Questions for Cornel West

When the going gets tough, will West fold and endorse Biden?

By Howie Hawkins

Cornel West is the first person to declare for the Green Party nomination for President with a relatively high public profile and the potential capacity to run a credible campaign to promote the Green Party platform. But questions remain.

Can Cornel West pull together a competent campaign team?

This question arose immediately when West announced as the candidate of the People’s Party, a shell of an organization without a grassroots base and many allegations reported in the media by former members against its leader and public face, Nick Brana.

From interviews West gave soon after the announcement, it appears that Brana simply asked West to be the People’s Party candidate and West said yes without a campaign team in place. Within a week, the problems with the People’s Party led West to declare himself a candidate for the Green Party nomination.

The Green Party starts off with at least 17 state ballot lines and at least some organization in most of the states.

West’s ill-prepared announcement didn’t show good political judgment or experience. But he has time to recover. West will need an experienced campaign manager who can handle everything from staff management in a pressurized campaign environment to executing a plan to meet the sprawling burden imposed on minor parties of petitioning for ballot access in 30 or more different states, all with different petition forms, signature requirements, and filing deadlines.

He should also prioritize finding a competent treasurer to navigate the shoals of the campaign finance reporting requirements of the Federal Election Commission.

Will West follow through an independent Green Party campaign through the November 2024 election?

What will West do when he is vilified by his progressive academic and activist peers for being the spoiler candidate who could lead to the election of Donald Trump, or the next-in-line far-right Republican?

West has flip-flopped between the Democrats and the Greens for years. In 2000, he was a senior advisor to Bill Bradley’s Democratic primary campaign before becoming a prominent endorser of Ralph Nader’s Green Party campaign. With the left-liberal backlash against Nader and the Greens in 2004 for supposedly spoiling the 2000 election for Gore, West went back to the Democrats, supporting Al Sharpton in the primaries and John Kerry in the general election. He supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election and then abstained from voting for either Obama or the Green candidate Jill Stein in 2012.

In 2016, after supporting Sanders in the Democratic primaries, he supported Jill Stein in the general election, a Green for the first time in 16 years.

In 2020, with another left-liberal backlash against the Greens for supposedly electing Trump in 2016, West was back to the Democrats, publicly opposing my Green Party candidacy and calling for a vote for Biden.

He told me and my vice-presidential running mate, Angela Walker, on his podcast in 2020 that after Trump and fascism are defeated in the 2020 presidential election, we can turn to fighting the neoliberal Democrats. We argued back that Trump was more a reflection than a cause of the bigoted and authoritarian current that American politics has always had with a lot of state power in Congress and many state houses. We argued that the Democrats were fueling the Republicans’ reactionary politics of scapegoating immigrants, people of color, women, and LGBTQ people for problems they did not cause.

The Democrats’ neoliberal economic policies had undermined the economic security of working- and middle-class people and their promotion of token diversity in professional and managerial circles while economic inequality and insecurity were growing made more people susceptible the politics of resentment and scapegoating.

We argued that the way to marginalize and politically crush the extremist right was with a positive progressive program, not Biden’s tepid calls for unity and bipartisanship, which only helped normalize the party that would soon attempt to overthrow his election.

In his interviews since announcing, West is making a case similar to that made by Angela and I that the Democrat’s pro-corporate neoliberalism is sowing the seeds for Republican neofascism.

What has changed since 2020 for West? If anything, the Republican attack on voting rights and honest elections, and on the rights and decent treatment of women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and people of color, is stronger today with the laws they are passing in the 20 or so state governments they control.

Will West support the Green Party’s pro-democracy agenda featuring ranked choice voting and proportional representation?

West’s initial platform on the People’s Party website and then on his own campaign website was very weak on democratic reforms. It called for term limits for Congress instead of proportional representation —  a game-changing pro-democracy reform. It called for hand counting of paper ballots, which is less accurate than machine counting of paper ballots.

Conspicuously missing was a call for a full restoration of the Voting  Rights Act and the passage of federal election protection legislation in order to pre-empt the voter suppression and election rigging bills that have been passing in Republican controlled states.

The failure of the Democrats to pass voting rights and election protection bills when they controlled both Houses of Congress should be major criticism West makes of Biden, who failed to lead a repeal or at least a carve-out of the filibuster for these bills.

When West is accused of being a spoiler, he should be able to say he has the answer that will eliminate the spoiler problem: replacing the Electoral College with a ranked-choice national popular vote for President.

He should expand upon that by saying all of our elections should eliminate the spoiler dilemma through ranked choice voting for executive offices and proportional representation in legislative bodies through proportional ranked choice voting in multi-member districts.

With the majority Americans no longer affiliating with either major party and desiring a third major party, campaigning for reforms to create an inclusive multi-party democracy would have broad appeal and could have a significant impact the 2024 presidential campaign debate.

Critics tell him we can work on those reforms after we defeat the Republicans (again), but he can answer that these reforms would not even be up for debate if he wasn’t raising them with his campaign.

Will West support the Ukrainian national liberation struggle against Russian imperialism?

In interviews that ask about his position on the war in Ukraine, West makes a point of condemning Putin as a “gangster” and the Russian invasion as imperialist and then adds that the U.S. empire provoked Russia with NATO’s expansion to states formerly in the Russian empire’s sphere of influence.

That comes across as an excuse for Russia’s invasion imperialism when West gets to what he thinks U.S. policy should be. His policies support the top demands of the Russian imperialists: an immediate ceasefire that would solidify Russia’s hold on its occupied territories and cutting US arms for Ukraine’s resistance.

He makes no call for Russian troops out, no affirmation of Ukraine’s right to self-determination and the restoration of its sovereignty and territorial integrity. His call for negotiations is like that of fence-straddling moderates during the Vietnam war who called for the U.S. to negotiate.

What was there to negotiate? The antiwar movement in the streets demanded Out Now because the U.S. military had no right to invade Vietnam and prop up the corrupt authoritarian government of South Vietnam.

If Cornel West applies to Ukraine what he says about centering “the least of these,” he will listen to the Ukrainian victims of the Russia invasion and occupation and their appeals for solidarity. The Ukrainian resistance is a people’s war with self-organized civil resistance and mutual aid throughout the country supporting the armed resistance of Ukraine’s armed forces.

Across Ukrainian society — including the Green Party’s counterparts in the Ukrainian progressive movements of trade unionists, socialists, feminists and Ukraine’s Green Party — the people appeal for arms and economic aid to enable them to push the Russian invaders out of their country.

The polls show that most Americans empathize with the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression and want to provide aid to Ukraine’s resistance without sending in U.S. troops. Will West be a consistent anti-imperialist who supports the Ukrainian national liberation struggle against Russia imperialism while also seeking, as he says, to dismantle the American military empire that has deployments and bases across the planet?

Neutrality between Russia and Ukraine in this war would be complicity in Russia’s war crimes. It would be a discordant position for a self-styled Christian socialist with a Ph.D. in moral philosophy.

I am hoping that Cornel West will provide good answers to these questions. Many people had been urging me to run again. In the absence of serious candidates, I was beginning to feel obligated to run.

Pulling a credible presidential campaign together is huge challenge, particularly for a minor party candidate. It’s like a starting a business in a market with a shared duopoly that colludes to crush upstart competitors.

Most members of my 2020 campaign team are now tied up with family and job commitments and two key members have passed away. So I am glad Cornel West has decided to run.

My biggest concern is West’s position on Ukraine and foreign policy generally. The international Left today is divided over whether to support the Ukraine’s national liberation struggle.

The opponents do so on grounds similar to those currents on the Left in the Cold War that supported the Soviet-led camp instead of being independent of both Cold War camps and supporting movements for democracy, justice, and peace in every country, East and West. If the Left in the U.S. is perceived as supporting or apologetic for authoritarian states simply because they are in conflict with U.S. imperialism, most progressive- and peace-minded people will be repelled.

The best traditions of Green and socialist internationalism have opposed all imperialisms and supported the freedom struggles of working and oppressed people in every country.

Based on his recent criticisms of Russian as well as U.S. imperialism as well as his association with the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, which between 1982 and 2017 supported popular struggles around the world for democracy, human rights, and social justice, I am hopeful Cornel West will bring this independent internationalist approach to world affairs into his campaign.

 

Howie Hawkins was the Green Party candidate for President in 2020.

Originally published in Ralph Nader’s print-only Capitol Hill Citizen.