Cornel West: The primaries call

BY TOM GALLAGHER
“The unfortunate fact is that a third party campaign in America just won’t add up”
 
In announcing that “We’re talking about empowering those who have been pushed to the margins because neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about Big Tech,” West expresses a quite understandable “plague on both your houses” perspective of the sort that generally underlies third party efforts – and not just in the U.S. 
But what may be a viable political option in one country might not be one in another; it all depends upon the rules and laws that govern politics in the respective nations. Nothing illustrates the importance of the differences better than the contrasting experiences of the aforementioned Greens, who find themselves continuously embroiled in defending against charges of facilitating Republican presidencies, and that of their German namesake, arguably the foreign “third party” most familiar to Americans, a party that has successfully entered governments – on both the state and national level – on numerous occasions.  Put in the most basic terms, we could say that the difference lies in the fact that where Germans operate within an “additive” political system, we Americans live in a “subtractive” one.
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In our case, on the other hand, should West persist in running a third party presidential campaign, his potential voters will have no such option. Whether West actually considers a second Biden term as bad an outcome as a second for Trump – or a first for DeSantis – I can’t say, but I feel fairly certain that most voters open to his ideas do not. However, under our plurality-winner-take-all system of apportioning a state’s share of the Electoral College, after the voters have cast their votes for different parties there is no way that they can be recombined to block a Trump return. And while a third-party West vote might contribute to an anti-Republican majority in a particular state, it could also contribute to creating a Trump (or DeSantis) plurality in that same time. The system is in that sense “subtractive,” in that a voter who considers Trump (or DeSantis) the worst possible outcome but opts for a third-party subtracts a vote from the only anti-Trump vote count that matters in the end – that of the largest non-Republican party, which will be the Democrats, however welcome or unwelcome that may be to said voter.
Read more.
https://stansburyforum.com/2023/06/22/cornel-west-the-primaries-call