An American Iconoclast: Cornel West on the Campaign Trail

President Joe Biden's approval rating is in a tailspin. Dr. Cornel West is a logical choice for defecting Democrats, but a distaste for "kissing ass" may doom his independent run

Illustration by Victor Juhasz, for Racket

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Getting late in the day on Saturday in Freedom Plaza, where attendees of a massive Free Palestine rally are stomping feet from Protest Cold. That’s when the thermostat number doesn’t look bad when you leave home, but starts numbing bones many hours and thirty or forty speeches later. The condition is more pronounced on the progressive side.

Author, philosopher and presidential candidate Dr. Cornel West is the big speaking draw and therefore has been held until the end. By the time he takes the stage in trademark shades and black suit, you can almost hear teeth rattling. “Let the word go forth… It’s in the name of truth,” he says. “And the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.”

He looks out over the crowd. Freedom Plaza is named after Martin Luther King, Jr., who’s said to have written the “I Have a Dream” speech in the nearby Willard Hotel. West, whose love of “Brother Martin” is such that he seldom gets through an appearance without invoking his name, opens by reminding the audience of time and place.

“Yes, it’s indeed true that brother Martin Luther King Jr. would’ve been 95 years old on Mon-dayyy…”

The crowd roars. They’d have cheered anything, but looks of relief were washing over many faces even before West took the stage. The Gaza issue is of course deathly serious, but the preceding hours of hyper-earnest speechifying featured addresses that were too long, too oddly religious given the Mundo Obrero politics, or so leaden that words landed like tent spikes driven through the ear. There was also spoken-word poetry of almost supernatural cringe levels, as if someone mated Kimberlé Crenshaw with Dr. Seuss: You announce: Gaza terrorist attack/But when it comes to the murder of Palestinians, your facts are all wack…

Bush-era antiwar protests sometimes featured too much levity, with a clear overpopulation especially of dudes on stilts, but this generation’s left/ANSWER Coalition-style protests tend in tone to be ascetic and self-mortifying to the extreme, as if one off-message microsecond is thoughtcrime. West’s jazzlike verbal improv represents the far edge of allowable looseness in this brand of activism, which is likely why he mostly has the crowd won a few sentences into his address. He went on:

“Don’t let anyone lie on you and say that we here in the name of hatred,” he says. “They could be on the chocolate side of Washington, DC. They could be Dalits in India, they could be landless peasants in Brazil, they can be indigenous peoples, they can be Iranians, they can be Iraqis. Anybody. This is a human thing we’re here for.”

He goes on, frequently returning to comparisons of Gaza to Jim Crow, noting for instance musician and football star Paul Robeson’s famous “We charge genocide” petition to the United Nations in 1951. He adds: “It is consistent to be in solidarity with South Africa,” the nation that just charged Israel with the same thing in the International Court of Justice.

Setting aside for a moment the question of whether or not there’s a real parallel between the black American experience and the current situation in Gaza — it seems a complicated case to this Gen-X white reporter, but what do I know? — West’s stump technique stands out. Had he gone into politics early instead of academia, he could easily be in high office already, as he has a skill set that ham-and-egger speakers like John Kerry or Mitt Romney will only ever experience in dreams.

As an orator West has things in common with his late friend and musical partner, Prince, who to the uninitiated also sometimes came across as derivative at first blush. There was so much Hendrix, James Brown, and Curtis Mayfield in Prince that at times he felt like a tribute act, but listen just a little and you heard the synthesis into something very original. West has the hair of Frederick Douglass, the lyricism of King, and at times, the surgical anger of Malcolm X. But the sum is uniquely him, which might be his problem, politically.

From a literary standpoint West is arguably superior to all his heroes — his ability to rattle off mellifluous sentences extemporaneously is unique in American popular culture — but his default temperament is sunny, ingratiating, and forgiving, maybe to a fault. All great politicians have a streak of P.T. Barnum in them, an instinct for calculation and (if needed) ruthlessness that never leaves them. Surely this is an exhausting type of person to be, but they’re all wired that way. Dr. West is a nice man.

Back to the stage. West is still talking about Gaza.

“What kind of world are we living in, America? What kind of country? What kind of empire? All of that barbarity, all of that bestiality?” (He pronounces barbarity with the last syllables stretched out, like King’s “long night of captivity.”) “When I think of Biden and Harris and Austin and Blinken, and Sullivan and Kirby” — booo! comes the rising sentiment from the crowd — “I say personally to Biden and company… You oughtta be shamed!”

The crowd roars again. Standing to the side of the stage, I can’t see its end. It was hard also to avoid seeing the awesome quantity of anti-Biden signage in the crowd. A Code Pink group was toting a BIDEN BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS canvas, while GENOCIDE JOE was heavily represented in chants and in at least one fat red sign periodically seen in the crowd’s dead center. A campaign reportedly begun by the National Conference of Swing State Muslim Leaders last month created an impressively ubiquitous call to ABANDON BIDEN, with holders of such signs scattered all over, departing from the modern American-left strategy of toothless protest, i.e. making noise without electoral punishment. This crowd isn’t trying to send a message. It wants Biden ridden from office.

All this creates an opportunity for West, or would, absent other factors. Again, whatever your feelings about the crisis that exploded to new dimensions on October 7th last year, Israel and Gaza have already dramatically altered the 2024 presidential race. Nearly 50% of Democrats disapprove of Biden’s policies, and support of Israel is particularly unpopular with the youngest voting Democrats. Polls now show either a dead heat or Biden slightly behind Donald Trump in a theoretical national contest.

With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. forcefully taking Israel’s side and other Democratic primary challengers effectively boxed out by internal machinations, the natural destination for this potentially sizable, even election-shifting bloc of votes would be West, who’s shown as much as 6% support in the few national polls that included him heading into this year. West drawing even four or five percent in a general election would make winning outright a tough proposition for Biden. But there’s a catch.

“It will be very hard for Cornel to get on the ballot,” says Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, who also spoke at the event. “He’s on one state.”

As of now, West is on the ballot in Alaska only. He announced his run in June and soon was the presumptive Green Party candidate, with virtually guaranteed wide ballot access. The Greens already had access to 18 states sewn up by July and historically have nearly always given candidates a solid theoretical chance to win, reaching a ballot high of 45 states (and a possible 480 electoral votes) in 2016.

The Greens should have been delighted to have a candidate whose very name inspired Beltway sack-shrinkage — West’s announcement led to a spate of transparent hit pieces, with Democrats horrified by visions of progressive and black voter defections — but the reality of party politics, even Green Party politics, is almost unimaginably complicated for rookies. West in October bailed on the Greens, apparently exhausted by bureaucratic requirements and the need to, as Politico put it, “kiss ass.”

“There are so many different factions within the party, and each faction has its own hoops that you’ve got to jump through, that it makes it tough,” says Tyrel Ventura, whose father Jesse flirted with a Green run in 2020.

West recently raised $100,000 in California, but he’ll need a lot more than that to be a factor in November. Worse, failure to hustle signatures or make enough deals (“There’s a chance that we might be able to connect with some other parties too,” West says) to be a candidate at all is a powerful argument against one’s executive fitness. West seems aware of this.

“We on the move. We on the move,” he said, after the event. “We should be on about fifteen states by the Ides of March. We’re on Alaska already, and nearly in Utah and Oregon.” He smiles a little, then concedes: “It’s going to be an uphill battle.”

If not to West, to whom do these votes go? Please remember this is a campaign story, not one making judgments about Israel or Palestine, and the extraordinary electoral angle on these Palestine protests is the sheer quantity of disaffected voters the crowds represent. If one assumes Joe Biden won’t be a choice for this demographic, that likely leaves Stein, West, RFK, Jr, and Trump, and Trump is shockingly no longer the absolute non-option he once was in crowds like this.

“I voted for Biden in the last election. There’s no chance I’m voting for this guy in the upcoming election, because of this,” says Faisal Siddiqi. “There’s still a chance I could vote for Trump, because to me he’s not an ideologue. There’s still a chance we can work with him.” His strategic calculation: “It’s a democracy, right? You have to earn my vote. I'm not going to give you my vote for no reason.”

“There are many people with real integrity who are turning to Trump as the only option,” says Stein. “We’ve seen that in the Palestine support community as well, there’s the Abandon Biden movement coming from this, and initially, many of them are turning to Trump as a way to punch back.”

It’s not that big of a surprise. Close your eyes and the rhetoric overlaps with those at MAGA rallies. It’s “endless wars” instead of “forever wars,” “Genocide Joe” instead of “Crooked Joe,” “lying corporate media” instead of “failing fake news media,” and so on. One speaker even talked about how “people are doing their own research” and “waking up” to the “convoluted narrative” on TV by communicating with one another on social media.

This is what’s so irritating about all the panic stories about a “horseshoe theory” in which the “radical left” and “radical right” are supposedly plotting to unite and undermine the virtuous center. What actually happens is that ordinary people across the spectrum find themselves screwed over in similar ways, and people of differing political orientations end up saying and feeling the same types of things, organically.

There are so many demographics recoiling from traditional politics now that in a fair electoral fight, Washington consensus would surely lose. This is why, after decades in which third parties were mostly irrelevant at the presidential level (with the exception of Ross Perot’s brief surge in the 1992 cycle), ballot access is suddenly a commodity more prized than gold. Anyone with a pulse who can order a cheeseburger without help will be a serious option for millions, once voters disappear into booths in November. The problem is getting names on ballots.

Republican frontrunner Trump faces myriad legal challenges to remain an every-state option. RFK, Jr., Rep. Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson either were or still are being stonewalled in a Democratic primary season dominated by ballot shenanigans, with the blue party refusing to count New Hampshire results or canceling the Florida primary. This is all happening as a free-falling Biden keeps hitting new record approval lows, the latest a gruesome 33%, three points below Lyndon Johnson’s fatal 36% number from 1968. Maybe not since the Jefferson-Adams election of 1800, when a House runoff decided the presidency on the 36th try, has American politics been so rife with uncertainties. Have we seen anything like this chaos?

“History is such a minefield of chaos, brother,” West replies. “You can go back to so many early elections, and you’ve got shootouts, you got people hiding in basements. And so American history, not just American history but human history in general —each moment has its own distinctive form of specific chaos.” He pauses. “But this particular moment of chaos is quite gargantuan now. No doubt about that.”

If the reader can’t tell already, I like Cornel West. He’s something that’s hard for a celebrity to be in modern America, original and true to himself. We imagine intellectuals to be ethereal creatures, with no skills beyond moving words around. A good thinker however is a person of action, converting the idea on the page into a living thing by standing behind it in the physical world. West to me recalls the sadly long tradition of prolific thinkers cast out by friends when they refused to compromise. He’s written about this, pointing to line 24A in Plato’s Apology, which he framed as, “The cause of my unpopularity was my parrhesia, my fearless speech, my frank speech.” West’s heroes like Malcolm X, King, and W.E.B. Du Bois were all castigated by would-be allies for such a habit of parrhesia, and seemingly all were more beset by critics and haters in their lifetimes than history remembers.

Maybe the political issues aren’t quite as severe as the ones King or Du Bois faced, but West’s refusal over decades to bend to the new Clintonian paradigm of “transactional politics” — better known as “selling out” — has made him a pariah in a left-liberal world that once adored him. Trace back far enough and his presidential run seems like the inevitable end result of a long career of refusing to go along to get along. Before the Israel-Palestine conflict made him a threat to “peel off Arab American voters” in a run The Economist says “holds dangers for Joe Biden,” West’s most constant complaints centered around the Democrats’ embrace of the neoliberal economics of Wall Street donors and their failure to halt the expansion of the carceral state. He blames Republicans equally or more, but never having been a Republican, the feelings aren’t as hard.

The grandson of a Baptist minister who grew up in a segregated section of Sacramento, West graduated from Harvard in 1973, gained a doctorate in Philosophy from Princeton in 1980, and started an academic career that would see repeated clashes with administrators. While a Harvard professor in the early 2000s, president Larry Summers called him in for a talk after he made headlines for working on political campaigns (for Bill Bradley, for instance) and for putting out a rap album. Summers reportedly asked West to report to him about his activities every two to three months. When a New York Times writer asked if it were true that he reported directly to Summers, West seethed, “Professors do not have supervisors, brother… Professors are free agents.”

By 2008 West returned to Princeton and was probably the left’s leading “public intellectual.” He was more telegenic and accessible to the Internet generation than Noam Chomsky, a regular on shows like Real Time With Bill Maher. However, he quickly irritated some in the now blue-controlled capital with his insufficiently ebullient response to Barack Obama’s election. “We’re coming to the end of the epoch of the Southern Strategy. For the first time now, we’ve got some democratic possibilities,” he said in cautious tones, after Obama’s win. “Barack Obama is a symbol, but we’ve got to move from symbol to substance.”

Saying he wanted to be Frederick Douglass pressuring the “progressive Lincoln” he hoped Obama would become, West soon argued with Obama, too. Though some of the arguments sound petty (there was a dispute about inauguration tickets, for instance), the through-line was West’s disappointment with Obama’s courting of donors, Wall Street confidantes, and mainstream (read: white) media celebrities. “Your economic team has little or no concern about poor and working people,” West wrote to Obama, on the first anniversary of his inauguration. “Job creation is an afterthought.”

Soon after the heat dialed up in an NPR interview, when West noted that Frank Rich, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd got White House invites when they were critical of Obama, but “I say the same thing, he talks to me like I’m a Cub Scout.” From there West blasted Obama as a “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats,” and the press in particular began to turn on the man who had been a go-to quote for ages.

West returned to politics in the 2016 cycle as a confidante and advisor to Bernie Sanders. I frequently saw the two together at campaign events in both 2016 and 2020, and Sanders asked West to be one of five people sent to help write the 2016 Democratic Platform. However, they too eventually had a falling out, from the outside seemingly over the same issue. After West announced his run this summer, he said there were some progressive politicians who “don’t really want to tell the full truth,” being fearful of hurting Biden’s electoral cause. West for instance derided the idea that Biden’s is “the best economy” that we can get.

“Is this the best that we can get? You don’t tell that lie to the people just for Biden to win,” West quipped. Sanders responded by saying there “has to be a unification of progressive people,” given the threat of Donald Trump, “an authoritarian, and a very, very dangerous person.”

Sanders from the start of his presidential run was so fearful of offending the Democratic barons that he never even spoke out loud the clear subtext of his 2016 run, a referendum on Obama’s Wall Street-stroking policies. By 2020, some in the Sanders circle were clearly frustrated by Bernie’s refusal to throw his hard-earned weight around, seething when Bernie rolled over for his old Senate pal, Joe Biden. After effectively sealing the nomination following Super Tuesday in 2020, Biden’s team assumed Sanders would go out and bust his fanny to deliver his constituents for the cause, even as they planned all along to ball-kick him after election with moves like the nomination of noted Sanders-basher Neera Tanden to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

West over the years has traveled from Barack Obama’s inner circle to Bernie’s camp to his current status of being pushed outside the club entirely, with running the only means left to express disagreement. I asked West if he was motivated by the party’s treatment of Sanders, with the idea of showing more backbone.

“No, no, the main reason for running is the way they treat poor people and working people,” West replied. “I love Bernie, but that’s not the main one. It would be about number 47.” He laughed. “But I love the man.”

Another quality about West that irks Democratic loyalists is his willingness to engage with conservatives. He rarely agrees with them — his tussles with Sean Hannity in particular make good television, with West dragging Hannity over Trump’s call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five a typical exchange — but doesn’t blanch at talking to red-state audiences and seems to work at being even-handed in his statements. While describing Trump as a “bonafide gangster and neofascist,” he still objected strongly to the Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Trump from the ballot, saying Democrats should “not rely on the courts as a mechanism to circumvent Brother Biden’s anemic poll numbers.”

Some of West’s positions would be a very hard sell to middle America. “Nationalize the fossil fuel industry” is one that stands out, along with reparations, although “end the war on drugs” and free pre-K care might go down easier. Still, my guess is West’s wit and no-bullshit attitude would, with time, go over well enough with most every demographic but the one currently running the country, i.e. upscale white liberals. The latter group simply has no patience for people who’ll talk about their flaws to their faces, and West is the dictionary definition of that. When I told West I’d heard a few Trump supporters in Iowa mention his name along with RFK, Jr. as evidence an electoral fix was in, he talked about trying not to be self-conscious when talking to “Trump country.”

“I don’t approach them in terms of them being stereotyped,” he says. “They’re human beings wrestling with a lot of economic frustration and deprivation. Now, they’ve got some xenophobic sensibilities you got to work with. But one out eight of them voted for my very dear brother Bernie Sanders, and one out of twelve voted for Obama. People are subject to shifts given the fluctuating moments that we live in.” He paused. “You just don’t know. So I will continue to go and talk to them.”

West isn’t for everyone. He will say things that will make the average Trump voter’s head explode, in one minute speaking in campus-intersectionality catch-phrases about “male supremacy” or transphobia, in another talking about the “neofascist moment” that produced Trump. However, as his current presidential run shows, he’s not toeing any party line when he talks. He doesn’t seem capable of it. Even when he tries to align with an institution, it seems in his nature to eventually say the impolitic thing and break with doctrine.

For instance, he’s a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but ask him about capitalism, and he’s as likely to speak in reply about Christian beliefs or T.S. Eliot’s hollow men as he is to cite Marx. This is a person who doesn’t know how to be boring, and it may be that his fate is to be more America’s Cassandra than its next Lincoln — a terrific talker, warner, and explainer of things, but lacking the iron digestion of an organizational man.

“You can’t do this on the fly, especially if you don't have a team of experienced people,” says Stein, who helped recruit West to the Green Party. “That’s what a political party is. They are flawed animals… It’s people who are aligning around an agreed-upon political agenda. And you work on it.”

That West couldn’t work on it with the Greens is fine. The world needs interesting people, too. It just happens that at this moment, it also desperately needs real political choices. Can West find a new gear to become one?