Could Cornel West Be America’s Next President?

If candidates for political office are said to campaign in poetry and govern in prose, what do they do in the prophetic mode? That question is raised by the entry into the 2024 presidential race of longtime professor, author, and activist, Cornel West, who hopes that his synthesis of old-time religion and leftist politics — Karl Marx and the Gospels — is tonic for a season of political discontent.In a video posted to Twitter, Mr. West asserts that he comes “from a tradition where I care about you.” He describes democracy as a process of “disruption, eruption, and interruption” and savages “neo-fascists like Brother Trump” and “milquetoast neoliberals like Brother Biden” in explaining his rationale for mounting a third-party bid for the Oval Office. The video, telegraphing Mr. West’s heterodox persona and exaggerated cadences, features footage of him in conversation with a podcast host, Joe Rogan, and a television personality, Bill Maher. Mr. West has on occasion referred to this correspondent as “Brother Ari.” He has said, “I was a gangster before I met Jesus and now I am a redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities.” Mr. West explains that he is getting into the race because “neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about Big Tech.” In a 2017 op-ed titled “Pity the Sad Legacy of Barack Obama,” he argued that the “reign of Obama did not produce the nightmare of Donald Trump — but it did contribute to it.”Mr. West, the author of “Race Matters” and “Black Prophetic Fire,” among other academic and popular works, joins the scion Robert Kennedy Jr. and wellness guru Marianne Wlliamson as options for those on the left’s wilder precincts. He acknowledges his bid is a longshot, but announces that “some of us will go down swinging with style and a smile.” In that video, Mr. West announces, “I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States as a candidate for the People’s Party. I enter for the quest for truth. I enter for the quest of justice. And the presidency is just one vehicle we pursue that truth and justice.” Mr. West, who is an honorary chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America and has supported Senator Sanders during the latter’s runs for the White House, promises on his campaign website to “stop all foreign military aid, close the bases, disband NATO, and ban nuclear weapons globally.”Mr. West’s platform also aspires to “end surveillance, the drug war, and mass incarceration” and “break up Big Tech.” He would “guarantee health care to all like every other major country on Earth.” He would have elections solely reliant on “hand-counted paper ballots.” The People’s Party, which emerged from the foment of Mr. Sanders’s 2016 run, is on the ballot in Virginia, Florida, and Missouri. Mr. West’s scholarly career has been both gilded and marked by controversy. A student of the philosophers Robert Nozick and Stanley Cavell as an undergraduate at Harvard, he was the first Black person to earn a doctorate in philosophy at Princeton. Mr. West was defenestrated from an august professorship at Harvard — where he was among the so-called Dream Team of the African American Studies Department, alongside Henry “Skip” Gates and Lawrence Bobo — when Lawrence Summers was president. He later returned to Harvard, but again left under stormy terms when it appeared that tenure was not forthcoming. Upon his second departure from Harvard, he alluded to his longtime support for the Palestinian Arabs, asking, “Is Harvard a place for a free Black man like myself whose Christian faith and witness put equal value on Palestinian and Jewish babies — like all babies — and reject all occupations as immoral?” The director of a Jewish student organization, Harvard Hillel, Rabbi Jonah Steinberg, called that allegation “an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory” and denounced the professor’s invocation of the “settler colonial violence of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.” Mr. West now teaches at the Union Theological Seminary, at New York. On Twitter, he promises his presidential run will aim to “end poverty, mass incarceration, ending wars and ecological collapse” and guarantee “housing, health care, education and living wages for all!” The campaign slogan for Mr. West’s bid for the White House is, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

Could Cornel West Be America’s Next President?

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