Cornel West will run for president as the Peoples Party candidate
Cornel’s campaign could revive the Peoples Party initiative.
It was a start-up after 2016 and they thought they would achieve ballot status in dozens of states by 2024. That didn’t happen. But now a Cornel West campaign might bring out the hundreds of activists needed to do the necessary petitioning.
If they have any success — and then if Cornel decides to make building the Peoples Party his activist project for some years — it could become, vis-a-vis the Greens, the competing independent left-of-Dems party that the Justice Party and the Labor Party were never able to become (the Working Families Party is not independent of the Democrats).
If their campaign gets some traction then it will be of interest to see who emerges from 2024 with the most ballot lines. If it’s the Peoples Party, then the Greens could wind up more marginalized than ever.
In regard to the presidential race: The Greens need to try to find a widely resonating candidate. An alternative would be to run a lot of candidates for lower-level offices. They haven’t been doing enough of that. Another alternative would be to endorse Cornel West in a fusion kind of way.
Whoever our candidate is, the platforms of the GP campaign and that of Cornel West will be 90% the same re: social justice issues. I hope we’ll come up with a candidate who can talk, distinctively, about building an ecological society. Millions and millions of people understand about “going green.” We ought to be able to get two million to VOTE Green. Two million vote Green in the UK, where the population is a quarter the size of this country. Elections are winner-take-all there like they are here, yet the Green Party is doing very well:
Jill Stein got 1.5 million votes in 2016. Cornel West could get that many votes if party leader Nick Brana now can show himself to be enough of a coordinating organizer to get the petitioning done in 40 states. It’s a big task. He’d sure love to have the Green ballot lines.
The Libertarians own the space “independent, on the right side of the spectrum.” As of 2017, after Bernie showed that he’s lost all impetus to be build an alternative, I thought the Peoples Party might become the American equivalent of Canada’s (social democratic) New Democratic Party on the left. But Nick Brana failed in his attempt to lay the groundwork for it. The Bernistas went into DSA instead of into the Peoples Party.
During 2018–2022 Brana seemed to be floundering. Yet that wouldn’t matter if he now can harness the potential resonance of a Cornel West campaign. Voters are sick to death of the Republicans and the Democrats. It’s just a question of who will break through to establish a popular third party. Maybe Cornel wants that to be his legacy.
An expansion of the Peoples Party would not kill the Green Party. All over the world there is a niche for social democracy and a (separate) niche for Green politics. Our Ten Key Values represent a distinctive worldview that, actually, most fittingly addresses the fundamental issues of the times we live in. Our founders put in the key value about communitarian economics because the withering of local community life has been so devastating re: people’s sense of well-being. We used to sell a bumpersticker which proved popular:
Ecology and Community
…. The Green Party ….
