There are some good things about Andrew Yang. Notably, he's one of the only candidates to [[ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/ | actually have a policy section of his website up in early 2019 ]]. That's laudable in a field where most of the candidates are doing their damndest to avoid being caught having any specifics whatsoever.
And his policies aren't terrible, necessarily. But they're an unfortunate combination of radical-sounding and woefully-insufficient that's probably summed up in his idea of "[[ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/human-capitalism/ | Human Capitalism ]]". And of course his big thing is [[ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/the-freedom-dividend/ | Universal Basic Income ]], which even gets [[ https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/ | its own big section ]] in addition to the writeup of it under his policies section, which includes the following passage:
>===Isn’t this Communism/Socialism?===
> No. Communism is, by definition, a revolutionary movement to create a classless, moneyless, and stateless social order built upon shared ownership of production. With Socialism, the core principle is the nationalization of the means of production – i.e. the government seizes Amazon and Google. UBI is none of those things and actually fits so seamlessly into capitalism, it is projected to [[ http://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Modeling-the-Macroeconomic-Effects-of-a-Universal-Basic-Income.pdf | grow the economy ]] $2.5 trillion in eight years.
>
> Really, UBI is necessary for the continuation of capitalism through the automation wave and displacement of workers. Markets need consumers to sell things to. Universal Basic Income is capitalism with a floor that people cannot fall beneath.
His perspective on a fundamental basis seems to be not far from that of [[ 2020_u.s._presidential_election/candidates/elizabeth_warren/ ]], where Capitalism is good but just needs some felts put underneath it to stop it from scratching the hardwood.
It's worth mentioning that he's [[ https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/9/18256622/andrew-yang-2020-president-meme-yanggang | the favored candidate of Anime Nazis everywhere ]]. And while it's not necessarily his fault, that's certainly unpromising. When [[ https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1103836332693041152 | Wikileaks in 2019 is tweeting how you're "winning the meme war" ]], certainly you're probably appealing to the wrong people. And it's not hard to see why he'd be appealing to [[ http://4chan.org/pol/ | /pol/ ]] Weebs, who would argue endlessly that communism is an obviously dumb idea but in arguing so much inevitably end up glomming onto seemingly-smart ideas that read like ersatz socialist policies to anyone without that "correct" perspective. Plus, many in that general milieu are feeling betrayed by Trump, and always want to be backing some candidate that the normies Don't Get.