Cornel West as a Candidate

​Bill Fletcher Jr. 
Excerpts from a longer piece,,

Which brings us to the Cornel West campaign and other third-party bids during the 2024 election cycle. What is the essence of such ventures?
If one is interested in building a struggle for power, one does not begin by running a presidential campaign, and certainly not a campaign with no organized base and no possibility of victory. If, however, one is concerned more with asserting one’s beliefs and expressing one’s frustration and antipathy toward the existing system, one can view a campaign for the presidency as an ongoing platform to both hear oneself talk, and to try to captivate and entertain an audience. Such politics become, not the politics inherent in a struggle for power, but the politics of self-expression. The objective becomes expressing one’s views, anger, etc., rather than seeking to achieve anything. In effect, it becomes the politics of defeat, in that one has no plan, knows one cannot win, and therefore cries out in hopelessness.
The West campaign and other third parties will virulently object. They will assert they are taking a stand against the two-party system of the capitalist class, against imperialism, against the criminality of the US support for Israeli genocide. And they will be correct! They are. Yet, they have neither plan nor sufficient organization to transform their assertions into political power. Thus, they can only rely on magical thinking in the hopes—and this is a best-case scenario—that their plea to the masses will resonate and result in a great wave of revulsion against the system, thrusting them into office…alone. 

…. 
The political moment
Leaving aside, for a moment, that minor parties in the USA have rarely been successful due to the undemocratic nature of the US electoral system, the actions of the Cornel West campaign and other third parties would be comical if less were at stake. And there have been times when comedians have run for president to make a satirical statement, such as Pat Paulsen.
Current third-party candidacies, including West and Jill Stein, either ignore or deny the dangers inherent in the current moment. West, for instance, acknowledges the dangers of a Trump victory but asserts, in part due to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, that there was no difference between Trump and Biden and, apparently, no difference between Trump and Harris. Stein’s views carry on from the historic and, unfortunately, dogmatic stand of the Green Party on the need for formal political independence from the two-party system.
None of them are coming to grips with the dangers on the horizon. There is nothing, for instance, on the Harris side that is comparable to the plans of the MAGA movement such as Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s hatched idea for a rightwing authoritarian overhaul of the US government. There is nothing comparable on the Harris side to proposals such as the American Legislative Exchange Council’s ongoing work to advance a Constitutional Convention to alter the US Constitution in favor of business and the Christian Right. Nothing.
One cannot conclude ignorance on the part of any of these campaigns. One cannot imagine that any of these campaigns believe that progressive politics and policies will survive a second Trump presidency. Or perhaps they do? As many of us have heard over the months, there are those who believe that Trump will not be so bad and, yes, there will be suffering, but we will come through it.
 
Read the entire piece.
 
https://liberationroad.substack.com/p/the-cornel-west-campaign-third-parties?
 

---