Cornel
West on Jimmy Dore and Briahna on Kyle & Krystal: Who’s a Default Democrat?
Jim
Kavanagh
There were two energetic political
conversations last week that have been the subject of much discussion in the
lefty blogosphere: the Jimmy Dore exchange
with Cornell West and the Kyle Kulinski-Krystal Ball conversation
with Briahna Joy Gray. It's worth clarifying what I think is the essential issue
in both of those exchanges.
On the face of it, they were very different.
In the Kyle-Krystal-Briahna conversation,
the issues were: 1) whether Cornel West should be running as a third
party candidate rather than as a Democrat challenging Joe Biden within the
Democratic party, with Kyle and Krystal arguing for the latter and 2) whether
or not there is a substantive reason for leftists to vote for Joe Biden, who,
it was presumed, would be the Democratic nominee next November—with Kyle and
Krystal arguing that Biden had “surprisingly” earned that support, and Briahna
staunchly refusing.
In the Jimmy Dore-Cornel West conversation,
on the other hand, no one was arguing against Cornel running third-party,
and no one was arguing for voting for Biden. Jimmy supports Cornel’s
third-party run, and Cornel continually states his objection to “milquetoast
neoliberal” Biden, and never explicitly suggests that anyone should vote for
him.
Dore was, somewhat clumsily, pressing
Cornell West on something else, and did so in a way that lost focus and allowed
the conversation to get sidetracked. There’s a specific, precise question that
Jimmy could have asked, which would have gotten the answer about Cornel’s
campaign that I think he was looking for.
I should say, first of all, that I know
Cornel West. We were colleagues at Princeton together back in the day and ran
in the same social and intellectual circles. He's a great guy, I respect him
enormously, and he certainly has the best overall political position of anybody
now running for president.
Nonetheless, there are important issues regarding
the relation of Cornel and the Green Party’s campaign to the Democratic Party
and Biden (or whoever is the Democratic nominee) that Jimmy was trying to get
at, and that a lot of people on the left, myself included, want to understand precisely.
Jimmy Dore missed the opportunity to pose a key question that would have clarified
that. It’s a question that we, and Cornel, should know the answer to.
So, I asked him. On Monday, September 11th, I sent Cornel an email asking this question:
Will you, actively campaign for every vote in every state, no matter who the Democratic and Republican nominees are and no matter what effect that has on either of them?
Or, come the crunch in November—when, we are told, the outcome in four states will decide the election—is there some possibility that you will adopt what's been the previous Green Party strategy of saying that voters in swing states should vote for the Democrat in order to stop Trump or whoever is the Republican nominee?