What Is Cornel West Thinking?

Two Tuesdays ago—Cornel West’s last day in New York before Election Day—I went uptown to see him at his high-end apartment building in Morningside Heights, between Seminary Row and Reinhold Niebuhr Place. He met me in the lobby and greeted me as “brother,” which was also how he greeted one of his neighbors, multiple doormen, and anyone else he knew or was politely pretending to know, except for the ones he called “sister.” “These are some grim and dim times, brother,” he told me, as he walked around looking for somewhere to sit. “How did Twain put it? ‘That damned human race’?”

In a profile that ran in this magazine, West was described as “one of the most talked-about academics in the United States.” That was three decades ago, and it’s been true ever since. One of his peers recently called him “undeniably the leading American public intellectual of my generation.” He was trained as a post-analytic philosopher, then gained fame for his best-selling books, and his frequent talking-head appearances on cable news, and his cameos in sequels of “The Matrix.” He was also an indefatigable political surrogate, crossing the country to stump for Bill Bradley, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders—all of whom he has since criticized from the left. Last October, after Hamas’s attacks in Israel and the beginning of the Israeli military’s retaliatory campaign, a few members of Congress, including Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called for a ceasefire. However, “it took Brother Bernie a number of months even to use the word,” West said. “We’re not talking about the highest level of moral heroism—just to use the word. So I think he lost some credibility there. I love the brother no matter what—I just disagree with him.”

Now West is seventy-one, and he’s a professor at Union Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Columbia—where he got his first faculty job, in the nineteen-seventies, and where he recently returned after Yale, Princeton, and two tumultuous stints at Harvard—but he’s on leave this semester, because he’s also running for President. “I’ve been at it for seventeen months, and I’ve seen the layers of corruption in the system,” he said. He is campaigning as an Independent, on a shoestring budget, opposing both the “neo-Fascist gangster” Donald Trump and the “multicultural militarist” Kamala Harris. On the trail, he continued, “I’ve met some of the most magnificent human beings in the world, but they feel helpless, if not hopeless. They see the billionaire strata reshaping the whole destiny of the nation, and they see it in both parties.” According to surveys aggregated by Real Clear Polling, West had a negative favorability rating, which wasn’t unusual—Trump and Harris did, too. (The only 2024 candidates who were above water were Tim Walz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) More germane was that, of all the candidates mentioned in those surveys, West consistently had the lowest name recognition. Even Real Clear Polling didn’t spell his name right.

There’s a private meeting room in West’s apartment building, appointed with swanky art books and a long wooden conference table, but it seemed to be occupied. “That’s all right,” he said, making himself comfortable just outside the room, in a wingback chair. He often refers to himself as a “jazzman,” always ready to improvise—a method that he has applied throughout his life and career, and especially in his Presidential campaign. Last June, he announced that he would seek the nomination of the People’s Party, which is considered marginal even by devotees of third-party politics. He briefly switched to the Green Party, a more established independent party; but he didn’t get along with Jill Stein, the Party’s perpetual candidate, and he ended up leaving after a few months. “There were moments of dishonesty and disrespect,” West said. (Politico called it “the latest rift within the perennially squabbling American left.”)

He is now the nominee of the Justice for All Party—established in 2024, by Cornel West. His campaign never got much traction. He did a lot of podcast interviews, but very few on mainstream TV. On Election Day, it seems like he’ll be lucky if he wins more than a percentage point in any state. Still, he is on the ballot in sixteen states, including Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan. A few thousand votes in any of those states—or even a few hundred—could, in theory, be enough to tip the election.

Last summer, The Nation ran an editorial commending West’s “prophetic voice and moral clarity,” but questioning his strategy. Why not run in the Democratic primary, where, even if he couldn’t win, he might “provide useful pressure by laying out the left alternative”? West told me that running as a Democrat would violate his beruf—his calling. He referred to Max Weber’s 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” in which “he makes the crucial distinction between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility,” he said. “So you’ve got to have concern about consequences”—for example, running a campaign that could risk throwing the election to Trump—“without in any way violating your calling and your commitment to integrity and principle.” I contacted dozens of West’s colleagues, friends, former students, and associates, asking what they made of his Presidential ambitions; the vast majority declined to speak on the record, or could think of nothing complimentary to say, or both. Kaivan Shroff, a Democratic commentator, took a course called American Democracy, co-taught by West, as a law student at Harvard. “I was fond of him as a professor,” Shroff said. “As far as why he ran, and why he’s still in the race? My guess would be egocentrism.”

Last September, the political strategist Peter Daou became West’s campaign manager. Daou, who had been a high-level campaign staffer for John Kerry and Hillary Clinton before turning against the two-party system, was by far the most experienced political strategist in West’s circle. I spoke to someone with knowledge of the campaign’s strategy who said that Daou and West discussed a narrowly targeted campaign, perhaps focussing on H.B.C.U.s and on Black voters in the South—especially Black men who were disaffected with Joe Biden and Harris and leaning toward Trump. Perhaps by winning a significant share of those voters, the thinking went, the campaign could get up to ten or fifteen per cent in the polls, and from there it could start to gain momentum. West did not take this advice. “This campaign is committed to a 50 State Strategy,” he tweeted last year, promoting a campaign event in Nebraska. “There are no flyover states, just the United States!” Daou lasted a month and a half before quitting.

The campaign has very few full-time staff members; among its most active unofficial advisers are Annahita Mahdavi West, who is also West’s wife, and Clifton West, his brother. (“I’ve got billions of brothers in the world,” West said, “but he’s my only blood brother.”) Even by the standards of long-shot campaigns, this one has made some baffling missteps. Last October, it was reported that West had accepted a campaign donation from Harlan Crow, the conservative Texas billionaire best known for giving undeclared gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas. “As an independent candidate and a free Black man,” West wrote on X, “I am unbought and unbossed. Despite my deep political differences with brother Harlan Crow (who is an anti-Trump Republican), I’ve known him in a non-political setting for some years and I pray for his precious family.” The following day, he announced that he would return the donation. This August, the Associated Press reported that “a group of lawyers with deep ties to the Republican Party” was working to get West on the ballot in Arizona, ostensibly to siphon votes away from Harris, and then reported that similar efforts were also under way in North Carolina. (One of the lawyers, Paul Hamrick, denied the allegations in an e-mail to The New Yorker, writing, in part, “I’ve had zero involvement with the Republican Party.”) “So much of American politics is highly gangster-like activity,” West told the Associated Press. “I have no knowledge of who they are or anything—none whatsoever. We just want to get on that ballot.”