Bernie Sanders, who has been criticized and had two of his events disrupted by Black Lives Matters activists who feel his platform is weak on racial justice issues, received an important endorsement from one of the leading black intellectuals of our times, Cornel West. This, however, is not surprising. West, after all, is a Marxist (“I think that a Marxist analysis is indispensable for any understanding“), and the candidate closest to that kind of “understanding” among the Democratic runners is certainly Sanders. Cornel West’s words:
It’s just so clear. Hillary Clinton, she’s been an exemplary neoliberal opportunist for a long time. Martin O’Malley strikes me as a kind of dyed-in-the-wool liberal. What we really need is a progressive to hit issues of Wall Street domination of the government… So in a sense it was very easy to endorse Brother Bernie.
It is very well known that West hates Barack Obama. Though he campaigned for Obama in 2008, and celebrated his inauguration in 2009, his heart was broken when the 44th President of the United States didn’t throw out the money changers from the temple of American politics. In fact, Obama kept the Wall Street/Washington revolving door turning. In a recent appearance on CNN, West even called Obama the first “niggerized black president”—meaning, he is scared to confront Wall Street and systemic white supremacy. That slam pretty much killed any hope of a hatchet being buried between the two.
Back in spring, Michael Eric Dyson, another leading black intellectual, argued in a rather long and tedious essay, “The Ghost of Cornel West,” that the acuteness of West’s opprobrium has little do with an “ideological schism” but more to do with hurt feelings. West, according to Dyson, is under the impression that Obama abandoned him after he was elected. His calls are no longer answered by the president, and he doesn’t receive invitations to White House events. In short, West feels Obama used him to rise to power, but once in power, Obama treated him like a burnt piece of bacon.
But there is one thing we must not forget in all of this: West is a philosopher. And what’s that got to do with anything? Well, there is in the West a long history of relationships between philosophers and leaders that turned sour. West was not at all the first philosopher to hope his ideas would be adopted by a leader and transformed into reality. To begin with, there is the most influential philosopher of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger. He placed his hopes on Adolph Hitler, and even joined the Nazi Party. But when things did not turn out as planned, he also felt used by Hitler. Germany did not become his Being and Time. In the 19th century, there was the rocky relationship between Georg Hegel and Frederick William III and the Prussian monarchy (though Hegel had initially hoped to be the philosopher for Napoleon—the world spirit on horseback). And in the early years of Western philosophy, there was Plato and the despot Dionysius of Syracuse. And how did this relationship turn out? Wikipedia:
Dionysius was offended by the philosopher when Plato spoke out against tyrannical leaders. This led to a quarrel, after which Dionysius ordered the assassination of the philosopher (who managed to escape this fate…
West, the philosopher, saw in Obama, the world spirit, the opportunity for the words in his books to become the way life in his society. Does philosophy have any other dream than this? Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” When the change doesn’t happen, the philosopher feels a hate whose intensity is not unlike that of a scorned lover.
