Cornel West is serious about his run for president. Because he’s serious, he poses a challenge to the capitalist establishment. He poses a challenge to capital and its omnipotent aegis. For that reason, the democrats (capital’s loyal lapdogs) are out for blood, and it’s only the beginning.
The early stages of the democrat attack on West’s campaign come from articles in corporate ‘left-wing’ publications like the Washington Post[1] and MSNBC.[2] They’re both written from a liberal, pseudo-left perspective intent on criticizing West for the way his campaign might pose a challenge to reform movements. Their arguments are composed of the following: Biden is good, West is okay, and Trump is pure evil; West running can steal votes from Biden, and help Trump win.
If it sounds like a repeat of Bernie in 2016, or Bernie in 2020, that’s because it is. Just as the democrat establishment feared Bernie because of the threat he posed to their corporate base, just as they used blatant lies and shady backroom deals to take nominations from Bernie, they’re going to lie and slander and pillory West all along the campaign trail in order to make his campaign untenable. In 2016, they stole the democrat nomination from Bernie, and in 2020 Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris teamed up to murder-suicide Bernie in the caucuses. West isn’t running as a Democrat, so this time, they’ll rely solely on the impact of their effective and ubiquitous propaganda against West.
The articles above are just the beginning, but they exemplify the strategy the liberal media uses whenever a legitimate, left-wing candidate appears and begins to challenge their corporate base.
Both of the previous articles depend on two presuppositions. The first of these, and the most obviously weak of these, is that Biden is good. But we don’t have to get very far to see that the authors hold a low bar for what constitutes good. In their eyes, Biden is good because he doesn’t write articles in support of Ron Desantis and his support of classical education,[3] and because he doesn’t criticize Black people. Both articles point out that West has benefited from criticizing black politicians who use their race as shields against criticism while they serve the interests of the fundamentally racist, imperialist, American government and its capitalist interests. Well, they don’t quite say it like that; to them, he criticizes black people like Obama (for being hypocritical liars who bomb black and brown kids in the middle east), so he’s a racist. Their point is that Biden doesn’t criticize black people (at least anymore), and he doesn’t support anything Ron Desantis does (at least in public, and only if you forget about their shared belief in capitalism and corporate lobbyists). This, and this alone, is what makes Biden good.
So what is bad? They don’t go into detail, but it’s easy to infer; they think republicans are bad writ large. More specifically, Trump is pure evil, and Ron Desantis’ only saving grace is that he’ll end up in a better circle of hell. Thus, the second principle proclaims that the worst political outcome is the election of either of them.
These are the two nebulous and narrow-minded presuppositions on which these articles depend. They are nebulous because they never say what’s so evil about Ron Desantis and Trump, other than that they’re prima facie racist and fascist and evil, and they never say what’s so good about Biden, other than that he’s not Trump or Ron Desantis. They’re narrow-minded because they never pause to think about whether or not the basic political premise in which this all takes place is fair or legitimate. In short, they never once question the political institutions in which this takes place.
In short, they never question American democracy and its supposed, meritocratic telos. For them, American democracy needs only a few tweaks, and these tweaks are best achieved within existing legislative bodies and frameworks. At the base of both of these arguments, then, lies a rock-hard faith in the democratic institutions governing America. Their rock-hard faith in these institutions precludes them from imagining political success outside state approved actions.
Their inability to imagine political success outside of state approved actions is the source of their antipathy towards political actors like Cornel West. West is running for the highest state office in the American empire, but he’s not likely to win. But his electoral success is not the measure of his political success; what matters is how effect West can spread class-consciousness in a bipartisan sense across the working class; that is what will measure his political success. And for liberals and corporate democrats alike, this vision of political success is only a threat.
It’s a threat to their vision of political success, and it’s also a threat to their safety and privilege. These liberals, democrats, republicans, and their lapdog journalists will do whatever they can to limit the nation’s understanding of political success to actions sanctioned by the land’s political institutions and legislative bodies. They rationalize this in all kinds of moralistic and seemingly realistic ways, but, at root, their primary motivation is the maintenance of these political bodies and institutions. Because when people begin to think about political actions outside of those sanctioned by the state, they question the validity and authority of the state.
And these petty bourgeoise journalists, and the bourgeoise politicians and capitalists who pay them, will do anything in their power to prevent this from happening. They will do it because they are fully aware that all of their luxury and privilege are ill gotten goods derived from centuries of robbery, violence, and exploitation that continues to this day. And they know that if the population begins to get wise of this, and realizes that the backbone of their society is fundamentally evil for the sake of the small few who lie at the top, they won’t be able to live in luxury and privilege anymore.
So, these articles ‘slamming’ Cornel West and any other vaguely leftist, anti-establishment political actor, will continue to appear from all sides of the political establishment. That’s the basic strategy that the democrats have always followed. They will slander and pillory anyone who threatens to upheave the political status quo in any meaningful sense, and they will do it as they always have for one reason: because defending the status quo at all costs allows petty bourgeoise journalists to keep their jobs writing for The Washington Post[4] and MSNBC. Because, at the end of the day, these people don’t care about making the world, or America, a better, more equitable, more meritocratic place. They care about perpetuating the system of violence and exploitation that gives them wealth, moral superiority, and comfort.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/16/cornel-west-black-liberation-juneteenth/
2. https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/cornel-west-presidential-campaign-bid-2024-rcna87996
3. Now, I have no idea what Ron Desantis thinks about classical education, and I’m sure none of it is said in good faith. Moreover, I’m sure it’s laced with a healthy dose of transphobia, racism, and white supremacy. Nonetheless, liberal media is so reactionary that they often miss the forest for the trees. It wouldn’t be the first time they compromised pedagogical integrity in order to win cheap political points; they love to ignore the content of whatever republicans say (which is often something on the surface populist with a fascist rationale) in order to take a cheap moral high ground. Sometimes, however, republicans say good things, even if they get there with a more than healthy dose of sophistry.
4. Keep in mind, The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, who is a billionaire herself due to their divorce settlement. The outlet clearly has an ideological bias aimed at retaining capitalism’s fundamental economic relations.
Meme Time:
Will Cornel Win? Will he have more of an impact than Bernie? Probably not, but it’s better than nothing, and it’s not like anyone else is really worth voting for. Direct action is still always better than voting. STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE!!
Ukraine is a failed American puppet state.
Amen.
> Keep in mind, The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, who is a billionaire herself due to their divorce settlement. The outlet clearly has an ideological bias aimed at retaining capitalism’s fundamental economic relations.
She has a name, you know. And she is a billionaire because she had stock in the corporation she founded with Bezos, not because of their “divorce settlement.” Their divorce is simply what freed her to unilaterally donate millions, if not more than a billion, right after they separated.
Regardless, literally every major American news corporation is owned by corporations (or people who have large stakes in corporations), and even the minor ones are motivated by keeping advertisers happy. Go look at Orwell’s ww2 diary entries - he maps out the kind of advertising was funding the news during war time. Fascinating stuff.