[Hopefully, West’s supporters will prevail upon him to undertake
his fight in the most effective arena that currently exists, where the
greatest light-to-heat potential lies – the primaries. ]
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CORNEL WEST: THE PRIMARIES CALL  
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Tom Gallagher
June 22, 2023
Stansbury Forum
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_ Hopefully, West’s supporters will prevail upon him to undertake
his fight in the most effective arena that currently exists, where the
greatest light-to-heat potential lies – the primaries. _

, Photograph Source: amberdc – CC BY 2.0

 

Shortly after Cornel West announced his intent to run for president as
the candidate of the People’s Party, _The Nation’s_ John Nichols
reported encountering some who “expressed sympathy for a third-party
run, but suggested that West should forgo a People’s Party bid and,
instead, campaign on the ticket of the Green Party—which has secured
many state ballot lines across the country and has an established
network of backers.” And voila, before the proverbial ink on that
article could dry, West had announced his intention to seek that
party’s nomination. Where some may see this rapid change as a sign
of a poorly thought-out effort, others may applaud the campaign’s
flexibility, but either way, here’s hoping this demonstrated
malleability can extend to the suggestion of Ben Burgis’s Jacobin
article: “Cornel West Should Challenge Biden in the Democratic
Primaries.” History, specifically the starkly different experiences
of the Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders candidacies – and maybe even
that of Eugene Debs – suggests the wisdom of the shift, but it’s
the math of the situation that demands it. 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.

In the German system, generally described as “parliamentary,”
while there is a president, the office is largely ceremonial, the real
head of government being the prime minister who is chosen by a
majority of the members of parliament, a majority that may, and
usually does require the support of more than one party. So, after
running an independent campaign, if the German Greens do not come in
first or second – as they never have on the national level –
recognizing that their members will consider one of the top two
parties to be preferable to the other, or at least not as bad (for
most that preference would be the Socialists over the Christian
Democrats), they will try to work out a compromise with that party,
with Green party leaders playing a minority role in a resulting
government coalition, as Joschka Fischer famously did as foreign
minister from 1998-2005. So, in the end, the effect will be that the
votes cast for the Greens are added to those cast for the Socialists,
thereby preventing the outcome least desirable to most of both
parties’ voters – the Christian Democrats coming to power.

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.

And, in the end, should West be on a ballot line in a final election
that results in a Republican presidency, the damage done to his
reputation – and much more importantly, to the causes he champions
– won’t be a matter of anyone _proving_ his culpability. Ralph
Nader has found himself embattled and subjected to abuse by people who
couldn’t carry his briefcase, lo these last twenty-plus years, not
because anyone can actually prove his candidacy enabled George W.
Bush’s election. Defeat generally has numerous contributors and in
this case the Democrats’ ill-advised Florida recount strategy and
the Clinton Administration’s decision to shut down online efforts to
match up potential vote swaps between Nader supporters in
“battleground” states with Gore supporters in non-battleground
states are factors often conveniently forgotten. But as anyone
involved knows, or at least should know, in politics, perception
counts for a great deal. And just as government employees are
prohibited not only from actually having a conflict of interest, but
from giving the appearance of conflict of interest as well, the wise
political actor will realize that it can be just as important to avoid
the appearance of causing an undesirable outcome as it is to avoid
actually causing it. 

At the same time, while the so-called “two party system” that
governs our presidential elections looks like it will be in place for
the foreseeable future, the two parties are not themselves immutable.
Just a month before the West announcement, Peter Beinart made just
that point in a _New York Times_ opinion piece, “Imagine if
Another Bernie Sanders Challenges Joe Biden,” arguing that the
profound effect of the Sanders candidacy has been a major factor in
Biden becoming “the most progressive president since Lyndon
Johnson.”  Pointing to the joint Biden-Sanders campaign working
groups that shaped the 2020 Democratic National Platform, he notes
that there was none devoted to foreign policy and that with “rare
exceptions, Mr. Biden hasn’t challenged the hawkish conventional
wisdom that permeates Washington; he’s embodied it. He’s largely
ignored progressives, who, polls suggest, want a fundamentally
different approach to the world. And he’ll keep ignoring them until
a challenger turns progressive discontent into votes.”

To be sure, as Beinart notes, “A primary opponent would risk the
Democratic establishment’s wrath.” And we quickly got a taste of
that – in the generally left-wing _Nation_, no less – where, in
her article “Cornel West Should Not Be Running for President,”
Joan Walsh argued that even if West “were to run as a Democrat, like
[Marianne] Williamson and the deeply off Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he
would still hurt Biden, because a primary gives the bored, supine
media a reason to hype “Dems in disarray” stories.” Walsh’s
argument unfortunately is the type of thinking that held that Bernie
Sanders should have minded his own business in 2016 and leave things
to those who had already decided on Hillary Clinton, a nominee whose,
shall we say, arms-length relationship with the working class resulted
in the Trump presidency.

And, oh yes, there will be character assassination: For Walsh,
“Williamson, West, and Kennedy are all, sadly, narcissists looking
for the spotlight.” While we can reasonably ask people to be aware
enough of the workings of the system so as to avoid possibly
unintended outcomes, we cannot reasonably ask them to be silent.
Perhaps a West primary candidacy would be useful, perhaps it
wouldn’t, but running out new and different ideas is precisely what
the primaries are for.  Disagreement does not imply narcissism – or
any other character flaw. 

And what about Debs? Although his presidential efforts are now a
hundred years past, the sterling reputation that his name still
carries on the American left contributes to a lingering reluctance to
engage with the Democratic Party that he left behind in favor of the
Socialist Party. In 1912, the year of Debs’s greatest electoral
success (his 1920 campaign from a cell in the Atlanta Penitentiary
resulted in a greater number of votes, but a lower percentage, as it
was the first year women had the vote), the Republicans’ 1856
supplanting of the Whigs in the national political duopoly was an
event within the living memory of some. And indeed, that year the
Republicans would be pushed out of the duo for the first time, as
their former President Theodore Roosevelt ran a third-party challenge
to their sitting President William Howard Taft and dropped him to
third place. Debs actually beat Taft in three states and Roosevelt in
two, and although he only had 6 percent of the total national vote, it
was the first race where four different candidates exceeded 5 percent
since the first Republican victory in 1860. It seemed that a big
electoral shakeup might be on the horizon. It wasn’t. Neither of
these anomalies has repeated. The third party impulse is all too
understandable: It’s not just foreign policy where there is a
serious critique of Biden to be made. The fact that it is legitimate
to speak of him as the most pro-labor president since FDR is largely a
statement about just how low the bar has been set. And remember, this
is a man who said he’d veto a “medicare-for-all” bill if it came
to his desk. But we are not living in a parliamentary system and we
cannot simply wish one into existence.  Hopefully, West’s
supporters will prevail upon him to undertake his fight in the most
effective arena that currently exists, where the greatest
light-to-heat potential lies – the primaries.

_Tom Gallagher is the author of THE PRIMARY ROUTE: HOW THE 99% TAKES
ON THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX,  Anti-war activist and community
organizer in Boston. He represented Allston Brighton neighborhood of
Boston in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. First socialist
state representative since the Sacco and Vanzetti era in
Massachusetts. Subsequently chaired the Boston chapter of the
Democratic Socialists of America. Later relocated to SF where he lives
on Bernal Heights, is a substitute teacher in SFUSD and has written
about his experiences in a book called SUB. Elected as a Bernie
Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic Presidential Nominating
Convention.  He is a member of the Bernal Heights Democratic Club,
the Progressive Democrats of America, and the Democratic Socialists of
America._

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