US Democratic Party operatives are already trying to beat their electorate into submission for 2024
Joe Biden, the oldest president in US history, who would be 82 years old on inauguration day in 2025 should he win a second term, is firmly committed to clinching another round in the White House.
But Biden, once a fiery Delaware Senator and the seventh-youngest person ever to be elected to the US Senate at the time, has clearly lost a step. When he announced his latest bid, an Associated Press/NORC poll showed that 73% of respondents thought he shouldn’t run again despite admitting they would inevitably hold their noses and vote for him again.
Fast forward to today and there is a conversation happening amongst Democrats that they want a competition rather than an outright coronation for Biden. Minnesota Democratic Congressman Dean Phillip, one of the wealthiest members of Congress and a vaunted centrist, has been doing the rounds in the media calling on someone, anyone to challenge the incumbent president and add some intrigue to the Democratic primary, and drive enthusiasm. Some are speculating that he himself might launch a bid, though he is probably in no realistic position to do so.
There are, of course, some candidates – like Marianne Williamson (the ‘crystal lady’) and Robert Kennedy Jr. – both of whom are running against Biden. But both also have their shortcomings that will in all likelihood make them non-contenders, even if they are contributing to the party’s overall policy discussions. One challenger from Biden’s left flank, however, does stand out: Dr. Cornel West. This is primarily because he is running a third-party campaign that will see him sidestep the Democratic Party’s notoriously corrupt bureaucracy.
West, a long-time activist and academic who has taught at some of the world’s most prestigious universities like Yale and Harvard, is certainly making the White House anxious. In June, he announced he’d run under the banner of the People’s Party, a new left-wing party founded in 2017 by former staffers for Independent Senator Bernie Sanders. Then he switched his target to the Green Party nomination This was obviously for strategic reasons given that the People’s Party is not a ballot-qualified party while the Green Party does have access in many states.
With West poised to have ballot access in some parts of the country, particularly in some tough battleground states, and a clear lack of enthusiasm for Biden, a key philosophical question arises for liberals and progressives. Namely, is voting for Dr. West essentially throwing your vote away or handing it to the eventual Republican nominee? Many are weighing in and drawing comparisons to other past “spoiler candidates” like Jill Stein and Ralph Nader, both former Green Party candidates.
Joan Walsh, the national affairs correspondent for The Nation, weighed in by saying in a column that “Cornel West Should Not Be Running for President,” arguing principally that he would take votes from Biden. She suggests that this is especially true for Black votes because West is a Black man that understands racial issues far better than Biden, who is a white man and the sponsor of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that helped ratchet up the incarceration of Black Americans. Black voters were an important part of Biden’s 2020 electoral coalition.
CNN has reported that Democrats are alarmed about West’s Green Party bid, citing concerns about Black voter enthusiasm and West potentially taking these votes from Biden. The left-wing ‘high-end tabloid’ Daily Beast also uncovered that West owes more than half a million dollars in unpaid taxes, playing into tropes of a Black thief and suggesting that he “isn’t living up to [the] standards” of his ‘tax the rich’ politics. West has said he is “broke as the 10 Commandments financially” and that this ploy was a distraction to delegitimize his candidacy.
But the notion pushed by the media (and Biden operatives) that any third-party left-wing candidate has cost Democrats an election doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. First of all, if we chalk all of Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s 2016 votes up as votes that should have gone to Hillary Clinton, then we also have to count all the votes that went to Libertarian Gary Johnson as votes automatically belonging to Donald Trump. The Libertarians actually got about three times as many votes as the Greens.
More importantly, no party is entitled to anyone’s vote. If a party wants to win an election then it’s the party’s job to craft a policy platform and message to reach voters and form the necessary coalition to win a majority in its given electorate. Politicians and parties that are not able to accomplish this are to be left behind, with candidates more suited to an electorate’s needs chosen to govern. This is supposed to be how democracy works. If Democrats feel like they’ll get outflanked by Dr. West then this is a clear message to change their policy platform.
The Democratic Party’s establishment does not think this way, however, because actually attuning a ‘left’ party (the Democratic Party is not a left party) to voters’ preferences would require significant concessions from the wealthy and corporations. Since the Democratic Party is one sect of the American corporatocracy, this is unacceptable. So they have adopted a strategy of ‘triangulation’ since Bill Clinton's presidency in the 1990s, wherein Democrats acquiesce positions to the right in order to win the center. This involves the assumption, in the absence of an actual left party, that left-wing voters will have nowhere else to go and will thus fall in line.
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, a longtime Democratic Party operative and political analyst, once eloquently stated why the left continues to be beaten down by Democrats as part of a 2006 documentary about Ralph Nader’s presidential bid called “An Unreasonable Man.”
He said: “If you want to pull the party, the major party, that is closest to the way you’re thinking to what you’re thinking, you must show them you’re capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them you’re capable of not voting for them, they don’t have to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn’t listen or have to listen to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party because the left had nowhere to go.”
The Democratic Party’s base has been triangulated to oblivion. The cost of living is out of control, productivity and wages have long been decoupled, the planet is dying, the bipartisan cabal is driving us to the precipice of nuclear annihilation and Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. For its part, the Democratic Party has ignored these most important issues and has openly conspired during the past two election cycles to stamp out any legitimate grassroots movements working to address them.
Our current political duopoly is clearly no longer in keeping and, as O’Donnell suggested, people have to demonstrate that they won't be gaslighted into voting for – and thus legitimizing – the failed program of the wildly corrupt Democratic Party. If that means casting a spoiler vote for Cornel West and handing the election to (presumably) Donald Trump then so be it. The onus is on the Democratic Party to earn peoples’ vote – not on people to vote for an out-of-touch party.
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