Cornel West’s vanity ratfucking campaign should not receive any votes from anyone anywhere on the left in any jurisdiction
By 
This should go without saying at this late date, but with Nathan J. Robinson, Uunionbuster joining team “throw the election to Trump, from the ‘left'” Eric Levitz lays out the definitive case anyway:
Notably, Sánchez declines to mention the myriad ways that Democrats have advanced progressive economic goals at the federal level in recent years. Congress’s robust response to the COVID recession was in no small part a product of the Democratic Party’s control of the House. It was congressional Democrats who insisted on increasing unemployment benefits to a level that left many laid-off workers with more income than they’d previously earned at their jobs. Under Biden, meanwhile, Democrats enacted a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill on a party-line vote. These measures collectively reduced poverty in the U.S. and triggered one of the fastest labor-market recoveries in history. Biden’s prioritization of full employment has yielded tight labor markets that increase the bargaining power of low-wage workers and abet union organizing. As a result, lower-income workers have recovered roughly 25 percent of the increase in wage inequality that accrued between Ronald Reagan’s election and Biden’s. The employment rate among disabled Americans, meanwhile, is at a record high. This year, the Democratic Party has proven even more amenable to progressive goals at the state level.
Finally, precisely because the Democratic Party does, in fact, deliver legislative gains to its core constituencies, the left cannot hope to build a mass movement for change through campaigns that aid Republicans.
Conscious of the vulnerabilities in her arguments for indifference to the Democratic Party’s success, or the plausibility of West actually winning the presidency, Sánchez suggests that the real point of his candidacy is movement-building: Even if one believes that leftists in swing states should support the Democratic nominee, West’s campaign offers the left an enormous opportunity to build up the progressive movement through organizing. After all, “we know that the Bernie campaigns, even though they failed to result in his election to the presidency, were hugely energizing. They trained organizers. They spread a message. They grew the movement.” (Of course, this cuts directly against Sánchez’s initial argument that the left has little to gain by competing in Democratic primaries.)
The problem here is that growing the radical left’s base of support to a level commensurate with national influence requires, at a minimum, winning over the core constituencies for progressive reform in the United States, among them African American voters and the labor movement. Associating the radical left with a presidential campaign that benefits the Republican Party is antithetical to that aim. It effectively expresses contempt for such voters’ and groups’ political interests and goals, as the radical left understands them. Critically, that understanding is more aligned with the realities of electoral politics in the U.S. than a worldview that entertains the possibilities that Cornel West could win the presidency or that Donald Trump did more to aid decarbonization than Joe Biden.
None of this is to say that the left has no justifiable complaints about the Biden administration or Democratic Party. Left internationalists are rational to worry about the president’s ratcheting up of tensions with China. The White House’s immigration policies leave much to be desired. The Democratic leadership’s decision to recruit Kyrsten Sinema as its candidate for Arizona Senate in 2018 was a costly blunder. The list goes on.
The question, though, is whether the party’s left-wing critics have a better chance of advancing their political ideals by fighting for power within blue America or defecting to a third party. The fact that proponents of the latter strategy cannot seem to articulate a case for their perspective without spouting blatant falsehoods should tell the West-curious what they need to know.
Particularly given how much of the opposition to Obama from West and his current supporters focused on drones, and how their much opposition to Biden centers on Ukraine, it is particularly instructive that they have given Biden zero credit for either grounding the drones or his politically damaging ending of the war in Afghanistan. The idea that Biden could make the ratfucking campaign go away by making some appealing progressive promises assumes a level of good faith that very plainly doesn’t exist. He couldn’t earn their support by actually achieving success on what was allegedly their top priority issue before he took their side. (And, of course, as with late-period Nader West’s real objection is not any particular policy disagreement but a conviction that he deserves to be in charge of the left coalition in America irrespective of what voters have to say about it.)
Levitz’s additional point about the tendency to blame the fact that the left is simply not a majority electoral coalition in the United States on the electoral system is also important:
5) In that system, the left must make all kinds of compromises and concessions to the center-left after Election Day. In the U.S. system, this coalition formation, and its attendant compromises and concessions, happen before Election Day.— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) July 13, 2023
Would a Joe Manchin who represented the Manchin For West Virginia No Labels party be more or less likely to support Biden’s legislative agenda and judges? To me, the answer is obvious and not favorable to claims that multiparty democracy is the solution to what ails the American left.
But whether one agrees or disagrees with that, the current deal being offered by Greens is “throw the election to Donald Trump in exchange for nothing” if you live in a swing state and “make it easier for our ratfucking campaigns to succeed in the future” if you don’t. Either way, the only answer for people who care about the material effects of elections is a hard pass.