A "spoiler" on the left could throw the 2024 election to Trump.
Cornel West is a candidate in the People's Party.
There may be a silver lining in this cloud.
Cornel West is a provocateur. A gadfly. A showman. A progressive ideologue.
Cornel West is a frequent guest on TV interview shows. He has a schtick, with big, unruly hair and beard, unique black suits and white shirts that look straight out of a 19th Century portrait photograph. He talks in gruff manner punctuated with finger jabbing. He has a role in the national political landscape: Black progressive intellectual.
I saw him live at Southern Oregon University, where he spoke to an audience of a few hundred. He was there as a celebrity speaker. He was showing off. His overt message was about economic and racial justice in America. But the subtext for his predominately White audience was look-at-this-Black-intellectual. His vocabulary stretched for obscure words. His casual allusions were designed to tell us he was far better read and smarter than you hicks in podunk-ville. He threw in "of course," and "as you know" and "from your reading of" to things no public audience would know. He name-dropped his way through "my dear brother Foucault," and "that rascal Kant, on to theories of consciousness, justice, and economics, all works that he acted as if he presumed, of course, his audience had read and mastered along with him. He breezed though allusions to the fiction and nonfiction work of scores of contemporary Black and feminist authors, mostly personal friends and fellow colleagues. It went on for an hour.
Whew, I thought, as I left the performance.
I thought it pretentious and ridiculous, but I credited him for pounding in his subtext: Take that, you White racists who think Blacks are bad at book-learning. Without saying the word, he was calling us deplorable.
In his campaign Twitter announcement West wrote:
I am running for truth and justice as a presidential candidate for the People's Party to reintroduce America to the best of itself -- fighting to end poverty, mass incarceration, ending wars and ecological collapse, guaranteeing housing, health care, education and living wages for all!
West will not win many votes of non-college working people of America. Cornel West will appeal to the people who voted for Ralph Nader and Jill Stine. Money will make its way to his campaign from the political right, so he will get his message out. Plus he is "good TV," willing to say controversial things. There is a body of voters on the progressive left who agree that Democrats are little different from Republicans, both beholden to big money. West called Biden "a milquetoast liberal" and said:
Neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about big tech.
For many Americans, Biden's center-left moderation and "normal-ness" are a positive. Yes, he threw Manchin that pipeline bone in the debt deal, but that is the nature of coalition politics and why it is called "sausage making." Biden got things done, a positive. But there is a price for the sausage, and West will exact it. For about 10% of voters, Biden being a milquetoast moderate is a negative. They want a fighter, not a negotiator. They wonder if maybe Biden had just cared more and tried harder, really harder, he wouldn't have needed Manchin and his pipeline.
Net-net West's entry isn't all bad for Democrats. West is "over the top." West's high octane self promotion may get through to enough voters to assure them that Biden is regular-Joe, a guy with limits. Biden won't get into a Clinton-style Sister Souljah disagreement with West. I expect Biden to shrug off West, not to confront him. That may be sufficient. West will make himself visible and define what Biden and Harris are not, a positive for some people looking for low drama moderation. Bernie Sanders has endorsed Biden, which may assure people on the wavering progressive left that Biden is OK, or OK-enough, given the GOP alternative.
It would be better for Democrats if there was no competition from Biden's left. But if there is going to be a leftist spoiler, then Biden could do worse than having it be Cornel West.
That was beautiful. My compliments!
I too was in the audience for West's talk at SOU. You are certainly entitled to make a critique, but I offer a critique of that critique.
One of my colleagues at SOU organized that event and their intentions--as well as those of most of the audience--were quite sincere. Our presence at the West event should not be dismissed so cynically, any more than the white-majority audiences at multi-cultural/diverse-cast OSF productions should be so characterized.
I could not avoid noticing the parallels between your reaction to West and the reaction of a certain segment local white progressives to Nataki Garrett (specifically & tragically Herb Rothschild, despite his long commitment to social justice causes).
In both cases, the reactions seem rooted in a kind of soft-bigotry, perhaps blended with anti-intellectualism, rooted in assumptions of entitlement to dominate progressive narratives. What you said about West, similar to what some local white liberal pundits said about Nataki Garrett, would play rather well on Fox News.
[full disclosure: I am a retired sociology prof/emeritus prof at SOU. And I've been to a fundraiser at your house for Jeff Golden--an all white turn-out, I noticed, by the way. We have our own diversity/inclusivity work to do.]
Knowing my fellow white people as I do, I think you need not worry about West have much of an impact on the 2024 election, UNLESS the white "centrists" of the Democratic Party continue to show weakness to resist the creeping authoritarianism/fascism here in the US and globally. We should be far more concerned about the ineffectiveness of the white & elite class gerontocracy, stuck in a slightly left form of 1990s neoliberalism, that dominates the Dems, (Obama included--Clintons, Bidens, Gore vintage too). The failure of that "center" is what discourages engagement in civic life for working class people , younger voters, and increasingly multi-culturally diverse generations.