Cornel West’s Threat to Joe Biden

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 17, 2023

 

President Joe Biden’s supporters don’t appear to be truly menaced by Cornel West’s decision to seek and likely secure the Green Party’s nomination for the presidency. At least, not yet. The only criticism they can muster so far is that the presence in the race of this far-left candidate, a philosopher and former Princeton University professor, is, at best, a little gauche. Indeed, the white-hot denunciations Democratic professionals reserve for prospective centrist third-party campaigns communicates more about what this White House perceives to be its real weaknesses. But every so often, Democrats reveal their concern that West’s agitation exposes cracks in the integrity of the president’s coalition. After all, the arguments West is making against Joe Biden are the same ones made by his Democratic primary opponents in 2019.

 

West has devoted his campaign to popularizing the various “catastrophes” that Biden either ignored or exacerbated. The horrors over which the president has presided are manifold. For example, “ecocide is the ultimate catastrophe,” West wrote this week. “It is the escalating actuality of wiping out life on Earth . . . Poor and venerable peoples of color already are disproportionately perishing.” To hear West tell it, only he and his supporters are truly dialed into the threat posed by catastrophic climate change.

 

That might sound familiar to those who remember the 2020 Democratic primaries, a race in which Biden tried to secure a “middle ground” that balances the nation’s energy needs against the maximalist advocacy of climate activists. In a race in which most of the field supported Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal in whole or in part, Biden broke from the crowd and took no small amount of heat for it. As president, Biden supported radical climate-related initiatives and laundered climate policy into law under the guise of reining in inflation, but Democratic voters aren’t convinced. A Pew Research Center poll released last year showed that nearly 80 percent of self-described Democrats think the government isn’t doing enough to mitigate climate change. Somewhere in that vast mass of Democratic voters is a receptive audience for West’s appeals.

 

The plague of “mass incarceration” is another crisis that haunts Cornel West — a “crime against humanity,” he calls it, to which “Joe Biden contributed.” Not only was Biden the “architect of the mass incarceration regime in the 1990s,” West recently alleged, but “black folk are [a] low priority” for the president even now. Biden’s cosmetic efforts to place “black faces in high places” is an insulting distraction designed to obscure the damage his presidency is doing to African Americans.

 

If West’s message has an audience, it will be among those who gravitated toward Biden’s challengers in 2019, many of whom articulated roughly similar criticisms of the president. When Biden ran as a dealmaker who could work across the aisle to get results, his opponents said that conciliatory posture led him to cozy up to the segregationists who still occupied positions of power in the 1970s. When Biden said he opposed forced busing — an experiment in social engineering that failed by its own metrics and came to be hated by every demographic subjected to it — his opponents attacked his lack of zeal for the cause of retributive social justice.

 

Whereas Biden talked about the promise of America — not to mention the fundamental decency of even congressional Republicans — his opponents spoke of the nation as having few redeeming traits. “This country was founded on white supremacy,” said Beto O’Rourke. If America wasn’t founded on white supremacy, Bernie Sanders allowed, it was at least predicated on “racist principles.” Cory Booker agreed. “We have systemic racism that is eroding our nation,” he said. America’s racist covenant contributes to the “generational theft of the decedents of slaves,” Pete Buttigieg concurred. All this may just have been the nearest weapon to hand for Biden’s 2016 opponents. But if there is a real market for this sort of talk among Democratic voters, Cornel West has it cornered.

One of West’s catastrophes is geopolitical: Russia’s war of territorial conquest in Ukraine. That is a calamity that, through its omnipotence, which is matched only by its malignant thoughtlessness, the United States engineered. And for that, Democrats are just as much to blame as Republicans.

 

“The Democratic Party has had a long history of being committed to war,” West told Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham last month. Russia’s war in Ukraine, he alleged, is a rational response to the West’s provocations. To appease the Russian bear, the Cornel West campaign opposes the expansion of NATO any further — after all, “14 former Soviet [states] are already part of NATO,” West said ignorantly of the captive nations the Soviets subsumed into the USSR and the Warsaw Pact during and after the Second World War. “NATO is an expanding instrument of U.S. global power that provoked Russia into a criminal invasion and occupation of Ukraine,” West added this month. Along with disbanding the Atlantic Alliance, West would block the transfer of controversial armaments, such as cluster bombs, to Ukraine, and he invites his followers to “save our democracy” first by “dismantling U.S. militarism at home” before going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

 

When it comes to Ukraine’s defense, the political physics of negative partisanship has polarized the country. Most Democrats indicate that they support Joe Biden’s efforts to arm Kyiv. But those efforts have been halting and qualified by the White House’s sensitivity toward the appearance of unduly aggravating Moscow. A recent Pew survey found that nearly 40 percent of Democrats believe “we should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home,” and a June Gallup poll showed that a minority of the party’s voters believe Ukraine is currently “winning.” Those on the Left likely to respond to West’s unique style of self-hatred may be a minority, but it’s a sizeable one.

 

Given all this, Democratic apprehension about West’s candidacy makes perfect sense. And the apprehension is growing. The Green Party “played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump,” said Democratic strategist David Axelrod. “Now, with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again. Risky business.” Perhaps. But if Joe Biden’s presidency is existentially threatened not just by the centrists defecting from his corner but the far-left progressives, too, that says more about this administration than the latest crop of eccentric also-rans.