New Delhi: 70-year-old Cornel West, an American Left-wing intellectual, supporter of Dalits and a critic of the Indian governement’s scrapping of special status in Kashmir, has announced he will be running in the 2024 US Presidential race.
According to West’s campaign site, he seeks to disband Nato, halt all foreign military aid and abolish student debt.
However, his chances of winning the presidential polls and implementing these policies are statistically slim given he is a candidate from a third party. West is running under the banner of the People’s Party, which is separate from the two dominant American parties — the Democratic and the Republican parties.
Since the 1900s, third parties have rarely garnered a significant percentage of votes cast in presidential elections but they have eaten into vote shares in certain states which have influenced the chances of Democratic or Republican candidates.
For example, the impressive performance of Ralph Nader, a candidate of the Green Party, in Florida during the 2004 US presidential race was widely seen as costing Democratic candidate Al Gore electoral votes in the critical swing state and the presidency too.
This year, there is already speculation that another third party, ‘No Labels’, could dampen support for US President Joe Biden in areas key to his re-election.
In West’s case, he has also fielded his candidacy from a relatively young political outfit. The People’s Party, also known as the Movement for a People’s Party (MPP), was founded in 2017 by Nick Brana. Brana worked as the political outreach coordinator for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016 and previously worked with John Kerry back when he was a Democratic Senator.
West’s announcement makes him the first person to run for office under the People’s Party.
In the past, he has been sharply critical of former US President Barack Obama, going as far as to call him a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface”. He has, however, extended support to other Democratic politicians like Sanders.
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Multi-faceted public figure
Born in Oklahoma, West entered politics at a very young age and actively participated in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.
With a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a Master’s and PhD from Princeton University, West quickly rose to fame as a public intellectual especially through the spread of his influential books, namely ‘Race Matters’ (1993) and ‘Democracy Matters’ (2004).
During his career, he has held professorships and fellowships at top institutes such as Harvard University, Yale, Princeton and more.
He also acted in the movie ‘Matrix Reloaded’ (2003).
West is considered an intellectual icon among African-Americans but has also been sharply critical of the first black president in US history — Obama. He has criticisedf Obama’s drone campaign, accused him of inaction on mass incarceration and pandering to Wall Street. He once referred to the former president as a “brown-faced Clinton”.
On the issue of Ukraine, West has been critical of NATO expansion and militarism but has said there is no justification for Russia’s use of military force. “That doesn’t mean that Putin is not still a gangster — of course he is,” he said in an interview with The New Yorker last March.
Views about Dalits, Ambedkar & Kashmir
West has been an admirer and long-time supporter of the Dalit rights movement in India and the philosophy of B. R. Ambedkar, who he has described as one of the “greatest public intellectuals and freedom fighters of the 20th century”.
Dalit rights activist and Harvard University scholar Suraj Yengde has frequently referred to West as his “mentor”.
In October 2021, the two were in conversation at an event in Cambridge Public Library. “I come out of the socratic legacy of Athens which believes in serious critical questioning of the assumptions and presuppositions like the dogma of Brahmins’ superiority…,” West said at the event.
While discussing oppression faced by Dalits, West said: “If our precious Dalit brothers and sisters were terrorising non-Dalits the way they were being terrorised, there would be no ending.”
On the issue of Kashmir, West has been critical of the Modi government’s decision in August 2019 to scrap special status in Jammu and Kashmir.
In August 2020, West participated in a video marking the one year anniversary of the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir. In the video, posted on Facebook, he expressed solidarity with Kashmiris facing a “vicious Indian occupation”.
Third parties & presidential elections
American history has seen the participation of several third parties such as the Green Party, Reform Party, Libertarians and more, but none has accumulated a significant vote share in the presidential elections.
In 17 of the 24 presidential elections since 1924, the two dominant parties garnered 98 percent of the vote, according to a report by TIME.
Some statistics indicate, however, that the American public is growing increasingly frustrated with the two dominant parties.
In August 2022, a study by Pew Research Center found that the share of voters with an unfavorable view of the Democratic and Republican parties has risen from 6 percent in 1994 to 27 percent.
(Edited by Tony Rai)