The 2024 presidential election is shaping up like a remix of Titanic and the Keystone Cops (or, for another generation, maybe Reno 911). But while an election-without-debates is increasingly recognized as farcically theatrical, a welcome announcement from America’s leading moral philosopher could turn it into a real race, something more like Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (or perhaps instead Cannonball Run).
[T]he most immediate impact of Dr. West’s entry into the 2024 presidential campaign may be its exposure of the sleight of hand long enabled by the Congressional Black Caucus.
A ruse on which Democrats rely
Joe Biden has long claimed to be a supporter of communities of color, despite a long record of enabling predatory policies from the notorious 1993 crime bill to the dismantling of welfare under the Clinton administration. His record as a president has unfortunately continued the pattern, from his continuation (until just a few weeks ago) of Trump border policies to his abandonment of working Americans on issues from student debt relief to labor rights, and even preventable hunger among the elderly.
Elected Black leaders with an equally long history of placing their careers before their constituents have been quick to overlook Biden’s record, currying favor with the establishment they have critically enabled for decades—at enormous cost to democracy and the future.
The farce that they together maintain in order to secure the crucial support of Black voters is only possible in the context of an electoral vacuum. The party establishment aims to maintain that vacuum by, for instance, denying voters debates among the contestants in the presidential primary, treating Biden’s nomination as a foregone conclusion, and deploying any number of spokespeople to smear his grassroots opponents.
I’ll leave aside for now a detailed analysis of how profoundly idiotic that strategy is. But given the weakness in Biden’s public support, and his abject failure to live up to even his meager campaign promises, nominating Biden again would be tantamount to handing the GOP the keys to the White House.
His international laughingstock of a Vice President is not poised to help. Kamala Harris is a walking reflection of a strategically confused Democratic Party attempt to replicate Barack Obama. But the shoe does not fit. Harris’ attempts to appear inspiring instead reveal her reliance on speechwriters and nervous laughter. She and Pete Buttigieg could start a master class in how to say nothing at all while filling air time. Together, they embody everything wrong with the Democratic Party and its vacuous commitment to style and identity over substantive interests.
The point, for now, is simply that the “Democratic” Party’s relationship to democracy is similar to the relationship between “correctional” institutions and the notion of correcting anything. It is a party branded around a principle that it routinely disrespects—and has successfully degraded.
I would use the image of Democrats spitting in the faces of voters, but the metaphor of shooting themselves (and unfortunately everyone else) in the feet is sadly more apt.
A prophetic voice impossible to ignore
In the face of this demagoguery enabled by the “Democratic” Party, democracy gained a step this week in the entrance of a new voice in the presidential race. Unlike his predecessors, he is poised to break the vacuum and force the debate that the Democratic establishment has done everything conceivably possible to avoid—from fabricating orchestrated disinformation to coronating candidates despite layers of documented and potential further corruption.
Dr. Cornel West is a peerless visionary. His ideas could transform the United States even more dramatically than the vision that Bernie Sanders articulated. He can eloquently address a limitless range of issues, and perceives politics through the crystal clear lens of a moral philosophy grounded in human rights and dignity. Were he to win the White House, he could do more than anyone has in decades to hold America to our own stated principles.
https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/1665743761551548416?s=20 [Note: Substack and Twitter are locked in something akin to a digital arms race, which is why you can’t see here the video featuring Dr. West announcing his campaign. You can, however, still access it through the publicly accessible link preceding this note. I encourage every reader to lend him your ear.]
Dissident writer Chris Hedges, who served as the former Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the New York Times, wrote at some length about Dr. West’s powerful insight and compelling concerns. This particular passage stood out to me:
“Progressives in the Democratic Party think they can get away with rendering invisible their consensus to extravagant militarism,” he said. “But it goes hand-in-hand with the U.S. imperial policy. It goes hand-in-hand with expansion of NATO. It goes hand-in-hand to lead us in the proxy war with Russia. It goes hand-in-hand with taking money out of programs that have to do with education and healthcare and jobs with a living wage and housing, basic social needs of, not just people in this country, in the empire, but around the world.”
“How many precious Iraqis were killed by the U.S. war machine?” he asked. “Each life is precious. Iraqi lives have the same value as a life anywhere else in the world. How many lives were killed in Afghanistan? And Libya? We can look at all of the different examples. Then you’ve got examples in Haiti, you’ve got examples in Panama, you’ve got examples in Grenada and so forth in the last forty or fifty years. And we’re not even talking about the co-ordinated activities of overthrowing democratic regimes in Iran and in other places. These are the kinds of issues we’re going to have to hit head on my brother, the same is true in terms of the Middle East. The monies we give to Egypt, the monies we give to Israel. How can we render invisible the suffering of our precious Palestinian brothers and sisters given the U.S. complicity and endorsement of these vicious apartheid-like conditions? There’s no way that the Democratic Party can get away with this anymore.”
“We had the same problem of the Democratic Party deferring to the apartheid regime in South Africa,” he went on. “What did we have to do? We came out with boycotts and sanctions. We came out with divestments. Well, the same is true now in apartheid-like conditions in the West Bank and Gaza. We can do that without in any way falling prey to one of the more vicious ideologies of the last two thousand years, which is the hatred of Jews. We don’t have a minute to engage in any kind of anti-Jewish hatred or anti-Jewish sentiment, but at the same time we don’t have a minute to turn our backs to the suffering of Palestinians tied to U.S. foreign policy that always looks away from their suffering, looks away from their social misery, looks away from the murders taking place, looks away from the houses that are crushed, looks away from the land that is taken, and so forth. Those are the kinds of issues that we have to bring to the public with whatever integrity, honesty and decency that we have and that’s pretty much what the tradition that produced me is all about, from Frederick Douglass to Ella Baker.”
No voice in American politics can rival either Dr. West’s poetry, or his prose.
There are other candidates in the presidential race—even the Democratic primary whose legitimacy Dr. West is poised to help challenge—who I support as better alternatives to Biden. One of them is Marianne Williamson. While her foreign policy vision has deferred at times to the Washington establishment, she shares Dr. West’s commitments to economic justice and environmental sustainability. In dramatic contrast, elected Democrats mouth those words with self-serving frequency, while relying on the public’s ignorance to get away with routinely betraying their stated commitments.
Notwithstanding Dr. West’s unparalleled vision, and the hope his campaign could inspire in a generation thirsty for alternatives to ecocide-for-profit, the most immediate impact of Dr. West’s entry into the 2024 presidential race may be its exposure of the sleight of hand long enabled by the Congressional Black Caucus.
Candidates running outside the party apparatus confront a tilted landscape, including not only a weaponized press establishment, campaign finance rules that effectively invite corporations and billionaires to buy elections, and a formal process that will include no televised debates, but also the limited imagination of a body politic that is equal parts complacent, ignorant, and complicit. That spectrum of challenges has created opportunities for careerists in Congress to advance themselves while abandoning their own communities and supporters.
For instance, in 2020, voices from the Congressional Black Caucus—especially Jim Clyburn (D-SC)—deployed their substantial influence to convince their supporters to vote against their own interests. They forcefully pushed the candidate whose path to and through Washington relied on support from Wall Street, who reciprocated with countless acts of servitude to capital, put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, played a crucial role in creating a slave labor force by imprisoning millions of Americans, and supports predatory for-profit “medicine.”
A crushing irony emerges when considering how desperately Clyburn’s supporters need support from government, the kind of support that only change in Washington can enable.
West entering the race represents a stick confronting the Democratic Party establishment, in the form of a credible threat to peel off crucial Black voters on whom it relies. Not only do Biden and the Democratic establishment writ large rely on Black voters, but everyone knows it—including Black voters.
The Democratic Party has declared in federal court that its establishment can pick any candidate they want, whatever the voters think, and has won the right to effectively make up its rules as it goes to favor candidates supported by Wall Street. Be that as it may, Democrats committed to coronating Biden despite his record and lack of public support are hurtling towards a cliff.
West’s analysis could not only expose the predatory conservatism of Biden’s record over decades, but also force Biden to respond to the concerns of communities of color who he has engaged only theatrically. As a candidate running outside the corporate duopoly, West has already committed to staying in the election until November 2024, drawing a sharp contrast with Bernie Sanders’ unfortunately premature concession in spring 2020.
Biden’s enablers would do well to remember their reliance on voters who West is particularly poised to reach.
West already won the debate—even if Biden tries to duck it
In an earlier era, the word “woke” was coined to refer, more or less, to people who understood the vision that Dr. Cornel West has long promoted. The co-optation of that term to instead connote the identitarian theater to which the Democratic Party has long reduced itself reflects the collapse of whatever claims to be the Left in the United States.
With enough support from enough concerned people, Dr. West could sufficiently threaten the Democratic Party’s interests—specifically by exposing Biden’s hypocrisy to Black voters—to force a debate at the national level.
However the term “woke” may have been co-opted, weaponized and contorted, Dr. West’s vision remains not only compelling, but also crucial for the ultimate liberation of Americans bearing the burden of either dark skin or inopportune circumstances.
His voice will be a force impossible to ignore.
That’s a good thing for democracy in America, however many Democrats ironically (prove through their actions that they) despise it.
Please join me in supporting Dr. West’s important campaign! He will need the support of every American concerned about the future to overcome the bipartisan weight of Wall Street. Visit his campaign website at https://www.cornelwest24.com to learn more and get involved.
With enough support from enough concerned people, Dr. West could sufficiently threaten the Democratic Party’s interests—specifically by exposing Biden’s hypocrisy to Black voters—to force a debate at the national level.
Paid subscribers can watch a video of Dr. West embracing me and speaking in support of my congressional campaign in 2020, and also read the story of how we first met on a dance floor and bonded over our shared appreciation for Prince. Dr. West’s later endorsement was among the ones of which I was ultimately most proud.
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