Cornel West’s Breakup With The Green Party Doomed The Left’s Third Party Effort
The progressive third parties fighting against the status quo failed this election. What mistakes did they make, and what can we learn?
“I am deeply committed to a broad coalition of sensibility and the united front. So I invite a variety of different organizations and that includes the People’s Party, but we are certainly looking forward to being a part of the nomination process of the Green Party.” Four months after saying that, Cornel West left the Green Party to pursue an independent campaign. Here, we find the progressive left’s over-complication of basic coalition building and lack of strategic focus.
This was not always the case though. Four short years ago, the entire left rallied behind Bernie Sanders and was devoted to expanding a straightforward working-class agenda to a populist audience. Since Bernie’s defeat, the movement has been in utter disarray, and I’d argue part of that has to do with the lack of ruthlessness. When Bernie accepted defeat, he got close to Biden in order to dictate essential policy changes like getting Lina Khan the FCC chair and negotiating drug prices. At the same time, by endorsing Biden, he lent legitimacy to the establishment and dissolved his own movement in the process. While it wouldn’t be right to ignore those successes, in the broader view, Bernie should’ve realized his place within history. As the right-wing fell further into fascism, he should’ve realized that the Democrats were following this trend and would not be able to push the country forward successfully. As a relatively small but vocal political bloc, the left must choose what battles to take and how to fight them. These fights won’t be won if taken in fear. It is fear of the fascist right that convinced Bernie to bend the knee to Biden, and millions more who once supported Bernie begrudgingly voted for Harris for that exact reason. It wasn’t that the left didn’t have power and momentum; there was plenty of anti-establishment sentiment. It was that there was no coherent alternative or convincing figure to lead it this election.
The narrative during this election cycle, spun by establishment media, was that the left will cause Trump to win, and we can’t accept that nonsense premise; the left has just as much a right to fight for its interests as the Democratic establishment does. It’s not only that, but if progressives were effective in this election and were able to influence the establishment, it may have forced Democrats to actually adopt the necessary populist policy that would’ve beat Trump. Compromising out of fear is always a road to failure, and we must always realize the moment we are in. Last year was already so rough, and unfortunately, conditions are about to get much worse for everyone in this country. But there are plenty of glimmers of hope that we can build upon. That means we must form coalitions to secure the best conditions possible in ways that are mutually beneficial. Union power has been steadily making waves over the past two years. The UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination proved that there is still a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the status quo across the political spectrum. This year, our goal is to build power off of this existing energy as well as the swelling disillusionment that comes from the deteriorating conditions under neo-fascism.
Doctor West is a prominent intellectual in American politics who has been active in many political movements throughout the years, including the 1992 LA Uprising, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. As a Harvard Professor and as the son of a Southern Baptist minister, West acquired a signature speaking cadence that combines sophisticated moral clarity and an inspiring vigor. Throughout the more than 40 years he was at the forefront of politics, West has maintained the radical spirit of the socialist black power struggle of the mid-20th century without bowing to the liberal mainstream. West was always critical of the two-party establishment but was willing to support Barack Obama in 2008, stating that he had “character and judgment.” When Obama threw away his progressive face to capitulate to capitalist banks and continue the War on Terror, West became loudly critical at a time when Obama could do no wrong in the eyes of the public. West has been, up until this point, someone with great instincts and years of consistency to back it up.
In 2016, West was chosen to write Bernie Sanders’ political platform. It was a perfect match for a person like West, who opposed the status quo established by Obama, supporting a candidate who represented a populist resistance to that status quo. Again, in 2020, West was all-in backing Bernie Sanders for his second campaign. He was a necessary representative for the black working class who may have been drawn to Joe Biden from Obama’s endorsement. After Bernie ultimately lost and endorsed Biden, West described the situation that Bernie had been “crushed by neo-liberalism.” West was also not afraid to be critical of his ally. While being much more charitable to Sanders than to Obama, he said Bernie wasn’t telling the whole truth about the Biden administration and was too afraid to speak out against him. With West’s prominence in progressive politics, which grew substantially over the past ten years, he seemed to be one of the only remaining people willing and able to run for President on the left.
On June 5th, 2023, with no one standing up to oppose Biden, Cornel West was formally invited to run for President with the independent People’s Party, which he accepted. West received the immediate enthusiastic support of the disorganized progressive movement and the left media. This excitement also came with questions about his strategy. Writing for Jacobin, Ben Burgis asserted that West should challenge Biden in the Democratic Primary and grab the spotlight. Burgis argued that a third-party run would be pretty much invisible, saying,
“But I see very little evidence that third-party runs under present circumstances add up to any sort of contribution to making that vision a reality. It would probably take deep changes in the way American elections work, some of which would require amending the Constitution… a new party emerging out of a struggle within one of the existing major parties. There’s nothing even remotely resembling a precedent for one emerging from an act of will by a tiny band of activists.”
And this is historically accurate; few times in American history has a third party even come close to challenging the duopoly. Burgis notes that the 1850s Republicans emerged from the abolition struggle, being the last time a new party took power. The first-past-the-post voting system in this country is particularly brutal, requiring a monumental effort to hurdle not only the institutional barriers but the corporate interests from both wings shredding you in the media. It would take a massive realignment to make an independent run succeed, and there isn’t much reason to believe that realignment is happening yet. But it’s not impossible. Something like this happened in the 90s with Ross Perot’s independent run taking the lead against Bush and Clinton for a short time when the two parties were so identical it left space for a disgruntled billionaire to run on vague right-wing populism and a staunch belief in balancing the budget. Even this year, Robert F Kennedy Jr used his wealth, name recognition, and some bipartisan quackery to reach ten percent in the polls. However, for an entirely grassroots anti-establishment campaign, with the added disadvantage of going against an incumbent, winning as an independent would take an unprecedented effort and tons of luck. For The Nation, Jeet Heer quotes progressive commentator Krystal Ball discussing West’s independent campaign,
“Krystal suggested that running within the Democratic primaries might be a better option. ‘I don’t think third-party efforts have proven successful even in pushing the establishment left. In fact, it appears to me they’ve backfired,’ Ball observed. ‘Jill Stein was a credible spoiler. It didn’t push Hillary to the left, or Biden for that matter. Instead of forcing establishment Dems to listen to lefty voters, the Stein campaign led to the entire left being smeared, and dismissed as fascist enablers and Putin puppets etc. Whereas, I do think that the fact Biden had to run against Bernie in the primary forced him to take positions he otherwise would not have. For example, Biden clearly would not have embraced any student debt cancellation were it not for Bernie and others forcing the issue. Once Biden was cornered into an ironclad pledge on the trail, activists were able to pressure him to make good on a portion of this promise. I think you could make a similar case with regards to climate action. It was all wildly insufficient, of course, but led to Biden being significantly more progressive than he had been for the rest of his career.’”
West, throughout his run, was adamant, saying many times that he was ideologically opposed to running as a Democrat because of the corporate capture and the party further adopting explicitly right-wing policy positions. Running as a Democrat may be conscionably wrong to West, but he overlooked how running in the primaries would be far more advantageous. West typically avoids directly critical questions, so it was never clear whether he cared more about the strategic concerns or the ethical concerns of running as a Democrat. It’s fair for him to be uncomfortable wearing a Democrat label when so many Americans feel disenfranchised by both parties. At the same time, there’s no reason he couldn’t have centered his campaign on changing that: stand firm on your progressive values while telling voters you are here to break up the establishment.
From a strategic perspective, running as a Democrat would give him a more realistic shot at winning. If West were to win the primary in a big upset, he would force the establishment to get in line behind him and bring in millions of ‘vote blue no matter who’ supporters. And there’s little reason to believe the road to winning the primary would be any more challenging than the independent route. West knows the primary process is rigged against him from working with Bernie but running as an independent would be no different in this aspect. For example, New York, a super-majority Democratic state, didn’t allow any third parties on the ballot this year, as did many other states. After RFK Jr. gained ground in the polls, many states prevented him from getting ballot access, prompting him to waste money on lawsuits. The Democratic Party will not fold on its own, so there has to be a mass effort to either completely seize and revolutionize the party or overthrow it entirely with an opposing coalition party– ideally, one that combines unions, the populist working class, and the left. For West, it’s not clear if he thought he could win or just wanted to reach out to and expand class consciousness to people of color and the poor.
His followers’ other critique came when they began looking into the People’s Party. It turns out that the party has a history of internal corruption, dubious political alignments, and rumors of mistreatment circulating. There were multiple credible sexual abuse allegations against the founder, Nick Brana, who, in response, falsely claimed that there was a conspiracy to remove him from the leadership. Since then, Brana seems to have gone completely right-wing, working on the RFK Jr. campaign, welcoming the merger with Trump and celebrating the Trump victory. When West joined the MPP, the party was only on the ballot in three states, and they never even filed his campaign with the FEC. Prominent writer Chris Hedges and members of the Green Party organized a meeting with Cornel West to discuss him potentially running for the Green Party. The meeting must’ve been successful because on June 14th, 2023, West announced on The Katie Halper Show that he would be seeking the Green Party nomination instead. In the interview, he said in regard to the meeting,
“When I did hear, mediated through Chris Hedges and from certain individuals in the Green Party who had their own invitation for the nomination, I said well, if in fact there's a good chance I’ll be able to have much broader infrastructure, [better] institutional capacity and make sure that there's no distractions in terms of any kinds of struggles or tensions or various kinds of stigmas associated with parties and persons. [It’s] very important that I’m able to keep the focus where it belongs.”
Joining the Green Party made much better sense for West than the independent path. With the help of Jill Stein, who had already run in two previous presidential elections for the Green Party, he had much more behind him: infrastructure, people, funding, recognition, and, most importantly– ballot access. In the last election cycle, the Green Party had ballot access in 30 states and had party infrastructure in 42 states. With the Greens, West also broadened the coalition he was working with. As someone who has long been an advocate for the black community, West often talked about orienting his campaign toward people of color who have been oppressed by the racist elements of the capitalist system. There is undoubtedly a portion of the black community that has been politically inactive since the first Obama term and others who may intuitively understand the political problems that affect the black community but have never connected it to the class struggle. For West, branching out to these people and incorporating them into the Green Party would’ve been genius since the party has historically postured toward black issues but struggled to gain support as it focused on upper-class white issues like climate change. Also, West brings with him a mature socialist ideology that could welcome more leftists, as the Green Party in the past lacked a robust critique of capitalism. When the news reached the progressive media, there was satisfaction and excitement that this could be a real chance to throw a wrench in the two-party system in a political environment when Biden felt politically weak and reelecting Trump felt like an impossibility. Regrettably, this didn’t last.
For reasons that are still unclear, on October 5th, 2023, Cornel West announced that he would abandon the Green Party nomination effort and instead run as an independent. West enlisted the help of Peter Daou as campaign manager to figure out the best method to gain ballot access in each state, as West was now essentially starting from scratch. Shortly after, Daou stepped down from the position and away from politics over post-traumatic stress caused by the genocide in Gaza. After this significant blow to his campaign leadership, West implemented a ‘cooperative campaign management model’ with four experienced leaders, but the decline of his campaign had already begun. From that point forward, West would only see marginal success in getting his face in front of the media and would only end up securing ballot access in 15 states. It felt like West could only receive support if people sought out him, not the other way around. Throughout the year, West hardly registered 1% in polling, if at all, unanimously underperforming Jill Stein. At points, it wasn’t clear what West’s campaign message even was; where Stein took advantage of the outrage over the Gaza genocide to gain the support of the Palestinian liberation movement, West hardly gained much support from this anti-establishment sentiment. Although he was adequately outspoken on the issue and showed up at the Columbia University protest and the UCLA protest, it seemed he was ultimately not able to translate this into votes.
That comes back to his choice to run independent; Stein received 814,196 votes and third place simply for being an alternative to the Democrats, while West got not even a tenth of that, with 78,529 votes, being essentially invisible. Stein was also strongly pro-Palestinian, but she didn’t make it the focus of her campaign until late in the election, and she wasn’t a prominent member of the movement. West, if he had deployed a focused strategy to be a leader in the movement, not only would it have benefited his campaign but also the Palestinian movement. This means going to every national protest, organizing new protests, blitzing the media, leveraging relationships to get people on board, and getting to the forefront of social media. Independent candidates are already at an inherent disadvantage, meaning they have to not only work ten times as hard but get out in front of voters ten times as often.
Cornel West’s justification for the sudden change is that the Green Party held him back, but he was never specific about the disagreement. West said in a CNN interview that he had “discovered, low and behold, that there are certain impediments.” When asked to clarify, he stated that there was “a long nomination process,” he would’ve had to make appearances at party events and prove himself as a candidate, things he believes would get in the way of focusing on the campaign. West was asked on Briahna Joy Gray’s show why he thought he couldn’t be his full self in the Green Party, and he responded by saying, “The Green Party has never put the black freedom struggle at the center of their program.” He went on to say that the Green Party, despite having many socialists in the organization, has never been centered on class struggle. To some extent, he’s right. The Green Party has never seemed to center a critique of capitalism as the basis of its platform, even though taking on corporate greed is part of its message, and Stein has made that very clear. At the same time, West was handed the freedom to present this critique to the party; as a candidate, he could’ve worked to change the platform to focus on class struggle and black freedom. In a different interview with Status Coup in February, he reiterated, “it was too much work inside of the Green Party, too many Green Party events, all the internal Green Party debates. And I had no idea that Jill Stein was going to end up running.” After that, West mentioned, “There were also many tensions that were personal that not ain’t worth talking about,” suggesting that he and the party had some sort of falling out.
Later in February, West would again speak on Briahna Joy Gray’s show, talking about the frustrations of the party system and criticism he’s getting from other leftists regarding his stance on the Putin regime. West would also make a far more direct criticism, not at the Green Party as a whole but at Jill Stein, saying she is “addicted to running for elections.” Now that this quarrel had become more open, it was more or less revealed that West seemed to struggle to accept criticism and suggestions from within the party. For West, who has always been independent in his political activities, representing a party with thousands of people who want to work for you but who also need to be assured that their issues aren’t betrayed may have been difficult to grapple with. Frustration is entirely understandable; West worked his entire career to defeat white supremacy and fight the class struggle, so being inundated with obligations to other issues feels like a distraction. However, that’s the trade-off that has to be made: work with people in a democratic process, and the payoff is getting the support and resources of an established party behind you. Jill Stein was given the chance to respond to this on Briahna Joy Grey’s show in May, where she explained that West abandoned the party suddenly, illustrating her point of view, feeling that West was overwhelmed by the party’s demands and didn’t take criticism well.
In November, the day before election day, The New Yorker published a piece about Cornel West’s campaign, describing his political trajectory until today. From it, we gain insight from a campaign insider into Peter Daou’s strategy, which was to “[focus] on H.B.C.U.s and on Black voters in the South—especially Black men who were disaffected with Joe Biden and Harris and leaning toward Trump. Perhaps by winning a significant share of those voters, the thinking went, the campaign could get up to ten or fifteen percent in the polls, and from there, it could start to gain momentum.” The article went on to explain that West was adamant about getting ballot access in all 50 states, scrapping Daou’s plan. Along with struggling to gain momentum in 2024, West became a magnet of criticism from the pro-Harris crowd. They worried that he would ‘help Trump win’ by ‘taking votes from her,’ which included Martin Luther King III and Susannah Heschel, daughter of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who asked him to drop out. The conversation around whether to vote for the lesser evil was particularly exhausting last year and didn’t let up until election day. Liberals were angry that the left was not backing down and accepting Harris. The left was outraged at Harris, finding it morally impossible to vote for her very overt rightward policy swing and her uncritical support of Israel committing the genocide in Gaza. Ultimately, the margin of victory for Trump was far too large for the third-party vote to have mattered. Thus, the blame can be squarely placed on the Democrats for failing to meet the demands of voters. To the accusation of being a spoiler, West said, “We live our lives prospectively, and that comes with risk.”
With all of the effort Cornel West put into this campaign, it’s hard not to blame him for the left’s failure this election cycle. West might think of himself as a chess master, but he’s getting triple-jumped in checkers. West really was the right candidate– he lived a morally consistent life, one where he consistently opposed the forces of capitalist oppression and had the rhetoric of love and solidarity. What doomed him was his unwillingness to work with others; probably the most challenging part of building a successful left movement. Unfortunately, the left doesn’t have the luxury of speaking on behalf of corporate interests that can pay for anything necessary for a successful campaign– so it must be grassroots. That means the left must build strong coalitions to be effective while not abandoning its core principles. Jill Stein was willing to hand the reins to West, but he had to make the effort to earn the party’s trust. If West had stayed with the Greens, he and Stein could’ve been a very powerful duo, someone who had worked on many campaigns before and knew the ins and outs alongside a powerful voice that had revolutionary ambitions. Instead, the left was fractured. West faded into obscurity while Stein, who was not a very capivating public figure, couldn’t even achieve 1% of the vote.
Despite the left ultimately failing, that doesn’t mean there weren’t some small successes. For one, the Party for Socialism and Liberation ran an extremely successful campaign in relative terms. Their message was ambitious; they called for dismantling the capitalist system, ending Western imperialism, issuing reparations, and returning the means of production to the workers. They were able to more than double their votes from the last election cycle, reflecting a growing desire for this country to change radically. Despite being a small organization, the PSL is built entirely from the grassroots level, primarily acting as a direct action organization. This is why showing up at every major Palestine protest and the DNC protest was built into who they were as an organization. They even were seen volunteering to support the residents of the Aurora apartment complex, which became the target of a racist right-wing fear mongering story. With just over a quarter million dollars to work with, the PSL secured 158,270 votes and sixth place ahead of Cornel West. This also meant the PSL had the second-best campaign efficiency at $1.76 spent per vote.
Based on this rough metric, the third parties performed quite well, while West’s independent run was inefficient and struggled. West raised and spent an impressive $1.27 million but only translated that into half the votes of the PSL. This is the power of a movement that emboldens people to work for a just and enduring cause, not just a single person.
This is similar to the Uncommitted Movement, which generated a relatively large support base almost entirely from volunteer work. In this year’s Democratic primary, they received 706,591 votes based on the protest against the Palestinian genocide, which was itself a small victory but failed to influence the change it desired. The movement would collapse after the primary concluded, mainly because of leadership failures and lack of devotion among high-ranking members. They failed to state long-term goals and ghosted members who questioned leadership. According to internal sources, the leadership accepted funds from a Democrat-adjacent donor, who stipulated that the movement couldn’t support a third party, a scandal which split the movement before the general election. A new group broke off from the existing leadership, calling itself “Uncommitted Grassroots,” but the damage was already done; they lost their chance to gain mainstream credibility. These organizers said they were “deceived by a group of Democratic Party-aligned operatives who were intent on merely rescuing the party, not holding it accountable.” While the DNC was going on, you could see this lack of persistence when leaders were interviewed. They often struggled to answer the most common questions, like what they demanded explicitly, when they would be satisfied, or if they would endorse Harris. These questions should’ve been ubiquitously agreed upon. They should’ve been clear about demanding an immediate arms embargo and a long-term commitment to decrease military spending from Harris. For the most part, they did get this first part across, but they disagreed on whether they’d support Harris. The answer should’ve been a resounding ‘no’ until Harris committed to their conditions, zero obfuscation or evading the question. And they didn’t have anything to lose either– “stop the genocide” should not be a complicated demand.
With all this going on, Bernie Sanders should’ve taken an active role in this election. Bernie’s role essentially amounted to reinforcing Biden until the end, long after it was apparent he would need to drop out. Granted, there was no way for Bernie to know the extent to which Biden was cognitively deteriorating; we now know that the Biden White House was hardly functional at times, having to cancel important meetings because he was ‘having a bad day’ and refusing to meet with critical voices. In retrospect, Bernie should’ve challenged Biden in the primaries or been in Biden’s ear discussing if he should retire after this term, potentially priming a new candidate. This would’ve been a departure from their cordial relationship the last four years, but we see now the consequences of inaction. Bernie also may not have even considered it possible to run himself at age 82. In his recent book, Sanders describes the fatigue he felt on the campaign trail during his 2020 run and knew that getting into the White House would be the easy part, whereas passing an ambitious progressive agenda while working with establishment Democrats would be a sisyphean task. If nothing else, Sanders should not have dissolved his campaign; he should have reoriented it into a long-term working class organization or party in 2020 that takes direct action and helps organize union power. Sanders could have at least supported an alternative to the Democrats in 2024, whatever that alternative may have been– anything but the status quo.
It seemed the Green Party provided the best alternative to the two-party system, coming in third place, but to most voters, it was still just a gimmick rather than a long-term vehicle for change. Cornel West was right to criticize them for their neglect of black issues. There is no way to take an organization seriously in left politics if there is no understanding of the systematic oppression that has happened historically and still happens today. Jill Stein has talked about social justice in the right way but often struggles to connect it to the broader picture. West also criticized them for not centering class struggle, something that should absolutely be at the core of every campaign, no matter where they are on the political spectrum. The Greens, despite having national recognition, are not connected to labor unions or have made an effort to center unionization in their platform. Imagine if they convinced a progressive union like the UAW to get on board with the Greens, it would be historic. That’s where work on the ground comes in; the Greens try to get people into office locally but have rarely succeeded. Part of this is just a complete lack of focus. In this election, no Green congressional candidate received more than 3%. It might be that the Green Party simply allows anyone who wants to run to use their platform, but it’s terrible optics when a Green runs an unwinnable campaign against a political ally. Nancy Wallace ran against prominent progressive Jamie Raskin in Maryland’s 8th district, who won by 56.3 points. But what’s maddening is that there was no Green candidate in any other Maryland district. Raskin is one of the most progressive members of Congress, who authored a bill to implement ranked choice voting, a bill that the Green Party literally endorsed. Most confusing, if not insulting, is Brenda Sanders running against Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian member of Congress. Despite Palestinian liberation being the issue that gained the Green Party the most support this cycle, the Greens still ran someone against Tlaib, who also happens to be one of the most left members of Congress.
What, if anything, is there to learn from all this? Bernie’s failure taught us that we can’t make political decisions out of fear. Cornel West’s failure teaches us that building coalitions and working with people is the only way to build grassroots power– you can be one of the greatest voices on the left and have lots of money to work with, but you can’t do it without people. Uncommitted’s failure teaches us that you can’t be afraid of what will happen if you lose– no one wins when they expect to lose, even if the odds are against them– play to win. The Greens’ failure teaches us that you need a persistent movement to maintain and build upon each success; it must be on the ground at all times, fighting the class struggle.
We can’t put our faith in one person and expect results. It takes mass communication, mass mobilization, mass organizing, and only then can a person who will lead that movement emerge. If you want radical, unprecedented change, you have to do radical, unprecedented things.
"Four short years ago, the entire left rallied behind Bernie Sanders and was devoted to expanding a straightforward working-class agenda to a populist audience."
You have a VERY different memory of this than I. Four years ago, the left fully fractured itself between Sanders and Warren, with neither candidate willing to step down and endorse the other at the end. If they had pledged from the beginning that whichever of them had less support would ultimately drop out and endorse the other, then their combined coalitions would have won. Instead, the Bernie Bros turned to smearing Warren with the most blatantly sexist lies, and Sanders refused to step in to refute them. So the two camps ended up at each other's throats when they should have been allied.