A couple of days ago, I went to the Andrew Yang rally in Detroit. It was my first time going to a political rally. Some notes:

A bunch of audience members were holding the official “Yang 2020” signs. The reverse side of each sign had one of two slogans. One of the slogans was his standard “Humanity First” (a nice subversion of Trump’s “America First”). The other slogan was simply “MATH.” Several times throughout Yang’s speech, he would say the phrase “I did the math, and…” then the audience would hold up the “MATH” signs. The idea here is that math is important. It’s important to back up policy proposals with facts and analysis, including math.

Yang might well be wrong about many things, but he seems to be trying to push our political discourse in the direction of caring more about critical thinking and discussion about policy details—instead of the most common preference, i.e. settling for vagueness. *If* he can do it properly, this kind of critical focus on policy details is what our political discourse really needs right now. If Yang’s policies are wrong, he is hopefully at least helping to support some discourse norms that can encourage people to have a serious conversation about *why and how* he’s wrong. My perhaps-foolhardy hope is that this results in *real* discourse improvement—and NOT the pseudo-critical thinking of the crowd who makes those “pwning the SJWs with facts and logic” videos.

(For the record, there *have* occasionally been *other* politicians who actually cared about policy details. One of those politicians was Hillary Clinton. Just saying. She did some stuff right.)

Before Yang came onstage, there was some local introductory speaker—who was incredibly boring and sounded just like the Ben Stein character from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. There was a tangible relief when he left the stage and Andrew Yang showed up.

It was a very racially diverse audience. I don’t know if this was usual for Yang’s audiences, or if it was due to Detroit in particular. But it was a welcome contrast against the popular image of his (regrettable) popularity among white nationalists.

Yang seems to think the recent upsurge in overt racism is primarily due to economic problems caused mainly by automation. That theory is dubious, since it seems to downplay the role of the *history* of racism in this country and its reverberating effects on every institution of our society. Yang seems to think nearly all white people will stop hating and fearing immigrants insofar as the employment situation improves. Again, this is dubious and oversimplified. Yang might express a more nuanced view in his book or interviews, but this is what I got from his speech. However, he still made an impressive-sounding case that automation is a very big issue and will only get bigger—that automation will make the employment situation much worse in the future, and that programs for job re-training won’t be good enough to address the problems.

I don’t like the strand of progressivism that treats racism as basically some kind of bottom-level brute fact that doesn’t have an underlying explanation. But the underlying explanation is complicated, it’s historically situated, and it can’t be reduced to economic anxiety—even though economic anxiety is *part* of it.

Yang prides himself on bringing together a diverse coalition. He said “I can reach out to libertarians…”—and part of the crowd cheered—“…democrats and progressives…”—and another part of the crowd cheered—“…and people who voted for Trump in 2016.” Then part of the crowd sort-of-kind-of cheered, hesitantly and mildly. There was a palpable sense that everyone knew that (1) a large chunk of the people here were ex-Trump-voters, and (2) many of the rest of us did not exactly consider this fact to be a selling point of the coalition. On a rhetorical level, Yang was impressively diplomatic in response; he’s clearly seen this kind of reaction before.

Yang seems to cater to young people who voted for Trump in 2016, and who are now disaffected at how Trump isn’t delivering the economic goods. Yang’s strategy might make political sense. But voting for Trump in 2016 is an *extremely* stupid and harmful thing to do, and many of the people who did that cannot now be relied on to make good decisions about politics. Yang might know this. But for better or for worse, Yang’s campaigning method makes it unlikely that he will be straightforward about these facts.

Some people asked how Yang would get congress on board with universal basic income. Yang claims that after he wins, many congresspeople will realize it means the people want universal basic income—and then most congresspeople will get on board with universal basic income, in order to preserve their own electability.

I wanted Yang to talk about opioid decriminalization in his speech, but he didn’t mention it. :(

I think he did claim that universal basic income would help people’s mental health and thereby help reduce addiction. If universal basic income is economically feasible (that’s a big if), then I agree this will be one of its many immense benefits. That’s one of the many reasons we should explore all possible avenues for discovering whether universal basic income can be done—which for me right now, means supporting Andrew Yang.

The end of his speech was something like this:

“Trump is our President because he got the *problems* right—but he got the *solutions* wrong. Job loss isn’t because of immigrants, but because of automation. Trump wants to solve the problem by turning the clock backwards. But I think we should turn the clock *forwards*. I’m the opposite of Trump: I’m an Asian man who likes math!” The crowd cheered loudly.

Andrew Yang is a fantastic speaker and has a very likable personality. He is also very funny, which (alas) I have been persuaded is essential for a presidential candidate’s electability. He made a few funny jokes which amounted to ribbing his audience in a friendly way; I found that rhetorically impressive. I haven’t seen a politician do that before, let alone do it successfully.

Andrew Yang definitely passes the “Which candidate would you rather have a beer with?” test.

Toward the end of the speech, a bearded hippy-Jesus-looking guy (presumably *not* associated with Yang’s campaign) showed up in the back of the crowd, who was dressed in tie-dye and was carrying a cute goat on his back. Somewhat odd, but not unwelcome.

I assume Yang probably won’t win, and it isn’t even clear that he’d be good for the job (considering he’s never held office). But I hope he can become popular enough to *influence* the other Democratic candidates—to seriously consider universal basic income, opioid decriminalization, etc., and to help build a culture of critical thinking and discussion about specific policy details and the relevant math.

That night, I had a disturbing dream about Andrew Yang. I might relate this dream at a later time.