Cornel West Is So Vain That He Thinks The 2024 Election Is About Him

Philosopher Cornel West is seen at a Malcolm X commemoration event at The Shabazz Center in New York City on Feb. 21, 2022.

Cornel West might be a wizard. To hear him speak is to watch an African griot weave spells with language, pulling from the sorrow of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the ingenuity of the Gullah people to the pitfalls of mass incarceration, while effortlessly summoning Bible verses and jazz stanzas in the same breath.

Cornel West might be a genius. At least that’s what they told his parents after a young West scored around 160 on an IQ test. He would go on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard University in just three years, and would later become Princeton’s first Black graduate with a Ph.D. in philosophy.

Cornel West might be a warrior. In elementary school, he refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Why are we saluting this thing that don’t love us?” a young West asked his teacher. “I’m not gonna do it.”

So I want to note that I’m fully aware of what I’m about to ask and whom I’m speaking about when I say, respectfully, is Cornel West really this dumb?

No, seriously, is Cornel West OK?

West, professor emeritus at Princeton, is running for the presidency of the United States of America as a Green Party candidate.

Yes, the Green Party — an alt-left political group akin to the Washington Generals (which might actually be unfair to the exhibition franchise, considering that the Generals have actually won at least one basketball game against the Harlem Globetrotters). It is the place where fringe-left candidates, who are usually hellbent on changing people’s relationship with the environment (hence the “Green” in the party’s name) and who have absolutely no chance of winning, run anyway and spoil the chances of Democratic hopefuls.

Of course, that’s not the way its members present themselves. To hear them tell it, they are the alternative to a two-party system that hasn’t worked. And fundamentally, they aren’t wrong. They seem to believe in less government and more grassroots. They are anti-capitalism and long for the day when self-governance cures social injustice. It’s the kind of utopian dream in which Kendall Jenner could stop the violence of protest by handing someone a Pepsi. The Green Party may be sincere in its beliefs, but much like the death penalty, pandemic loan distribution and payback, or every sneaker release, it’s the application that needs work.

It’s impossible for most Democrats not to have a sore spot within their voting bloc after Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson played spoiler to Hillary Clinton in her 2016 bid to become the first female president. Stein and Johnson seemed to funnel just enough votes away from Clinton to ensure that she would lose to Donald Trump, emboldening MAGA racists and leaning the Supreme Court so far right that it’s obtuse.

“Trump won 290 Electoral College votes to 232 for Hillary Clinton … with Clinton topping him in the popular vote,”CNN reported at the time. “But had the Democrats managed to capture the bulk of third-party voters in some of the closest contests – Wisconsin (10), Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (16) and Florida (29) – Clinton would have defeated Trump by earning 307 Electoral College votes, enough to secure the presidency.”

In 2000, the year that America would be captivated by hanging chads, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader did his best to ensure that Democrat Al Gore wouldn’t defeat Republican George W. Bush. In one of the closest presidential elections in America’s history, Bush won by a mere 537 votes in Florida. Nader got 97,421 votes there.

Historically, left-leaning third-party candidates have always siphoned votes from rightfully nominated Democratic hopefuls. Fringe candidates like these are not nominated in the same way. They don’t run in comparable primary elections, and they usually have very little or no formal background in politics. These candidates from the land of make-believe can campaign, hop on major platforms and even debate on the national stage, as long as they meet financial requirements.

West delivers a keynote speech at a Malcolm X commemoration event at The Shabazz Center in New York City on Feb. 21, 2022.

And that’s the biggest issue with Cornel West. He’s done the work of building his name. He commands five figures for speeches. He’s one of the few Black intellectuals who’s known outside of the insulated upper, educated class. He’s got the right kind of friendships to finance his poor decision-making. And as a wizard of words, his poetic deliverance will be hypnotizing. He’s already started doing interviews, and casting spells on those who are tired of the status quo.

But now is not the time to try and get the kinks out of the continuous Democratic drain that is the Green Party. Its members are disruptors, and not in a good way. For all of their self-righteous, indignant babble about change and alternatives, we would be fools to believe that the totality of their existence doesn’t center around this one mind-numbingly stupid truth: The Green Party is an ego project, a vanity resume builder, and just another opportunity for a prominent academic like West to build on his fame.

And that’s not some earth-shattering declaration; it’s as obvious as pink paint on a white wall. There is a responsibility with being one of the smartest people in the room, and the unspoken agreement is that if you are smart — like, super smart — then you don’t do dumb things. And West — with his inability to acknowledge what he has to know he’s doing by running as a candidate with no shot in hell of winning the White House, but the ability to pull just enough to make sure President Joe Biden doesn’t get reelected — is being really stupid. 

Make no mistake about it: To ignore that the White House, and subsequently the fate of the country, doesn’t hang in the balance in this particular election is to either be ignorant or so full of yourself that you just don’t care. 

This upcoming election isn’t just a battle between different ideals — we are in a fight over the conscience of America. As it stands, the ultraconservative Supreme Court has stripped women of the right to choose, ended affirmative action and allowed businesses to openly discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community. America has fallen so far into a death spiral that there is currently an actual public argument about whether slavery benefited Black people.

That’s a real conversation. Happening. Right now. In 2023. 

And I don’t care how West tries to spin it — this is an extremely selfish ego belly rub to run for an office he knows he can’t win, coming from a man with an ego the size of North Dakota. And that’s not a diss; the man has earned it. He’s truly one of the smartest people in the room, no matter what room it is, and that’s why all of this sucks. West won’t admit it, but his Democrat villain origin story started right around the time that Barack Obama was running for president. Back in the olden days of 2008, there was a group of talented Black men who not only aspired to one day ascend to Obama levels, but assumed that their academic and civil rights accomplishments gave them enough of a resume that surely the first Black president would be calling on them as a sort of Negro counsel.

And then a strange thing happened. Obama wasn’t interested in consulting with the Negro choir on how to run his possible presidency, and during the Democratic primary he spurned the annual State of the Black Union forum, organized by West’s “brother” Tavis Smiley.

“Smiley repeatedly suggested that his forum was the necessary black vetting space for the Democratic nominees,” Melissa Harris-Perry wrote for The Nation. “He needed to ask Obama and Clinton tough questions so that black America could get the answers it needed. But black America was doing a fine job making up its own mind in the primaries and didn’t need Smiley’s blessing to determine their own electoral preferences.”

The source of West’s true resentment, and proof that his ego is larger than his black suit collection, was the reveal that his yearslong takedown of Obama’s presidency came when he didn’t receive inauguration tickets.

“I couldn’t get a ticket [to the inauguration] with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration,” West said. “We had to watch the thing in the hotel.”

And on that day, Cornel West became Obama’s antagonist. He became the Ivy League-educated Black face willing to tear down the first Black president, even going so far as to criticize Obama’s blackness: “As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin.” 

And now he wants to be crowned king without following any of the necessary steps. It’s the work of the privileged class to find unconventional ways to avoid work. The Green Party is that way. It allows celebrity to count more than chores. It’s a greased path to one of the highest offices in the land, and the only role it actually serves is as a sidekick to the Republican party; it is the Robin to Trump and Ron DeSantis’ Batman.

If the Green Party wants to be taken seriously as a political group, I have a suggestion: Stop rolling out these quasi-political personalities every four years and actually do the work. Have local government candidates actually win office. Let America see the Green Party in action on a local level. Win some seats, any seats, in any house. Have a Green Party PTA president or head of an Elks Lodge. Have a Green Party mayor or junior member of Congress. But this idea that you insert a third-party candidate in the Super Bowl of political contests, without even a nationally televised primary, is downright preposterous. It’s the political equivalent of a bad Disney movie in which a teen main character wakes up in an adult body and suddenly decides that they are going to run for president, because why not?!

Cornel West may be a wizard, but no matter what he conjures up he’s only hurting the American people to feed his own ego. And I really wish Obama would have sent him those tickets, because maybe we wouldn’t have to be here dealing with this idiot.

Respectfully.