When the Forward Party launched in 2022, it defined itself as a movement designed to break through a dysfunctional two-party system that catered to the ideological fringes.

To avoid the kind of rigidity and top-down decision making that marked the two major parties, the new movement announced there would be no traditional party platform — it was viewed as a vestige of the past, a one-size-fits-all approach that stifled democracy. State Forward parties would determine their own priorities. Individual candidates would then develop their own policies around those priorities.

But the Forward Party is making a dangerous miscalculation. It is betting that what a party opposes is more important that what it stands for. Motivated by a tech industry ethos that considers disruption for disruption’s sake a virtue, Forward is following a path blazed by some of startup culture’s biggest debacles — Theranos and WeWork.

I know because I saw it from the inside as the national press secretary.

Mary Anna Mancuso, author of the piece and former Forward Party national press secretary.

Courtesy of Mary Anna Mancuso

During the Trump era, I broke away from the GOP as it devolved into a cult of personality threatening democracy and our institutions; I served as the national spokesperson for the Republican organization, Renew America Movement, which worked to reduce political polarization.

But Renew America was swept into the Forward Party inJuly 2022, one ina series of mergers and acquisitions of collapsing Republican reform groups that splintered off from the GOP in the wake of the Trump presidency. As they united under the new party’s banner, the groups delivered their membership lists, resources and even their political professionals like me — despite having no ideological commonality.

Suddenly dozens of staffers from previous Republican break-off groups were working in tandem with supporters of Andrew Yang, the former Democratic presidential contender and Forward Party co-founder, to promulgate the idea that political beliefs no longer matter in a party, so long as everyone is committed to moving “Not Left. Not Right. Forward.”

We had been promised our reform efforts would continue. Instead, I found an organization convinced it could maintain and grow its disparate coalition by not taking any positions at all. Its very existence was premised on the idea that, in the future, political parties will succeed by not having a philosophy of government, a shared vision or even a platform to unite behind.

That’s not what I signed up for.

Forward expected to create change through the sheer force of Andrew Yang’s personality and a healthy dose of hope, Mancuso writes.