardens), "work with" universities and hospitals, lobby Albany, and tax pot?
Granted I've not compared all the candidates on this issue, but I am really not seeing a tax positive agent of progressive reform at work here.
Totally irrelevant, but I love the phrase "trapezoidal program"
I don’t live in NYC so I haven’t been paying super close attention to the details of this race, but you’ve done a pretty good job moving my vague intuition that Yang is bad into a vague intuition that maybe Yang is good. Also I’m shocked that Yang is not even nearly as rich as Bernie or Warren were; it’s amazing the way narratives get constructed around candidates that have little bearing on the facts.
In general I’ve been struggling so much with people who call themselves progressives lately. I used to be one, and I really don’t feel like I’ve changed much, but what that word means feels like it’s changed around me. Definitely feeling this here in San Francisco where I think it’s hard to argue that the “progressives” on the Board of Supervisors are anything other than its most conservative members in terms of their complete resistance to any change in the status quo. Interesting to see something similar happening in NYC and across the country.
I think you have to be really careful about the label "progressive" in this context. We have a tendency to look at the term through the lens of "people I hear about on Twitter", but they aren't necessarily representative of all the individuals that use the label.
One of the key takeaways of the this election is that even in a Democratic primary for a very Democratic city, the activist/non-profit aligned candidates don't seem to be making much headway. This was the same trend we saw in the presidential primary too -- not only are loud activists not representative of the average voter, they aren't even representative of the average progressive voter!
Sanders had a clear path to victory in both primaries (in a "this might work" sense not a "sure thing" sense), and very clear plans for how to govern differently than a centrist Democrat, especially on foreign policy. Warren's path to victory made sense on its own terms (tho' it was clearly based on mistaken assumptions), and she also had a very clear sense of what she could make the federal government do. In Congress AOC stands for a clear set of positions and moves the conversation in her direction.
The NYC municipal left seems mostly to be interested in talking a certain way. They don't *want* to win (look at the Morales campaign falling apart in a symbolic fight about unionizing jobs that will be gone in June), they don't plan to do anything different from De Blasio if they do (who is also on "the left" for whatever that's worth). If they had the least sense of urgency about what they claim to care about they'd be alarmed by Eric Adams. Instead they are offended by Yang, without understanding why he is popular or making any real effort to stop him.
Also no normal gay person was offended by Yang's remarks at Stonewall. (He talked about re-opening gay bars at an event at a famous gay bar! My God!). He was speaking to a group of gay *senior Democratic party operatives who hate his guts.* Christine Quinn was offended but she'd be offended by anything he says or does. Of course it was up to the media to decide how to react to this.
I'm a Garcia #1, Yang #2 voter for now, but the reaction to Yang strikes me as completely crazy.
This may be dumb, but given that Stonewall Dems are literally named after a gay bar (and the riots that happened there) It was funny to me to hear them argue that gay bars aren't important.
"Why didn't he talk about Black trans teens"?
If I thought Yang was somehow worse for Black trans teens than the others I'd hold that against him. This was a bunch of professional Democratic operatives and fundraiser types who were committed to other candidates & just looking for an excuse to be offended by Yang.
He even said our vibrant gay community contributes to the NYC culture scene and makes it a more attractive tourist destination, I can't imagine anything more homophobic than that.