The Doctor is in.

The Grange Movement in the 1800s was an agrarian political movement among farmers who were fed up with the corporate monopoly over grain. Terence Powderly was a labor organizer in the late 1800s most responsible for making the Knights of Labor a national movement. Along the way farmers would unite with the labor movement, join forces with socialists and progressive free silver activists looking to break the wealthy stranglehold over gold. This alchemy of interests gradually became known as the Populist Alliance. Their platform was known as the Omaha Platform and it included some familiar ideas like increasing the money supply to make it easier to pay down personal debt, an eight hour workday, nationalizing railroads, taxing the rich; and mostly reining in corporate power.

Like other upstart movements and parties, some of the bigger ideas were incorporated into the American two-party political apparatus. The eight hour work day, income tax on the wealthy and the direct election of senators for example, were conceived in the Populist Alliance and codified by the early Progressive movement under Republican Teddy Roosevelt and his successor.

Today, one of my favorite public intellectuals, Dr. Cornel West, announced his candidacy for President of the United States. He’s running under the banner of the People’s Party, which credits much of its platform to the legacy of the Populist Alliance.

While I don’t normally comment on topics like this immediately, the idea of Cornel West on the national stage is too tempting to pass up. Veterans of Unf*cking The Republic will understand why this is a complicated issue and might even be more forgiving of my gut reaction and analysis than a leftist or social democrat just discovering UNFTR. This moment is the ultimate “what if” proposition that challenges my underlying thesis of political organization in this country.

But first, Cornel West.

I first became aware of West during the Occupy Movement. And my only regret is that I missed out on his decades of teaching and advocacy and had to play catch up. What attracted me to him was his stunning rebuke of Barack Obama.

West remained a steadfast critic throughout the Obama years and beyond. He called Obama’s liberal use of drone strikes a war crime. Said he was right of Nixon on healthcare and the environment. Criticized him for propping up the establishment and failing to prosecute executives on Wall Street. And he was transparent all along that he was doing it because he’s an honest broker. And it cost him.

He lost a lot of friends in the liberal establishment, but unlike other fame seeking pseudo-intellectuals and pundits who fall out of favor with their base of support, he didn’t adapt to these circumstances to appeal to another audience. No Patreon. No Substack. No fake Twitter wars. No manufactured drama. Just honest talk. Holy and secular dialogue that speaks truth to power.

I probably don’t need to run through West’s pedigree but for anyone not closely familiar with his biography, here are some highlights. Magna Cum Laude from Harvard undergrad in three years. Got a masters and a PhD from Princeton. Has written 20 books. Spoken all over the world. Is an ordained Baptist minister. Has taught religion, Black history, philosophy, politics. Can talk about the classics or music, from jazz to pop culture. An intellectual in the truest sense.

Because my admiration for him runs deep, I have a lot of feelings regarding his announcement. Especially considering how we’ve covered Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr., Bernie Sanders as an independent on the Democratic line, and the idea of third parties in general. The candidacy of Cornel West is precisely what my heart wants. And it’s precisely what I’ve been advocating against since the beginning of UNFTR. So this is an opportunity to hash it out and use a figure I have a great deal of love for to illustrate my point.

Let’s talk about pragmatism.

In terms of policies I consider myself a leftist. For example, I:

• Support getting money out of politics.
• Would like to ban corporate lobbying.
• Guarantee quality education, housing, paid leave, and a living wage to all.
• Curb inflation, support unions, and expand Social Security.
• Create a national single-payer healthcare system.
• Lower drug prices and abolish medical debt.
• Bring our troops home and invest those trillions of war dollars into American communities.
• Guarantee equal rights to all Americans.
• Restore free speech, protect choice, end the drug war, and abolish mass incarceration.
• Clean up pollution in our food, water and air.
• Tackle climate change and shift to regenerative agriculture.

Also, that is the word-for-word platform of the People’s Party, save for two things I’m not in support of. And that’s term limits in Congress and hand-counted paper ballots. On the former, if you go with ranked choice voting, get money out of politics, eliminate corporate lobbying and eliminate gerrymandering, you’ll get a better class of elected official and institutional knowledge is profoundly important. Tenure has merits. And with respect to hand-counted paper ballots, it’s not 1870. But on everything else—and feel free to change my mind on the paper ballot thing, but I’ll argue all day against term limits—I’m completely and wholeheartedly aligned with the core platform of the People’s Party that appears on their one page Wordpress site that doesn’t even have a favicon.

That’s fine. The organization was founded by a former Bernie outreach organizer named Nick Brana and it was originally formed as a draft Bernie movement in 2017 by former campaign staffers. Brana’s profile claims the non-profit group was founded in 2017 as The Movement for a People’s Party (MPP) officially and now boasts 60,000 members. I tried to look them up on ProPublica, Guidestar, the IRS database and couldn’t find any information. No tax filings, nothing. So I decided to donate on the website to see what the receipt said and it was just the website and “thanks!” So technically the organization is a 527 organization, which means it would have to file what’s known as a form 8871, like a 990 for a non-profit. Unless it takes in less than $25,000 a year. So assuming the MPP isn’t a rogue and derelict organization, I’ll assume that it takes in less than $25,000.

Considering the amount of money spent during the 2020 election cycle was $14 billion, I’d say the MPP has a ways to go.

Does this sound snarky and mean so far? I hope not. But it’s a reality check.

But, hey. Every movement has to start somewhere.

Just look at the other third party options in this country like the Working Families Party. Or the Libertarian Party. Conservative Party. Constitution Party. Green Party. Independence Party. Moderate Party. Mountain Party. The Peace and Freedom Party. Progressive Democratic Party. Tea Party. So many parties! I hope I’m invited to all of them! But what will I wear?

In order for these parties to run candidates in local, state or federal elections they have to first get on a ballot. That takes a lot of money, organizing and outreach. All of these other parties have been doing it for years and now the People’s Party is jumping into the game with arguably one of the greatest American intellectuals in our little history. Some good news is they were able to get on the ballot in the not-so-great state of Florida, where they are at least mandated to file campaign finance disclosures and it’s here we get our first glimpse of the organizational and fundraising prowess of the People’s Party. For the last election cycle, they were able to raise and back their candidates with a grand total of $1,700.

So one state down, 49 to go plus DC, Puerto Rico and American Samoa. We’re on our way.

I get it. I really do. I get the urge to stick it in the eye of the two-party system and go with a third party. Even a new one. Forget that the Working Families and Green Party platforms are incredibly similar and already appear on the ballot in multiple states and even have a handful of successes at the state levels. There’s always room for more in the political system. Right? Wrong.

We’re out of time.

The IPCC set the global emissions fail point at 1.5 degrees from where we are now and they’re now projecting that we’re going to get there in just a matter of a few years. The planet is doomed and so are we if we spend our time tilting at windmills trying to break the duopoly system in the United States. As Unf*ckers have heard me say before, and criticized me for it, our only expedient hope is to build grassroots coalitions on the ground to infect and overwhelm the Democratic establishment specifically because of the sophistication and enormity of the political apparatus. This war needs to be waged on the inside. A hostile takeover that gives progressives—true progressives—the levers of power. They need more than just a handful of chips for bargaining power at the table. We need to run the table. You don’t do that by opening up a competing casino down the road with no bathrooms, running water or table games, just a handful of slot machines and a BYOB sign.

As the World Socialist Web Site said of the MPP in the most blunt way possible:

“The MPP is an example of the type of formation produced by an extremely low level of political consciousness. It is somewhat difficult to comment on because it is not a serious organization. The term “party” is purely nominal. A party is based on a common program, a common assessment of historical experiences, and a common perspective. The MPP has none of these. It does not understand the past, it has nothing to offer for the present, and it has no future.”

As I said with respect to Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr. damaging the progressive brand and wasting our time on demagoguery, this isn’t a game. I get it that there are a bunch of disaffected Bernie supporters out there still miffed at how the DNC undercut Bernie not once, but twice. I’m one of them. But his campaigns were successful enough to have pretty long coattails that have taken the Progressive Caucus in Congress from a handful of members to nearly 100, and growing if we do this right. But when you let people like Williamson and Kennedy chip away at our attention, people with literally no political experience or inclination that they can build organizations and coalitions, we’re tampering with the most expedient method to move progressive ideals forward.

So what are we to make of Cornel West?

Does he fall into the same category? Yes and no. Had West thrown his hat into the ring as a Democrat running on a socialist platform, like Bernie but even further left, I’m all in. What’s the difference between him and Williamson or Kennedy? Credibility. Consistency. He’s not remotely conspiratorial. He’s honest, pragmatic and schooled in political science. His grasp of issues is rooted in intellectual and doctrinal teachings.

He’s built coalitions of support and supporters and worked closely with labor organizers, poverty relief organizations and economic councils. He’s not a demagogue. He’s a leader. One who is willing to sacrifice his popularity in favor of principle, and yet, one who is willing to walk into the lion’s den armed with only his wit, wisdom and words. I’ve watched him debate Peter Thiel, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Maher, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson. And he does it with love, addressing them all as brother and sister without ever seeming patronizing.

He’s an artful and moving communicator who works feverishly on behalf of the working class, the poverty stricken, the disenfranchised, abused, demoralized. Not just here but around the world. He’s one of the few people who can stand up fervently against anti-semetism while condemning Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and actually get all sides to listen. His messages are grounded in secularism and shrouded in morality, carefully cultivated in the Black prophetic tradition of Frederick Douglass. As he has often said, it was Douglass and the abolitionists who pulled Lincoln to the right side of history. Eleanor Roosevelt who pulled FDR to the right side of history. It was Dr. King who pulled LBJ to the right side of history. And in each instance, the right side is always the left.

Cornel West deserves more than a nascent platform with zero transparency, one balloted state and $1,700 in the bank. Cornel West is a global treasure who should be platformed at the highest level possible. We don’t need more political parties. We need leftists to rout establishment dems on the local level. To dominate primary after primary and force the nation to the left in order to save the planet.

Here endeth the screed.

Image Source

• Cornel West’s Campaign Website