Trouble: Cornel West is a candidate

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.