Obligs:
YOU “WON’T EVEN ADMIT THAT THE KNIFE IS THERE.”
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Clay Shirky has the best essay on this topic that I have read. Honestly, I was expecting the “here’s my niche candidate with a snowballs chance in hell of winning” posts to arrive a lot later in the election cycle, but hey, it’s apparently never too early.
People who believe in protest votes do so because they confuse sending a message with receiving one. You can send any message you like: “I think Jill Stein should be president” or “I think David Duke should be president” or “I think Park Eunsol should be president.”
Similarly, you can send any message you like by not voting. You can say you are sitting out the election because both parties are neo-liberal or because an election without Lyndon LaRouche is a sham or because 9/11 was an inside job. The story you tell yourself about your political commitments are yours to construct.
But it doesn’t matter what message you think you are sending, because no one will receive it. No one is listening. The system is set up so that every choice other than “R” or “D” boils down to “I defer to the judgement of my fellow citizens.”
I expect the chorus of posts making the case for letting your fellow citizens decide to get a lot louder in the following months.
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Everybody loves Cornel West … until now that is
He has just stepped onto the tracks in front of a freight train called the Democratic Party, and it is going to spend the next 17 months destroying him
Whatever we think of Ralph Nader and Jill Stein today, we don’t think “heroes who made good decisions and achieved their goals”—and after 2024 we won’t think that about Cornel West either
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That mostly sounds like great stuff. And by electing one guy, without a party to back him up in congress (where all of this would actually be implemented), absolutely none of it will come to pass. I really, really, really wish more people understood how our system works… and mostly the part about how we don’t elect a dictator or king.
I’m not the biggest fan of this bullshit system that makes positive change for the people hard to achieve by design… but it’s what we’ve got. Running a 3rd party bid for president isn’t going to change that. Want a better national government? Vote in every election, especially those off-year congressional ones. Or raise a people’s army and seize control of the state, I guess…
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there’s always the working families party
their approach is through “fusion voting” where one party supports particular members of another party when their goals align. they sometimes have their own candidates, more often they support existing candidates. but, they have a specific set of goals they lobby for regardless.
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I’m not excited about his candidacy at all. The best possible thing that could happen would be for his campaign to get no traction whatsoever. We don’t need another narcissistic spoiler like Ralph Nader in 2000. 2024 looks to be a very close race, and West’s good intentions could inadvertently help end American democracy for good. There is simply too much at stake to vote for a third party in the race for the White House. Biden is not ideal, but you’re kidding yourself if you think a second Biden term wouldn’t be light years better for civil rights and the environment than a Trump, DeSantis, Haley, Pence, etc. term.
If West and his party really wanted to make things better, they would run for local offices, where they might actually stand a chance of winning and implementing some of their platform positions. That would be the responsible and pragmatic way to build a strong third party.
West’s candidacy is nothing to be exciting about. This isn’t fantasy politics, where the stakes are how righteous you feel after you cast your ballot. This is real politics, where the stakes are the lives of countless people, both future and current. If you want to get excited about something, get excited about voting for a candidate who actually has a chance to win and push America to respect civil rights and do it’s part to fight the climate crisis.
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Was there anything in that interview about how the decolonialist approach actually approaches decolonizing stuff?
The jump from ‘invasion of Ukraine is crime against humanity being conducted along typically imperialist lines’ to the next paragraph about the hope for the recovery of a soft-focus historical tradition of anti-colonial struggle, without further mention of the situation that involves a certain amount of urgent immediate anti-colonial struggle is honestly puzzling at best.
At worst it looks like a fairly blithe dismissal of people not-symbolically spilling blood on a very literal anticolonial struggle, because their preference for international solidarity delivered in weapon systems is awkward, in favor of the ‘deep antiwar struggle’ of symbolically spilling blood on ballistic missile submarines. Not a full tankie take where the whole war is dismissed as a justified response to Washington’s sinister international meddling; but apparently willing to treat the situation largely as a footnote to western Europe’s military budget.
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I don’t disagree with any of that, but it’s not as though local and state elections don’t matter. The same problem exists. Vote for a third party and you can end up with a Ted Cruz or Lauren Boebert. It feels like every race on every level now has razor-thin margins where every vote is vital.
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I generally agree with many of his policies, but some of it strikes me as disturbingly naive, such as the suggestion that we should “disband NATO” and completely abandon Ukraine to Russian depredation.
Even with more enthusiasm for his platform, it would be difficult to get around the “third-party candidate dilemma”. It’s an impossible moral quandary - as Ralph Nader argued during his first run, the argument that third-party candidates can only siphon votes is a self-defeating proposition that will guarantee a two-party monopoly in perpetuity. On the other hand, it is accurate. Cornel West has a 0.0% chance of winning the White House.
I’m a bit more sympathetic to aggressive Democratic primaries, like Bernie ran against Hillary, based on the supposition that such a primary can force the Democrats to the left. But it seems to me that he ran such a savage campaign against Hillary that many Democrats came out of the 2016 primaries feeling like there was no real difference between Clinton and Trump, and that, of course, is catastrophically wrong.
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Progressives love to run for president (for which there is no hope that they might ever get elected). They rarely run for school board, city council, or other local government positions, which might eventually, long term, build a base.
Which tells me that it’s always only theatre. No effort to really create any sort of viable third party, Because of course not: there’s lots of profit to be made in being the maverick.
I’ll just vote for whoever is the democratic nominee contra the obviously inevitable fascist republican.
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Best case scenario for the Americans here seems to me that his candidacy will pull Democrats further left, at least in terms of social and economic policy.
As a European, not too thrilled about the “disband NATO” talk. I certainly agree that the US has probably overdone its military quite a bit, and that war should be regarded as a failure of resolving conflicts in better ways. But being able to stand up to straight-up aggressors is not a bad thing. It’s all well and good to talk about post-colonial cooperation but when your bigger neighbor responds with “well, I’ve noticed you can’t defend yourself so I’m just going to kill you and take your stuff”, I don’t really see a non-violent solution.
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Just a thought…
Perhaps we should revive some of the older campaign threads for some of the often repeated arguments – and the “why I don’t like this candidate” threads, to keep the shitshow to a minimum? 
West’s foreign policy is a socialist form of isolationism. We (the USA) will stop being the global hyperpower, we’ll give ourselves (not you) a big fat peace dividend and use it to give our people a decent standard of living, and meanwhile the rampaging imperial powers that threaten your freedom are not our problem.
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The hard work of progressivism still needs to be done in city halls and statehouses nationwide. Even if he pulls an upset and somehow wins, it’s not going to change the basic equation for people living in red states. Think global, vote local.
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There will be two kinds of posts
- Yay Joe Biden
and the other one
- Shut up you’re hurting Joe Biden
That’s it
It’s silly to expect anything else from an election
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I don’t think that’s necessary. Campaigns run on money as well as other forms of support. Without both, candidates cannot last until the election. Let’s see if he can continue through the election cycle this year, after the press and the public ask a lot of questions about his positions, platform, and proposals.
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Um… what? What world are you watching? Next are you going to say people enabled the Nazis because of economic anxiety?
Um, sorry, but this is not a “distraction”:
It is a coordinated effort by a major political party in the most powerful country in the world to get me killed.
“Distraction”? Fuck that noise.
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Embrace “and”. The ruling class is using it to create more laws to benefit themselves, because that’s what they do. That’s what they always do. That’s how they became the “ruling class”.
AND
There are actual fucking fascists and Nazis in the streets who really and literally want to eliminate large swathes of the population, including people in here talking to you now trying to get you to see that this is not a hypothetical exercise.
A couple of months ago literal seig-heiling Nazis openly marched in my city supporting the elimination of people including people I know and love. And as an intellectual politically progressive autistic man with a Jewish wife, I have no illusions as to what they would want to do to me.
And, yes, sure, the ruling classes continue to wage the class war from their penthouse bunkers. They also need to be dealt with. But of the two groups, one of them actively wants to eliminate me and mine and are marching in the streets.
So, you know, sometimes you just have to pick your battles.
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They had some help from fascist oligarchs.
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Exactly, that’s how you get the Iranian Revolution. It started out with college students who didn’t like the repression of the American-backed Shah. How’d that end up? Freedom for everyone?
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