Part of running for President is the contest to tell the best story about the problems of the country. Both Donald Trump and some of his Democratic rivals have spent significant time narrating the economic uncertainty in the lives of all but the richest Americans, a feeling of entrapment and helplessness.
The odds that the Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang will last long in the race are slim, but in the contest to describe what’s wrong with America he has become a compelling and distinctive figure. Yang’s story begins with the displacement of workers by automation. He blames Donald Trump’s 2016 victory on the loss of four million manufacturing jobs in swing states. The loss of jobs, he emphasizes, has not been limited to manufacturing. Technology has taken revenue from malls, from newspapers, from taxi-drivers. For Yang, our country’s divisions are a purely economic story, with other problems—nastiness, racism, misogyny, bad ideas—caused in part by the decline in reasoning that sets in when you can’t pay your bills. Yang talks about the rise in suicide, the rise in drug overdoses, the increase in the numbers of people claiming disability benefits. What he describes is a loss of meaning on a massive scale.
One good way to patronize a lot of small American businesses is to run for President. On a rainy Thursday in mid-June, Yang was at Crackskull’s, a ramshackle coffee shop and used-book store in the town of Newmarket, in southern New Hampshire. Stickers that read “Buy local,” “Make jobs not war,” and “Take big $ out of politics” were plastered on the door, and watercolors by a local artist decorated one wall. A bulletin board advertised a support group for addicts. A crowd of about seventy people waited for Yang to arrive, the milk foamer steaming while they chatted politics.
Every four years, the entire state of New Hampshire gets wooed by Presidential candidates, and at least some segment of the population treats attending meet-and-greets like a part-time job. Someone remarked that Julián Castro’s audience in the same venue had been only half as large as the crowd that now gathered for Yang. “Carly Fiorina—now, she was always on time,” a retiree named Gene Bishop remembered, of a bygone primary season. He was among four or five already-converted supporters wearing Yang T-shirts. There was also a knot of teen-age boys representing the Timberlane High School Owls, and a man wearing a shirt that read “Unity,” printed by a group called No Labels that advocates for bipartisanship. There were couples, retirees, and a family with kids.
Yang entered theatrically, at a slight jog, waving as if he were taking the stage to an audience at Macworld and not the damp confines of a small-town café. The café’s stage, set into a bay window, had a striped vintage armchair that seemed more appropriate for children’s storytelling hours. Yang, who wore a navy-blue suit, a light-blue shirt, and no tie, opted to stand. He began his speech with an overview of his résumé—his childhood in upstate New York, his education at Phillips Exeter Academy and Brown University, his ups and downs as an entrepreneur—operating under the reasonable premise that a majority of the people in the room had no idea who he is.
Yang is a natural public speaker who delivers his stump speech like it’s a TED talk, laden with references to statistics and social research and with an emphasis on the counterintuitive. He favors information over ideology, with an approach to narrative that mimics the chatty colloquialisms of an NPR podcast rather than preacherly rhetorical flourishes. It’s less a stump speech than a social-studies lesson. After the short biographical introduction, Yang started talking, as he often does, about truck drivers.
Driving a truck, he told the room, is the most common job in twenty-nine states, including New Hampshire. “There are three and a half million truck drivers in this country, ninety-four per cent men, average age forty-nine, and they make about forty-six thousand dollars a year,” he said. The audience considered this person, the middle-aged, middle-income, male truck driver. He still has a full-time job; soon, as self-driving trucks become more common, he may not.
The primary advantage of the robot truck is that it never stops driving. It does not need to get out and stretch or stop for a gas-station burrito or use a coin-operated truck-stop shower or go to sleep in a Motel 6. Yang described how, when the truck driver loses his job, those businesses will also lose money. The job losses, he added, will continue into other sectors, including professional ones. Yang asked if local businesses have been closing. The audience answered yes. He asked why.
“Amazon,” several people called out.
“And how much is Amazon paying in taxes?” Yang asked.
“Zero!”
Yang likes to say that Trump got all the problems right but offered the wrong solutions. The answer to the decline in blue-collar work is not bringing back coal jobs or protectionist tariffs. A tech company is not going to invest in retraining a fifty-year-old truck driver with chronic health problems. Yang’s vision for the country begins with universal basic income, or, as he decided to call it after some market research, the “freedom dividend.” Under this policy, every American over eighteen will receive a thousand dollars a month from the government. (In certain cases, people already receiving government assistance will have to choose between their benefits and the monthly payment.) The income will be funded by a value-added tax on the nation’s corporations. He compares it to the oil dividends received by every adult in the red state of Alaska.
“And what is the oil of the twenty-first century?” he asked in New Hampshire.
“Technology!” his followers chorused.
I met my first Yang supporter at a strike by Uber and Lyft drivers in Los Angeles, last spring. His name was Sam Nuzbrokh, and he came to a rally in a park next to Los Angeles International Airport dressed in business-casual clothes and carrying a box of bumper stickers. He told me that, in 2016, he had been drawn to Trump’s message of dissatisfaction about the economy. “Trump was a scream against that, but it was incoherent,” he said. He became a Yang supporter after hearing the candidate on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” a podcast that explores topics such as bodybuilding, hunting your own meat, standup comedy, and psychedelics, and had thrown himself into campaigning. Sam said he had helped organize a Yang rally in Los Angeles in May and handed out info at a dockworker solidarity march earlier in the year, another sector threatened by automation.
Yang has several mottos. There’s “Humanity First.” There’s “Not left, not right, it’s forward.” He is a centrist, not as Kamala Harris or Joe Biden are centrists, by not diverging too far from the status quo, but in that he presents his policy proposals in language that disorients voters from the known ideological maps of their political platforms. His technocratic populism attracts podcast listeners, tech-industry venture capitalists, libertarians, Trump supporters, proud Asian-Americans, and white men who feel they have been unfairly blamed for the perpetuation of inequality.
If Yang were elected, the government would be different. His preferred term to describe this process is, predictably, “disruption.” In Yang’s United States 2.0, Supreme Court Justices and congresspeople will have term limits of eighteen years. Federal laws will automatically sunset after a determined period of time. To neutralize the influence of the wealthy in politics, each American will receive a hundred “democracy dollars” to donate to the candidate of her choosing and a hundred dollars to donate to the nonprofit organization of her choice. They will have access to free financial counselling and free marriage counselling.
Yang’s policies nod to everything from long-standing political movements (promoting gun safety, ending mass incarceration, paid family leave) to resolving minor gripes (a government hotline to report robocalls). The voting age will be sixteen, opioids will be decriminalized, and every cop will wear a camera. N.C.A.A. athletes will finally get paid, and mixed-martial-arts fighters will be protected by law from exploitation. Ceremonial events will be attended not by the President of the United States, who has better things to do, but by the “Head of Culture and Ceremony,” who would be a Presidentially appointed famous person, like Tom Hanks, the Rock, or Oprah. High-school students will do exchanges to other parts of the United States to learn about their fellow-Americans. A local journalism fund will finance the regional news, malls emptied by Internet commerce will be revitalized as public spaces, and companies will be forced to reduce their plastic packaging. Airlines will not be allowed to drag their customers from overbooked flights. Tax Day will be a holiday. Puerto Rico will be a state. The penny will be eliminated.
Reading the list is like seeing the world-building outline for a work of near-future speculative fiction. The marriage counsellors might, in fact, be robots, or, as Yang writes in “The War on Normal People,” a book that he published last year, “an AI life coach with the voice of Oprah or Tom Hanks.” (Under a Yang Presidency, Oprah and Tom Hanks will be very busy.) There would be new government agencies, such as the “Legion of Builders and Destroyers,” which will be tasked with updating the nation’s infrastructure. We will be able to vote on our phones. And why not science fiction, if contemporary reality feels increasingly dystopian? The world Yang sees is one in which automation, climate change, and Internet commerce have transformed capitalism beyond the point where it sustains humanity. He calls the necessary corrective—universal basic income—a turn toward “human-centered capitalism,” a wisely chosen phrase that has no real history, and therefore no connotations for the right or the left.
Yang’s arguments for his policies are empirical rather than sentimental. Medicare for All will make it easier for people to switch jobs or start new businesses; providing a pathway to citizenship is more practical than deporting nine million undocumented immigrants. In New Hampshire, a campaign volunteer sat at a folding table selling thirty-dollar hats with the word “MATH” on them. The acronym, as his supporters, who call themselves the Yang Gang, know, stands for “Make America Think Harder.” Yang promises to be the first President to use PowerPoint in the State of the Union.
Yang could be described as part of the tradition of successful entrepreneurs running for President, but he is not as rich as Ross Perot or Howard Schultz, and has none of the name recognition of Trump. It’s hard to place him in the taxonomy of tech-adjacent people—he does not seem like the type to park in a handicapped spot or throw mercurial tantrums (as Steve Jobs did), or to go on a fad diet and practice Vipassana meditation (à la Jack Dorsey). His public persona is that of a dad trying to set a really good example for his kids: patiently explaining how the world works, indulging curiosity, not judging stupid questions, avoiding negativity, and texting bitmojis of himself.
Yang, who is forty-four, was born in Schenectady, New York, to parents who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. He has a conventional family life: his wife, Evelyn, is a stay-at-home mom who cares for the couple’s two sons, one of whom has autism. After graduating from Brown, Yang went to Columbia Law School and was hired by Davis Polk, but he quit working as a corporate lawyer after only five months. He spent the rest of his twenties at a series of failed startups, then started tutoring business-school applicants for the GMAT entrance exam, eventually becoming C.E.O. of a tutoring company called Manhattan Prep. In his first book, “Smart People Should Build Things,” published in 2014, Yang says he scored a hundred and seventy-eight (out of a hundred and eighty) on the LSAT. He has also said, on a podcast, “I certainly attribute most of my success through my early years just to the fact that I was really good at filling in bubbles on Scantron sheets.”
Kaplan bought Yang’s company in 2009, for more than ten million dollars, which left him with what he described on the podcast “Freakonomics” as “several million dollars.” In 2011, he started Venture for America, a nonprofit that trained young graduates of élite universities in entrepreneurial skills and then placed them with startups in cities that are not New York, San Francisco, or Boston. Venture for America did not achieve its goals (as described in a recent Recode article), and Yang left the organization in 2017, but he still speaks about the epiphany the experience gave him about the economic difficulties faced by certain cities in the Midwest and the South. He summarized these insights in “The War on Normal People.” In New Hampshire, he emphasized that people shouldn’t have to leave where they grew up to have a good life.
Yang presents himself as a liaison between the “normal people” and the super-rich, with channels of communication in both directions. It’s a quintessentially Trumpian move, except Yang portrays his friends as being concerned insiders rather than kleptocratic oil barons. There are his “friends from Exeter,” who “headed to Wall Street, and some of them had even worked on the securities that ended up crashing the economy.” There is the “friend who is a professional investor,” who told Yang that “she’s never seen profiteering and profit levels like she’s seeing right now in the health-care industry.” There is the friend who lives in Washington, who supposedly told Yang that “D.C. is a town of followers, not leaders” and that “the only way we in D.C. will do anything about it is if you create a wave in the rest of the country and bring that wave crashing down on our heads.”
“Challenge accepted!” Yang claims to have responded.
His status as an outsider to politics has allowed him to attract some of the disaffected or fringe groups that also collected around Trump. Last February, in what was a breakout moment for his campaign, Yang went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which has an audience in the millions. Rogan, a comedian and a former host of “Fear Factor,” is one of a constellation of podcasters whose guests, who identify as “classical liberals,” refer pejoratively to “social-justice warriors” and find a sympathetic ear to complain about trigger warnings on college campuses, and other instances of perceived censorship.
Yang has welcomed the embrace of this subset of Internet media, and is good at appearing sympathetic to their gripes while not quite echoing them himself. “Men deal with joblessness very poorly,” he said on “Rogan,” in what seemed like an appeal to swing voters. “By the numbers, we spend between forty to seventy-five per cent of our time on the computer playing video games or doing other things. Our substance abuse goes up. Our volunteering in the community goes down, even though we have more time, and we generally spiral into antisocial and self-destructive behaviors. This is not something that’s experienced by women in the same levels.”
Later, he added, “There’s now some kind of pathology that if the person who’s suffering is a white man of a certain background then the suffering is somehow, like, diminished, like it doesn’t count as much if they’re a trucker. And that’s something that I find really destructive. We have to start acknowledging the source of the problems. One thing I’m saying to people is ‘Look, it’s not immigrants that are taking these jobs away.’ ”
In the days that followed his appearance on Rogan, and another interview, with Tucker Carlson, on Fox News, Yang Gang threads dominated the “politically incorrect” board of 4Chan, and #YangGang briefly trended on Twitter. Yang’s fans included the dropout NEETs—the acronym stands for “Not in Education, Employment or Training”—who debated how they might spend their “NEETbux.” A sudden flurry of support among white supremacists, including the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, resulted in Yang issuing a statement denouncing “hatred, bigotry, racism, white nationalism, anti-Semitism and the alt-right in all its many forms.”
“I don’t look much like a white nationalist,” he said, to laughs, during a town hall on CNN. “It’s been a point of confusion.”
Yang is not the only child of immigrants in the Democratic field, but he is the only person of East Asian descent, a difference he brings up is his speeches. “The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math,” he frequently says. The crowd in New Hampshire laughed at that line. “If you’re here today,” he said later, “it’s because you’ve heard something like this: there’s an Asian man running for President who wants to give everyone a thousand dollars a month.”
For Yang, his personal identity is an advantage for his conciliatory approach. It allows him to speak to disaffected white male conservatives without being mistaken for one of them. “I’m the son of immigrants, and I understand identity politics, but I think that if you’re trying to win a national election as a Democrat it’s a poor approach, and I’ve been open about my perspective on that,” he told me, after the rally in New Hampshire. “There are folks that see me as more of a balanced, moderate voice, and they regard identity politics as something that’s being wielded by certain people on the left. To me, you can just look at it objectively and say, to win a national election, it shouldn’t be a primary lens.”
This strategy could be described as more pragmatism, or as pandering to a group of white people who have decided among themselves which narratives of struggle are legitimate. In New Hampshire, I spoke with a nineteen-year-old named Tyler Silverwood, who had come with a group of friends, some who were students at the University of New Hampshire and were dressed in sports jackets. When I asked what he liked about Yang, he said that one of his favorite things was that “he isn’t afraid to speak his mind, like making the Asian-man jokes.” He continued, “He’s come out against identity politics, which as a young white man I feel is putting us down at the lowest point, and for him to come out against that means a lot to me.”
His supporters find Yang’s evenhandedness refreshing—he will post a photograph of himself with Cornel West and go on Ben Shapiro’s talk show. But, though he may be right that identity politics are a losing strategy for a Democrat, they are not for a Republican. Donald Trump talked a lot about jobs in 2016, but he also promoted an ethno-nationalism that manifests in everything from the cultural makeup of his Cabinet to the demographics of the crowds who attend his rallies and his choices about which groups of people to mock or imprison. Trump embraced identity politics, and it turned out to be a great way to win an election.
Yang’s far-right followers have got a lot of attention, and yet their values have little in common with his personality or the ideals of his campaign. He expresses empathy for their grief and resentment, but does not share their self-centered world view. His charisma comes from his friendliness, and he seems to be a happy person. He does not malign others but also does not come off as overly eager to please. His supporters, for the most part, follow his example, displaying an unusual commitment to avoiding the fearmongering and bellicosity of Trump-era politics. “Please remember we are here as a representation of Andrew Yang,” the guidance on the Yang for President HQ subreddit reads. “Do your part by being kind, respectful, and considerate of the humanity of your fellow users.”
Yang’s campaign told me that his biggest followings are concentrated in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle—all nodes of the technology-based economy. Andrew Yang HQ is a very small office suite a few blocks south of Times Square. On a recent Tuesday evening, several Yang volunteers, a couple in Yang T-shirts or wearing MATH buttons, gathered for a phone-banking event. The office was spartan. Jugs of water lined one wall. A poster on the wall, part of a street campaign, encouraged people to Google Andrew Yang. (“He’s an awesome new Democrat running for president.”)
The volunteers at the phone-banking event were positive, friendly, and motivated, exemplars of the attitude that’s encouraged by the campaign. They listened carefully as Shaun Looney, an Army veteran and recent business-school graduate from Buffalo, trained them on software that offered the callers scripted cues. Yang’s conciliatory approach might feel to some like too much of a surrender. But I could see how the campaign presented a respite from the deeply depressing divisions around us.
Brian Leff, a twenty-two-year-old political-science student at New York University, who is from Westchester County, told me that he liked that Yang “focusses so much more on solutions than ideology.” He voted for Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate, in the 2016 elections. Kyle Barrett, who is twenty-nine and works at a communications consultancy in Manhattan, said that with Yang’s U.B.I. proposal he and his wife would be able to pay off their student loans in two years. Tami Joy Schlichter, thirty-seven, is the head volunteer for the campaign in New York City. An entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in mathematical neuroscience, she said that Yang was the only candidate addressing what she saw as the most urgent issue: the displacement of workers to automation.
I spoke to Avery Kim, who is nineteen and whose father immigrated to the United States from Korea. She described herself as politically active since her mid-teens. “I really wanted to find a Presidential candidate I felt would represent me,” she said. “For young Asian people, just seeing it is important.”
After their training, the group began making calls, which it did with quiet dedication. Its members were young, diverse, educated, heterodox, and part of the large class of people who are concerned that politicians are out of touch with the economic realities of the twenty-first-century economy. As Yang once wrote on Twitter, “People on the Internet generally exist in real life too.”
