Progressive academic Cornel West says he will run for president by a third party

() — Former Harvard professor and prominent public intellectual Cornell West He will run as a third-party presidential candidate, he announced Monday in a video posted on Twitter.

A supporter, surrogate, and confidant of Bernie Sanders during the Vermont senator’s presidential bids in 2016 and 2020, West is one of the leading democratic socialist activists of his generation.

“In these dark times, I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for President of the United States as a Popular Party candidate,” West said. “I go into the search for truth, I go into the search for justice. And the presidency is just a vehicle to pursue that truth and that justice that I’ve been trying my whole life.”

West will run as a People’s Party candidate, a path that Sanders rejected during his own campaigns, despite his clashes with a Democratic Party establishment that largely weighed against him. Sanders endorsed Biden before the 2020 general election and will endorse him again in 2024.

West taught philosophy at Harvard for several terms before returning to Union Theological Seminary in 2021. He was previously a tenured professor at Princeton and has written and edited dozens of books. West entered the public sphere during the Civil Rights Movement and has emerged in the decades since as an irrepressible voice of radical political thought.

“I come from a tradition where I care about you. I care about the quality of your life. I care if you have access to a living wage job, decent housing, women having control over their bodies, to healing for all,” West said in his video.

A supporter of Barack Obama during his first campaign, West soon became one of the former president’s harshest left-wing critics. He frequently derided Obama’s policies, including his support for Wall Street, the drone war and what West described as a lack of progress on mass incarceration.

“Obama’s reign did not produce the Donald Trump nightmare, but it did contribute to it,” West wrote in 2017. “And those Obama cheerleaders who refused to hold him accountable bear some responsibility.”

Following Biden’s election in 2020, West summarized in an interview with Jacobin magazine the views of many left-wing and socialist activists.

“It looks like we’re going to be dealing with a neoliberal mess,” West said. “That’s another way of saying the rot is there, only with Biden, the rot moves much more slowly.”