Nobody for President

The announcement of a presidential campaign by Professor Cornel West is unwelcome. (By the way, it’s one “L.”) The outcome is potentially disastrous. There is no upside. Stopping Trump is the priority.

West is a brilliant man, even a great man, but his head for politics is lacking. One bit of evidence was his behavior when he had the opportunity to weigh in on Democratic Party platform deliberations in 2016. Subsequently he endorsed Green Party candidate Jill Stein. That’s a big no-no. If you accept a seat at the table, you don’t take your ball and go home when you don’t get what you want.

I’m second to nobody in my distaste for Hillary Clinton, but voting for her in November of 2016 was the political imperative for anyone in their right mind. After all, we have fully experienced the sickening alternative. Who wants to do that again.

Item #2 was sharing platforms with the ridiculous Robert Avakian, guru of the so-called Revolutionary Communist Party, which is neither revolutionary, communist, nor a party. Enough said about that.

The Green Party arguably helped tip the 2016 election to the Tapioca Turd in a handful of states. Now its hapless, grifty, Russophilic standard-bearer Jill Stein will run the West fiasco. West is an infinitely better messenger than Stein, and Joe Biden is looking weak these days, notwithstanding his achievements as president, so the Green initiative is dangerous.

When asked about the spoiler factor, West evaded the question and commenced to babbling about how you fight fascism. Surely you don’t fight fascism by facilitating its access to power.

A subsumed debate is over whether West should instead contest for the nomination in the Democratic primaries. This would avoid the spoiler problem but still be ineffectual. In the same vein, the campaign of Marianne Williamson could only be of limited value.

All of the likely yammering about the inadequacies of government policy is irrelevant, even idiotic, in light of the realities of the U.S. Congress. That criticism was better focused on Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, who both came into office with healthy majorities in Congress and proceeded to piss them away. In both cases, it was for the sake of deficit reduction.

Today the problem isn’t the government, it’s the voters. They need to be shepherded to think differently. A West campaign in the primaries is unlikely to change that.

Any West campaign is likely to retard the progress of the Left. Presently the most active sector of the Democratic electorate is middle class, suburban women. A left-identified campaign to impede Joe Biden, and thereby facilitate the further liquidation of reproductive rights, among other things, will reduce the appeal of the Left.

A debate is forming inside Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) over whether to support West. Its permanently enraged millennial/Gen Z ranks are itching to form a third party. Aside from the spoiler factor, the fact is that DSA is not positioned to grow. In fact, it has been losing membership. Most of its campaigns are ill-advised, and the ones that aren’t are misdirected as well.

DSA’s best priority is labor. In fact, a big upcoming Teamster strike against UPS promises another opportunity. Unfortunately, the record is not promising, in light of the recent shenanigans around the railroad workers. DSA ended up attacking its most likely allies – in the Congress and among the workers – for failing to restart the Paris Commune. Moreover, the criticism was replete with idiotic gaslighting about non-existent picket lines.

The organizing failure there paralleled the older abstention from the biggest anti-racist upsurge in the past sixty years, around Black Lives Matter and George Floyd.

Presently our political fates hang on the slender reed of middle-class and independent voter alienation from Trump and from the Republican Party that he has transformed into a neo-fascist enterprise. Noam Chomsky called the G.O.P. “the most dangerous organization in the history of the world.” Without an effort to prevent its return to power, the difficult grass-roots work needed to transform the electorate will be impossible.