Cornel West Chooses Irrelevance

And RFK Jr. might just do the same

Two days ago, Cornel West announced he was leaving the Green Party and launching an independent presidential bid. This convinces me that his campaign is nothing more than a quest to polish his own legacy and vanity. As such, it should not be taken seriously, much less supported, by anyone who wants revolutionary change of any stripe.

Let’s get real here. West first announced he was running under the People’s Party banner, which is little more than an internet-based club whose primary accomplishment is to make the name of Nick Brana a vaguely familiar one to a few million Americans. There’s no noticeable organization to it at all, much less anything resembling the potential of a political ground game.

The People’s Party was on the ballot in a grand total of one state(Florida) as of December 2021, as opposed to 17 for the Greens and 33 for the Libertarians. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Libertarians have added a few more since then, but it’s highly doubtful the clubby, academic Greens or damned near invisible People’s Party have done very much.

That alone was a red flag for me, and as Russell Dobular of Due Dissidence noted, the older you get, the more you learn to trust that first red flag someone raises. I was delighted when Chris Hedges and Jill Stein talked West into running for the Green nomination for the simple reason it would get him more ballot access, thereby increasing his chances of damaging a Democratic Party completely controlled by an increasingly authoritarian and Fascistic oligarchy.

Then, for whatever reason, West decided to go independent. Right there, he makes it almost impossible for him to make the ballot in more than a very few states, thereby making it impossible for him to materially affect the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

That’s right. Full stop. Time to apply a little something I learned from Kshama Sawant. I forget which You Tube show it was on—Due Dissidence, Jimmy Dore, Sabby Sabs, one of those—but it is important.

She said that if one wants to lead a workers’ movement, then one has a duty to those people not to ask them for their precious time, and especially money, if one is not serious about effectively challenging the capitalist system and the institutions which support it.

By going independent and giving up those 17 or so states in which the Greens are on the ballot, Cornel West has done the American football equivalent of catching a punt on his own 1 yard line and taking a knee, instead of letting it bounce into the end zone and taking over at the 20.

If he was serious at all about the presidential contest, he would not have done this, which leads me to suspect that’s the whole point. I think Cornel West doesn’t want to be Ralph Nadered. He doesn’t want to be shunned by all those academic and media and political contacts he has cultivated for decades.

Which means preserving the very comfortable world Cornel West has built for himself is more important to him than in actually doing anything politically to improve the lot of working class Americans of any description, including Black ones. That’s fine if he wants to do that, but by asking for their time and money he’s breaking that duty to the working class not to rip them off, lead them to nowhere, or to distract them from their real enemy, which is the capitalist system itself.

Cornel West likes to call Donald Trump a pied piper. As a Marxist voter, I say Cornel West needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

In other news, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to make an announcement in Philadelphia on Columbus/Indigenous People’s Catastrophe Day. He’s either going to run for the Libertarian nomination or launch an independent campaign.

I will apply the same standard to him that I did to West. If he’s serious about attacking the corrupt Democratic Party because it is now anti-democratic, he’ll run as a Libertarian and take over that political football at the 20 yard line.

If he’s not, he’ll run as an independent and kneel down on his own 1 yard line. Cornel West has chosen irrelevance. We’ll soon know what RFK Jr. is made of.

Thank you for reading and have a great weekend.