The political party problem: a Cornel West comment
Here's Cornel West on Sabrina Salvati's podcast, explaining why he decided to run as an independent instead of as a Green Party member. The first few minutes will give you a sense of the whole thing:
Basically it's that, given the enormity of what Cornel West wants to do, the Green Party is a waste of time for him. This is, he thinks, true even given the extra time he'll have to consume attaining ballot status. At 6:20 West says, bluntly: "All I'm saying is that we don't have a mass left-based party." Which should at some point lead to the question of why West is doing this. Congress is full of Demopublicans and Republicrats. Are there 435 Cornel Wests running independent campaigns throughout the US who are going to challenge this situation? It doesn't seem so. Ceteris paribus, an independent President would still face a Congress completely married to the duopoly. Having a political party would at least give West some competing machinery to deal with those other offices. Who -- among those who think the Green Party is a dead end -- is going to start that party afresh?
A political campaign can't be a charity, running on liberal guilt. That way lies Team Biden policy which is to say neoconservative liberalism and Ukraine benefit concerts and carbon offsets and means-testing bureaucracies and the generally pointless "progressive" policy notions of the past five decades (outside, yeah, of single payer or anything so thoroughly socialized). Matthew Huber's book Climate Change as Class War has a tasty phrase for "green" policy in the service of the professional-managerial class: "carbon guilt." At any rate, the difference between charity and solidarity, reviewed: charity is a handout, solidarity empowers collectives. It's like the "teach a man to fish" parable in the Bible but it's more than that. At least it can be said that if Cornel West's campaign is to be a moment in a movement, there has to be something meaningful for everyone else to do. That was what the "party" notion was supposed to satisfy.
So what is everyone else to do? I have yet to see an answer. If all West seeks to do is offer up a protest vote, well, RFK Jr. is doing that more effectively now.
Comments
A little more
illuminating was Sabby's interview the previous day w Jill Stein. My takeaways of a chat where she was clearly trying to avoid any harsh criticism:
1) His quitting the GP had largely to do with the frequent back scenes criticism by some GP factions of some of his positions and rhetoric. She cited Russia/Putin, CW harshly criticizing Vlad but not so much Joe, and his criticizing Trump in very harsh terms but not so much Joe. 2) Even though she was one of his 2-3 top advisors, presumably, much of what irked CW in GP criticism of his campaign was not discussed w her, she was in the dark about it. 3) the West campaign for 4 months was disorganized and rudderless, as it failed to bring on a true campaign mgr with experience, until Daou, so there really wasn't much of a campaign to be seen. 4) His decision to quit the Greens is a bad strategic move, for the ballot access reason mentioned above. 5) She feels CW will have a difficult time making much of an electoral impact w/o that ballot access. 6) CW is probably too much of a solo jazzman to work well with any even semi-organized team like the Greens. He has to be himself and himself means working alone.
Re 5 and 6, I don't see how CW recovers and builds any political momentum. Or maybe this is his plan -- to be officially running but not really seriously. And if he was running a narrow niche campaign before, it will become even more so when he is allowed to be himself unhampered by party considerations.
Team Biden, on the other hand --
-- is persistent in making sure all of the membership at least pretends to be on the same page, which is no doubt why:
1) Team Biden has control of nearly all of the mainstream mass media
2) Team Biden has the express endorsement of all Dem elites such that the Democratic Party appears as a monolith now
3) Team Biden has nearly all of the leaders of Europe throwing their countries' resources into the black hole that is the folly in Ukraine, with maybe Viktor Orban offering a peep or two in the opposite direction
4) Team Biden has the "progressives" eating out of their hands. Oooh, benefit concerts for Ukraine!
5) Team Biden controls the Veal Pen.
6) Team Biden's supposed opponent today wanders aimlessly somewhere within the Republican Party, a cesspool of nicely-dressed people with tinfoil-hat opinions, incompetent speech, writing, and administration, and billionaire money showered daily upon chosen instruments of power. (I presume it's not going to be Donald Trump -- they will convict The Donald somehow.)
Now, sure, Team Biden's supposed leader is senile, they are themselves incompetent (outside of the areas just mentioned), and they're completely blinded by hubris and greed. But, for reasons 1) through 6), they are phenomenally successful and historically transformative, and the important thing about them right now is that they suck and that the hope that anyone with an ounce of sanity would share after fully knowing who they are is that something can be recovered from America once they have brought it to ruin.
But this is a really daunting task! Thus, I think we can debate the Green Party's small-potatoes concerns about Cornel West in all friendly seriousness while at the same time recognizing that they are indeed small potatoes. In fact, we are boiling in there with the small potatoes all over the place. RFK Jr.'s pandering and history-free response to Israel/ Palestine? Small potatoes, because the Zionist vote already went to Team Biden and he's just taking orders. Team Biden has made it clear in their public pronouncements (Hillary Clinton made one recently) that the future of democracy is at stake and therefore you have no choice (already), you must vote for Joe Biden as if this were a Soviet election.
Throughout this diary I have asked: what would it take to bring about a change? It would take a lot more than a Presidential campaign, regardless of the candidate running, to bring about a change. So my question -- AGAIN -- is, where is this lot more coming from?
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
That was
a monumentally clueless response by RFK, Jr. to the Hamas-Israel conflict. Thanks for providing the link. Especially from someone not even on the Epstein/Maxwell client list. RFK certainly getting a lot of pushback on Twitter from people who are otherwise generally supportive (myself included).
As a Blue state (Disclosure: former Dem, former Green, two-time Trump voter) voter, I'd *still* consider voting for RFK in the general if Trump was going to lose there anyway and the alternative was Biden - or whoever the Dem PTB throw in to replace him.
But this shameless and historically clueless sucking up to the xenophobe wing of the Zionists is embarrassing and a big negative...
It's the wrong utopian dream.
You have three types of believers in politics today. The first are the dystopians. Their motivation is guilt, and they end up voting for one dystopia because "the other dystopia is worse," or so they argue. Those were the liberal Democrats before Team Biden took over.
The second are those who bring about dystopia unintentionally, because their idea of utopia is so besotted with internal confusion that they really don't know what they're doing. Some Republicans fit that model. George Carlin skewered them well:
The third are the true-believer neoconservatives and neoliberals. Team Biden is the first bunch; the second varies from Mitt Romney to Bill Clinton to Thomas Friedman. Their problem is that they are true believers in what they think is a utopia, but their utopian dream is actually a dream of dystopia. There are also, to be sure, the Zionists, whose utopia is that of Israel -- not looking so utopian at this moment.
The trick, then, is in building a coalition behind the right utopian dream.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Umm...
Where then would Vivek R. and his supporters fit in your paradigm?
(Would be really nice if we could embed Rumble videos...)
https://rumble.com/v3gzpz0-james-okeefe-interviews-vivek-ramaswamy.html
There's an embed link...
below the video. Go to the Rumble page, click the embed link, copy the code and paste it into c99's editor. All video services have embed links if you look for them.
Thanks, JtC
will try that next time.
i have seen
Rfk jr was on the Epstein Lolita Express list, cannot verify it.
Everyone should look.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I recall
discussing that already on this board. He can show it consisted of 2 trips, one to the MW for fossil hunting with some members of his family. Epstein, who did not take part in the hunt, was so annoyed with them that he arranged to get off the plane early. A second trip was to FL to visit family. That was all. He dealt with this several yrs ago, well before his presidential run, in podcast conversation with an author doing a book on Epstein, which author also found nothing about Bobby to report on. And if there was some there there, you can be sure the author would have reported it and the anti-RFK Jr MSM would have brought it up long ago.
Friends in
high places.
Who the hell wants to fly American Airlines?
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
OK...
So, it looks like he was on the list, but must not have fallen for the honey pot entrapment - which was obviously the point of the operation.
Good point about his being unpopular enough with the PTB that they likely have targeted him by now if they had anything. I suppose it is possible the Israelis have something that they have, for whatever reason, held back...
Hey, go on about
Grandpa Joe all you want, he and most Ds are not getting my modest support nor my vote. And that view is dittoed by the other members of this wacky house where I live. (I am still undecided on Katie Porter for CA senate). The Big Red Line he crossed was Ukraine, which is so dangerous as it's set off this West vs East hostility which in turn, after no doubt a twist and turn, will eventually lead sooner rather than later to the world war we've feared. It's in the wind and, I conclude, in the cards.
The current ME situation of course adds to the world destabilization, all happening on Joe's watch. He has no one to blame but himself as he's allowed the crazies at State and the CIA and apparently to a lesser extent the Pentagon to run FP. Re Bobby, he has a major announcement tomorrow in Philly, so we'll see what he says on this current hot topic. Still a strong supporter despite this issue. I am not a purist leftie.
As for lefties and liberals voting for Biden, LOTE, you aren't going to lose friends here negatively citing the deplorable Hillary. But let's not forget Bernie. And Chomsky. Probably a fairly long list of public libs and lefties, maybe even including Cornel West again, will bend the knee to the D nominee. CW has already made the case for endorsing Joe again, when the appropriate time next year comes.
Can't help you too much with your big question. What's left of the left is still too balkanized in their niche identity groups (including Cornel), and Code Pink refuses out of purity and "safety" to mix with company that has one member who holds even one view that differs from them. How do you build an antiwar left with these small echo chamber attitudes?
Not an optimistic picture. I keep doing the math, and it keeps coming up Doomsday. I am trying to do my best, by continuing certain interesting spiritual studies to stay sane if I happen to survive what is coming and also to enter all that learning into the data bank for a more evolved next lifetime ; ) Also about to wrap up work on the backyard fallout shelter. Doing my best to be prepared.
Even that reasoning leads down the dystopian path.
See my response above to Blue Republic. If you think we're irrevocably headed toward dystopia, eventually you'll end up voting and organizing for what you think is the lesser dystopia, like most everyone else in your cohort (if you're lucky enough to have one) has done.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Right now
I'm just organizing to survive physically. Matters of life and death tend to concentrate the mind. And a candidate clearly leading us into WW3 is not getting my vote. Probably makes me, for the first time in my lifetime, a One Issue voter. So be it. But not necessarily your Lesser Dystopian voter. RFK Jr or bust for me. No LD voting.
I've been hiding from the political world
until it shows it's willing to offer an alternative to the three types of believers I mentioned above. You have the resigned, the confused, and the deluded true believers. I vote "none of the above."
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
RFKJr just sunk his campaign
when he came out condemning Hamas and going full tilt warmonger in support of Israel.
He posted on Twitter and tens of thousands Tweeted back they're dumping him.
Again, it's
rather premature to be writing political obits only 2 days after the latest events flared up and esp since his tough position is largely in tune with the establishment even as some professional virtue signalers and some anonymous people online -- no doubt heavily populated w trolls -- claim it's a deal breaker. First let's see what he says about it in front of a live crowd in Philly today. I'd be very surprised if he omits a mention. The crowd's response will be a much more accurate indicator of Kennedy backers' support or non-support.
Unfortunately it doesn't appear he will have a more detailed written response at the moment beyond his tweets.