I’m sure that our interest in Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign seems weird to lots of people who read this website.

Andrew Yang is pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ, pro-DREAM Act, pro-gun control and so forth. I can assure you that his positions on these social issues annoy the hell out of me too, but he is running in the Democratic primary. Yang’s positions on these issues are understandable because about 44% of Americans are Left-Libertarians, nearly the entire Democratic Party believes in this stuff and there is no path to victory that doesn’t go through them. He doesn’t really have any choice in the matter.

This is the political reality he is facing:

I don’t blame Yang for having for having these positions on social issues. It is Donald Trump’s positions on these issues that make no sense. 54% of Americans are social conservatives and authoritarians. Republican voters now say that immigration is their top priority. And yet, the Trump administration is waging a global crusade on behalf of feminism and homosexuality. It is presiding over the total collapse of the border and is considering banning silencers after the Virginia Beach shooting.

The Democratic Party is pretty much aligned with the interests and values of its base. The Republican Party, however, is totally at odds with the interests and values of its base. It consistently runs on polarizing social issues to win elections only to mysteriously drop those issues from the agenda once in power in order to focus on things like tax cuts, banking deregulation and pro-Israel objectives.

If the GOP isn’t serious about the social issues and is jerking us around, I am willing to listen to what Yang has to say about economics. In particular, the rise of robots, automation and artificial intelligence is a real problem and that isn’t going to change regardless of who wins the 2020 election.

Note: We don’t have any confidence in the David Frenches of the GOP to conserve anything that we care about.