Two Tuesdays ago (Cornel West’s last day in New York before Election Day) I went downtown to see him at his luxury 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 anyone else he knew or politely pretended to know, except those he called “sister.” “These are dark and gloomy times, brother,” he told me, as he walked around looking for a place to sit. “How did Dunn put it? ‘That damn human race’?

in a profile that was published in this journal, West was described as “one of the most talked about academics in the United States.” That was three decades ago and it has been true. since then. One of his colleagues recently I called him “Without a doubt, the leading American public intellectual of my generation.” He trained as a post-analytic philosopher and later gained fame for his best-seller booksand his frequent appearances as a talking head on cable news, and his cameos in the sequels to “The Matrix.” He was also a tireless political substitutecrossing the country to defend Bill Bradley, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, whom he has since criticized from the left. Last October, after Hamas attacks in Israel and the beginning of the Israeli military’s retaliation campaign, some members of Congress, including Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called for a ceasefire. However, “it took Brother Bernie several months to even use the word,” West said. “We are 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 don’t agree with him.”

Now seventy-one, West is a professor at the Columbia-affiliated Union Theological Seminary, where he landed his first teaching position, in the 1970s, and where he recently returned after Yale, Princeton, and two tumultuous terms. at Harvard, but is on leave this semester because he is also running for president. “I’ve been at this 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. Along the way, he continued: “I have met some of the most magnificent human beings in the world, but they feel helpless, if not hopeless. “They see that the billionaire strata are reshaping the entire destiny of the nation, and they see it in both parties.” According to polls aggregated by Real Clear Polling, West had a negative favorability ratingwhich wasn’t unusual: Trump and Harris did it too. (The only 2024 candidates who were afloat were Tim Walz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) More relevant was that, of all the candidates mentioned in those polls, 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, decorated with elegant art books and a long wooden conference table, but it appeared to be occupied. “Okay,” he said, making himself comfortable just outside the room, in a wingback chair. He often refers to himself as a “jazzman,” always willing to improvise, a method he has applied throughout his life and career, and especially in his presidential campaign. Last June he announced that he would seek the candidacy of the Popular Party, considered marginal even by supporters of third-party politics. He briefly switched to the Green Party, a more established independent party; But he did not get along with Jill Stein, the Party’s perpetual candidate, and ended up leaving him after a few months. “There were moments of dishonesty and disrespect,” West said. (Political called It is “the last rift within the American left, always in dispute”).

He is now the candidate of the Justice for All Party, established in 2024 by Cornel West. His campaign never had much traction. He did many podcast interviewsbut very few on conventional television. On Election Day, it looks like he’ll be lucky to win more than a percentage point in any state. Still, it 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 swing the election.

Last summer, The Nation ran a editorial praising 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 could “provide useful pressure by presenting the left alternative”? West told me that running as a Democrat would violate his beruf—his vocation. 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 put Trump at risk of winning the election) “without in any way violating your calling and your commitment to integrity and principles.” I contacted dozens of West’s colleagues, friends, former students and associates and asked them what they thought of his presidential ambitions; the vast majority refused to speak on the record, or couldn’t think of anything complimentary to say, or both. Kaivan Shroff, a Democratic commentator, took a course called American Democracy, co-taught by West, when he was a law student at Harvard. “I was fond of him as a teacher,” Shroff said. “As for why he ran and why is he still in the race? I guess it would be egocentrism.”

Last September, political strategist Peter Daou became West’s campaign manager. Daou, who had been a senior campaign staffer for John Kerry and Hillary Clinton before turning against the two-party systemhe was by far the most experienced political strategist in West’s circle. I spoke to someone who knew the campaign strategy and he told me that Daou and West discussed a targeted campaign, perhaps focusing on HBCUs and black voters in the South, especially black men who were dissatisfied with joe biden and Harris and leaning toward Trump. It was thought that perhaps by winning a significant portion of those voters, the campaign could get up to ten or fifteen percent in the polls, and from there it could begin to gain momentum. West did not follow 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 a month and a half before quitting.

The campaign has very few full-time staff members; Among his most active unofficial advisors are Annahita Mahdavi West, who is also West’s wife, and Clifton Westhis brother. (“I have billions of brothers in the world,” West said, “but he is my only blood brother.”) Even by far-reaching campaign standards, 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 Judge Clarence Thomas. “As an independent candidate and free black man,” West wrote in X, “I am neither bought nor dominated. “Despite my deep political differences with my brother Harlan Crow (who is an anti-Trump Republican), I have known him in a non-political environment for a few years and am praying for his precious family.” The next day he announced that he would return the donation. This August, 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, apparently to siphon votes away from Harris, and then reported that similar efforts were also underway in North Carolina. (One of the attorneys, Paul Hamrick, denied the allegations in an email to The New Yorkerwriting, in part: “I have had no relationship with the Republican Party”). “A lot of American politics is very gangster-like activity,” West told the Associated Press. “I have no knowledge of who they are or anything, nothing at all. “We just want to be on that ballot.”