My Opinion, as Expressed on the Forward Party's "Platform Chat" Discord

After having watched all the ideas, at this point I'm pretty set on limiting the platform to structural issues -- ranked choice voting, etc. -- and leaving the rest up to candidates. The "center" is a moving target that differs from locale to locale and that is a function of the populace, not something a party can just name, claim, and hope to monopolize. In one area, a Forward candidate who would otherwise be a Socialist Alternative member might do well. In another, a Forward candidate who would otherwise be a Libertarian Party member might do better.

To extend and revise: While the old parties have large baskets of issues they seek member/candidate conformity on, even those parties organized around one or two particular ideas early on. The Republicans, for example, were about ending the expansion of slavery, and instituting a tariff to fund big public works. Isn't "turn America into a true multi-party democracy" a big enough bite to chew off for now, rather than trying to cram every issue into our candidates' mouths as well?

I've seen everything on the platform chat from anti-nuclear and anti-nuclear-weapons to pro-nuclear and pro-nuclear weapons, from reducing healthcare regulation (e.g. eliminating Certificate of Need laws and letting nurse practitioners practice independently instead of only with the permission of an MD) to fully socialized healthcare. And of course, everything from complete victim disarmament to constitutional carry.

Hopefully the participants are starting to figure out that "the center" they're looking for isn't something that a rigid platform can either accommodate or capture.

I've been holding off on looking for (or creating) a Libertarian Caucus, in part because I'm not interested in trying to make Forward into an ideologically libertarian party. While I doubt that it can succeed at all, if it can succeed, I'll measure its success in terms of accomplishing structural reforms that break the "duopoly" grip on elections. And even if it's successful at that, I don't think it will do more than slightly delay the complete dissolution/replacement of the United States of America as we know it, which (as I've said for several years) I expect by 2050 or so.