Can Cornel West Win in 2024?

with Cornel West

Third-party presidential candidates have everything stacked against them. They usually haven’t worked their way up through the traditional channels of elected local and state offices. (The last president before Donald Trump to have held the office without winning a prior election was Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he was five-star general.) They don’t have access to the massive donor networks and super PACs cultivated by Democratic and Republican operatives. Their policy prescriptions and campaign promises often address issues and take positions unfamiliar to the average voter.

The natural question is this: Why? Knowing the long odds against them, why do these candidates nevertheless put themselves through the expensive, grueling, and sometimes humiliating process involved in even a brief presidential run? I wanted to know, so I asked an old friend, the philosopher, social critic, and activist Cornel West, to come on the show to talk about it. As you may or may not know, Cornel is running for the Green Party presidential nomination. In this clip, I ask him why he’s running and whether he honestly thinks he has a chance of winning.

Cornel is no fool. He’s aware that his chances of victory are slim. And yet, by his own account, he feels a moral compulsion to represent the interests of poor and working-class Americans whose interests he feels are unjustly ignored by the two dominant political parties. Cornel’s candidacy strikes me as quixotic, but as he reminds me elsewhere in our full conversation, Cervantes’s Don Quixote embodies a deep spiritual commitment. He’s an idealistic figure, one who acts on behalf of what he perceives to be good and right. For such a figure, winning is not the only criterion for success. Integrity and moral seriousness count. Accordingly, the final vote tally may not tell the full story of Cornel’s campaign. There’s certainly more to the man than that.

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This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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GLENN LOURY: I gotta ask you this question. You are a brilliant and profound social thinker. You are an intellectual and a man of ideas. You are a prophetic witness on behalf of ideals that you embrace. What do you think makes you fit to run the country?

CORNEL WEST: I've said before you'd find me in the crack house before you find me in the White House, because the White House has been tied to so much corruption and war crimes abroad, be it Vietnam and Iraq or other places. But I do feel a certain calling to allow the legacy that has shaped me of Martin Luther King and Rabbi Heschel and Dorothy Day and Edward Said and it goes on. Grace Lee Boggs. Because I'm thoroughly convinced that there is a best of America, and I want to reintroduce America to the best of itself. And the best of itself was people of integrity, honesty, courage, who were fundamentally committed to the least of these poor and working people.

It's the government of the United States of America. It's a massive, massive thing. You can't get anything done by yourself. You say you'd be prefer to be in a crack house [rather] than in the White House. The White House is not actually running the show, not on its own. It's providing some direction, but it's at the pinnacle of a massive bureaucratic structure. You got the other party, you got the Congress, you got the courts. Is it not a quixotic enterprise, one where it's full of symbolism but where it doesn't actually touch the ground? How are things gonna be made better in virtue of this candidacy? You're not gonna win. Excuse me, with respect.

You never know, brother. It's hard to say. You know, Biden's getting old, Trump might drop, the mediocre folk on the Republican side, the Democrats have very little. You never know how God works and our history proceeds. But you're right, the chances don't look good. Again, I'm not naive about this thing.

I run for the presidency trying to ensure, first, that there is a public debate and public conversation that focuses on those you spent so much time on in the last twenty years or so, those in mass incarceration, those in the hood and the ghettos and so forth. And then how that's connected to the military industrial complex and the imperial presence of 800 military bases around the world and US troops and over 150 countries? How that's connected to not having enough resources to deal with the elimination of poverty and homelessness, to deal with decent housing, to deal with quality schools, to deal with healthcare for all, and then to deal with those personal and spiritual issues you've always been concerned about, often associated with personal responsibility, which is stronger families, strong civic institutions so people can straighten their backs up and try to be persons of caring?

Let's suppose I'm a white guy running a small company in the middle of Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska, somewhere. Yes, I vote Republican, but I don't necessarily feel good about it. I love my country, whatever I mean by that. I love my God. I'm a straight arrow. And I'm listening to your prophetic witness, and what I see is a radical. I see—I'm sorry—a Marxist. That's what they're gonna say. I see a guy who shows up ambulance chaser-like—excuse me, with respect, but that's what they're gonna say—at every demonstration with a protest sign and who's gonna spout this rhetoric.

What I know is that the world is a dangerous place, that there are forces at work other than American empire that necessarily don't mean my grandchildren any good, that hard calls have to be made when they fly planes into office towers. Things have to be done in response to that. Of course there are questions about what's wise, but to adopt an armchair posture—again, this is the voice of this guy I want you to respond to it—of castigating the American Project tout court because we have made “mistakes,” when I know that the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War was the right side, when I know that the retirement of the arsenal of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics actually advanced human freedom in the largest sweep of history, notwithstanding the fact that the United States has done things to set human freedom back.

Please! Talk to me! Don't talk at me. Tell me why it is that I should be persuaded by this radical vision that you're giving such eloquent voice to.

So at first I would start with the precious white brother that you noted. I would say that there's the best in us and there's the worst in us. I would say that I'm fundamentally concerned about his situation and predicament, and I would say I want to learn and listen. I have something to say to him. He has something to say to me. I would say he is who he is because somebody loved him. I am who I am because somebody loved me. And therefore I'm concerned about his access to a job with a living wage, access to safe neighborhoods, access to healthcare, access to quality education for him and his children, and that we have much in common because we're part of a project of living in the United States.

The United States has its worst, which is its imperial presence abroad, let alone all of the various forms of domination. And America has its best, those who resisted it and those who preserved their dignity and resilience in the face of it. So I would put myself on a human level. That's why I'm gonna spend some good time going into Trump Country, brother. I approach each person not as a stereotype, not as some kind of construct, but as a very precious human being who has their own lens through which they view the world. I have my lens through which I view the world. We attempt to come together and see where we overlap.

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And you're right, it is a dangerous place. The world's a dangerous place, always has been, always will be. You know, the hounds of hell are always dominating the species, of hatred and fear and envy and resentment. But thank God we've got moments of interruption. That's what love is all about. That's what justice is all about. And you know how fragile any democratic experiment is. The question becomes, how do we try to preserve the best of it?

And I think I can find some common ground with that white brother, even if we entered first talking about sports and music a little bit, or maybe talked about his mom and I tell him about mine so we can make a genuine connection. But then the political discussion would begin. If they came in and said, well, I'm a Marxist and I'm a radical. Well, no. First, I'm a mama's child and daddy's kid just like you. Then they say, “Oh, I hear you are a Christian. You're a Christian, you couldn't be a Marxist.” Well, I'm the kind of Christian that believes that a critique of capitalism is very important, but Marx is wrong on a lot of things. So I think there's a way in which I can make that connection, my brother.

I gather that you're not expecting an endorsement from Former President Barack Obama as you seek to become the second African American elected to that high office.

Did you hear what he said yesterday, though? God bless him.

About Tim Scott?

Oh Lord. “Tim Scott better have a plan to hit transgenerational poverty and deal with racial inequality. He got to walk and walk and talk and talk.” What a self-criticism! What a self-indictment! Tavis Smiley and I had a poverty tour twice trying to get [Obama] to use the word “poverty,” and we were trashed by the White House folk. We also tried to raise issues of mass incarceration, raise the issues of [the] poor in barrios and reservations. Pushed aside, viewed as traitors, and now he's gonna say exactly the same thing about Brother Tim Scott? Come on, Brother Barack. We were born at night, but not last night, man.

I know you've heard the criticism: Third-party candidacy, it just draws support away from the milquetoast Democrats. But after all, even a milquetoast Democrat is better than the other alternatives, say these critics. And they remember Ralph Nader 2000 and all of that. And they wanna know, what's your plan? What's your long-term plan in terms of the weighty election and the role that you might play in it? Even if you're successful in securing the Green Party nomination, and even if you attract a non-trivial amount of support, the chances that you would prevail in the electoral process are slim. But the consequences of your effort could be very, very significant. How do you answer that?

If you think that American politics will forever be the oscillation between Republicans and Democrats, then any attempt to break out is viewed as being a spoiler. Now, I think that's an unfortunate term. When you actually look at Al Gore, he didn't even carry his own congressional district of Tennessee, he didn't carry Arkansas, and he could have actually fought when it went to the Supreme Court. He refused to fight. You might remember that. And Jesse Jackson Jr. and the [Congressional Black] Caucus tried to convince him to to follow through.

The idea of putting that on somebody who will receive such few votes relative to the two parties, to me, is simply a rationalization. They said the same thing about Sister Jill Stein. She got one percent of the votes, but she received full responsibility for why Hillary Clinton lost. No, Hillary lost. She was a mediocre candidate, she didn't go to West Virginia, she called ordinary Americans deplorables and irredeemables, and therefore she did not win. It wasn't because of Jill Stein. You see what I mean? I don't like that kind of framework.

I do think there has to be some very practical reflections and practical judgements, not just Machiavellian ones that have to do with numbers, but also practical ones in terms of the impact of various administrations on people. To me, that is a factor, but it's not the sole factor. You just have to be ready to get hit with all kinds of bows and arrows, my brother. Some of 'em are strong and you learn from 'em, and some of 'em are just empty and false and pseudo, because people are trying to foreclose any broader discussion.

I'm convinced the two-party system, the two parties in place, do not speak to the basic needs of poor and working people. Now, if that's the case, and I'm committed to poor and working people, I got to follow my call.

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