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 exclusive 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, several doormen, and everyone else he knew or politely pretended to know, except those he called “sister”. “These are some dark and gloomy times, brother,” he told me as he walked around looking for a place to sit. “How did Twain say that? ‘The accursed 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 and then gained fame for his bestseller booksand his frequent appearances as talking heads on cable news, and his cameos in sequels to “The Matrix.” He was also a tireless political surrogate, criss-crossing the country to run into Bill Bradley, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders — whom he has since criticized from the left. Last October, following Hamas 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. But “it took Brother Bernie a number of months to even use the word,” West said. “We are not talking about the highest level of moral heroism – just to use word. So I think he lost some credibility there. I love the brother no matter what – I just disagree with him.”

Now seventy-one, West is a professor at Columbia-affiliated Union Theological Seminary—where he got his first faculty job in the 1970s and where he recently returned after Yale, Princeton, and two tumultuous stints at Harvard—but he is on leave this semester because he is also running for president. “I’ve been in business 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, against both the “neo-fascist mobster” Donald Trump and the “multicultural militarist” Kamala Harris. On the trail, he continued: “I have met some of the most magnificent people in the world, but they feel helpless, if not hopeless. They see the billionaires reshaping the destiny of the whole nation, and they see it in both parties.” According to surveys compiled by Real Clear Polling, West had a negative favorability assessmentwhich was not unusual – so did Trump and Harris. (The only 2024 candidates who were above water were Tim Walz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) More pertinently, of all the candidates mentioned in these surveys, West consistently had the lowest name recognition. Even Real Clear Polling didn’t spell his name right.

There is a private meeting room in West’s apartment building, equipped with smart art books and a long wooden conference table, but it seemed occupied. “It’s alright,” 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 he has used 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 supporters 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 perennial candidate, and he ended up leaving after a few months. “There were moments of dishonesty and disrespect,” West said. (Politics called it “the latest rift within the perennially bickering American left.”)

He is now nominated by the party Justice for All – established in 2024 by Cornel West. His campaign never gained much traction. He did many podcast interviews, but very few on mainstream television. On Election Day, it looks like he’ll be lucky to win by 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 these states—or even a few hundred—could, in theory, be enough to tip the election.

last summer, The nation ran one editorial praises West’s “prophetic voice and moral clarity” but questions his strategy. Why not run in the Democratic primary, where, even if he couldn’t win, he might “provide useful pressure by fielding the left alternative”? West told me it would violate his running as a Democrat profession– 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 have to worry about the 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 staff and asked what they thought of his presidential ambitions; the vast majority declined to speak on the record, or couldn’t think of anything free to say, or both. Kaivan Shroff, a Democratic commentator, took a course called American Democracy taught by West as a Harvard law student. “I was happy for him as a professor,” Shroff said. “As for why he ran and why he’s still in the race? My guess would be egocentrism.”

Last September, 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 with a person familiar with the campaign’s strategy who said Daou and West were discussing a narrowly targeted campaign, perhaps focusing on HBCUs and on black voters in the South — especially black men who were unhappy with Joe Biden and Harris and leaned toward Trump. Perhaps by winning a significant share of those voters, the thinking went, the campaign could get up to ten or fifteen percent in the polls, and from there it could begin to take off. 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, only the United States!” Daou lasted for a month and a half before quitting.

The campaign has very few full-time employees; among its most active unofficial advisers are Annahita Mahdavi West, who is also West’s wife, and Clifton Westhis 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 making undeclared gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas. “As an independent candidate and a free black man,” West wrote on X, “I am unbought and bossless. Despite my deep political disagreements with brother Harlan Crow (who is an anti-Trump Republican), I have known him in a non-political environment for a few years and I pray for his precious family.” The next day he announced that he would return the donation. In August, the Associated Press reported that “a group of lawyers with deep ties to the Republican Party” worked to get West on the Arizona ballot, ostensibly to siphon votes away from Harris, and then reported that similar efforts were underway in North Carolina as well. (One of the attorneys, Paul Hamrick, denied the allegations in an email to The New Yorkerand wrote in part: “I have not been involved in the Republican Party.”) “So much of American politics is very gangster-like activity,” West told the Associated Press. “I have no knowledge of who they are or anything — none at all. We just want to join that vote.”