Debate part 1: Should DSA Endorse Cornel West? – NO!

Ruy Martinez argues: DSA Should Focus on Bodily Autonomy, Not on Cornel West

While there are good reasons to support a third-party candidate, DSA needs to work on gaining political coherence via a national campaign.

[Read the other part of this debate: DSA – Go West!]

Cornel West’s announcement of a third-party Presidential campaign – first with the controversial People’s Party, and now potentially with the Green Party – has generated much conversation and consternation. Already, a group within DSA has begun advocating for the organization to support West’s candidacy, though with more pushback than support.

While West’s campaign will no doubt be a potential site of struggle for between 400,000 and about three million people (based on previous Green Party voting totals), and while socialist parties have historically run candidates in elections they could not win to build the party, the reality is that there are far more useful ways for us to build DSA than a third-party campaign. 

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For example, Reform & Revolution put forward an amendment turning the “Fighting the Right by Defending Abortion Rights, Trans People, and Democracy” resolution into a campaign for DSA to organize across the nation. This is a more coherent and potentially larger campaign than trailing West’s candidacy for a limited subset of third-partyists. The campaign would be able to reach a broad majority of people who agree with abortion and trans rights, rather than the few people who take a third-party campaign seriously. Still, let’s lay out the positives and negatives of a West campaign to accurately assess what DSA engaging in it might accomplish and cost us. 

Potential Benefits and Defending Third-Party Runs

First, third party campaigns are not inherently unserious or bad. Running as a candidate for the Socialist Party of America (SPA), Eugene V. Debs ran third-party campaigns that everyone knew were unwinnable, but which succeeded in growing the party. Indeed, the SPA even ran campaigns in statewide races such as the Auditor of Massachusetts, giving them the chance to talk to voters despite knowing the election of their candidate was virtually impossible. 

West’s campaign could be useful for talking to voters about independent socialist politics, to those who are fed up with the two-party system. West himself could promote DSA’s campaigns by using his larger platform to talk to voters more-so than local officials could.

However, once interrogated, the potential benefits outlined above become harder and harder to maintain, not to mention the viability. The problem is twofold: 

1) West’s campaign is not that large, and his potentially winnable base is much smaller than pro-West comrades believe.

2) DSA does not have the desire or cohesion to do more than one major campaign, especially a third-party one. 

A Sober Assessment

How big is the Cornel West campaign? How many people can we bring to DSA? Some boasted that Cornel West’s announcement video has been seen 19 million times on Twitter. What they leave out is that this number (and the number of positive engagements) is in the grand scheme of things, minor. While MSNBC overreacts and calls West a spoiler, or chastises the left for even considering a third-party run, the reality is that the announcement of West’s campaign is less significant than frivolous celebrity tweets (which got two million likes to West’s measly 40 thousand).

The Green Party has historically gotten between 2.7 percent in 2000 to as low as 0.1 percent of the vote in 2008, when Nader ran on his own. Let’s say we could speak to this crowd of around three million people who’d be receptive to our message. The numbers themselves are small, though bigger than DSA. We would be speaking to a topic which excites a small portion of the population — while many may be frustrated with the anti-democratic two-party system in the United States, they also do not view the Green Party (GP) as a viable option out of the quagmire. 

Furthermore, we have to question if every third party voter is a third party supporter. Many may vote as a protest, but have no allegiance to the GP, or be willing to listen to a socialist message. We would maybe be able to reach several hundreds of thousands of people, and that does not even presume that they would join DSA or organize with us. 

While not a damning critique, this seriously wounds the argument that West’s campaign can reach incredible numbers of people who are waiting to hear our message. The reality is less exciting and more disappointing.

Cohering Around West?

The other problem is one of convincing DSA to be a part of West’s campaign. DSA members are rightly concerned about paper endorsements, which they view as the standard practice of NGOs and other cookie-cutter activist organizations. That’s not to say that paper endorsements are always wrong, but we should presume skepticism rather than support for them. However, if we were to propose going “all in” for West, it would be a monumental blunder.

To actually mobilize around Cornel West on the scale of the DSA for Bernie campaign, which included an independent expenditure and had overwhelming support in the organization, would be practically impossible. DSA members would rightfully be skeptical for the above reasons. 

We should focus on the real prize: the vast majorities of people who, despite any political alignment or lack thereof, believe in abortion rights, trans rights, and other progressive reforms for bodily autonomy. These issues have majoritarian support and are the bulwark of right-wing attacks on working people. 

We’ve already begun to see KKK gangs in Kentucky rove around stoking up fears against LGBTQ people, along with the vast array of anti-trans and anti-abortion bills being passed in the recent year. Progressive workers will be fighting for their rights, and it would be a missed opportunity for DSA to sit on the sidelines or only engage with these struggles in an informal, localistic way, via a measly website that has chapter resources. 

This issue is beyond third-party, beyond not voting, beyond even the skepticism Democratic voters may have. When faced with the critical attacks on working people, if socialists are able to be the best fighters for the movement, and if we have the confidence to put forward a socialist appeal, people will join DSA on a more politicized, active, and engaged basis than those who join us thinking that we will continue to support the Greens or third-partyism.

In my view, the desire to campaign for Cornel West shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, or in a sectarian way, but rather, we should seriously consider what DSA and R&R can accomplish to best build the socialist movement and the revolutionary Marxist tendency in it. Towards that end, I believe that the best course of action is to not campaign for West, or call for a confusing vote, but rather keep our eyes on the critical struggle for a campaigning and boldly socialist DSA.