Cornel West Interview: The Success & Disappointment of Obama's Presidency

dr cornell west interview take one marker i recall that he gave me a call at princeton immediately after his powerful speech that he gave in boston at the democratic national convention and he had said america is a magical place and i had said this brother's gonna have a christopher columbus experience he's gonna discover america america is free and democratic to the degree to which people fight to keep it free and democratic through blood sweat and tears nothing magical about this at all this is not disneyland at disney world so he called me up and he said i heard what you said about my speech why did you say it i said i said it because i believed it it's clear you're brilliant it's clear that you've got unbelievable rhetorical talent but at the same time i wanted to speak the truth he said well you know i'm thinking about running for president and i was wondering whether you would work with me i said i've got one question what is your relation to the legacy of martin luther king jr how will your campaign enact the struggle against poverty militarism racism and materialism those are the four evils that one of the king juniors saw right before he was murdered and he was very honest with me and he said he said professor west you know that i'm not as radical as you are but i do see myself directly connected to the legacy of martin luther king jr i said that sounds wonderful to me let's work together next thing you know i was down in washington d.c in a meeting uh we were preparing him for a debate at howard university who was with with charles ogletree david axelrod uh jesse jackson jr arthur davis we're all in a room and we work for two days and so i became a critical supporter and i did that was the first time i met him here in washington and i met him again in south carolina and i was doing a number of events but i ended up doing about 65 events all around the country beginning with iowa and ending up in ohio know that those crucial states and it it was always a critical support because there's no doubt that he was better than the other candidates i thought all he needed to do and i told him when i first met him i said you if we can leave frog over the clinton machine you're going to be the next president at that time he had about six or seven percent support and even black folk had not really began to kick in because this is prior to iowa so that i was deeply impressed by his intellect his sharpness his poise and so on but it was always a question would he be able to hold up the bloodstained banner of the legacy of martin luther king jr within the context of the treacherous terrain of american intellectual politics that was a fundamental challenge that i think he and i knew that he had well he knew that you know my i've got a calling and a vocation not just a career and a profession and so i was going to hold up the legacy of fannie lou hamer alabama monitor king jr visa v his candidacy or anybody else's candidacy in that regard and when i introduced them here at harlem at the apollo i said exactly the same thing i said we're here to try to keep a lot of the legacy of mullet king jr and the others and the best candidate who does that is our dear brother barack well again it's a relative judgment he was better than the other candidates there's no doubt about that that's why my critical support was always there but once he brought in the wall street advisors wall street affiliates tim geithner larry summers robin rubin and company it was very clear that he was willing to bail out wall street the one percent and not bail out the homeowners who somebody martin king and ella baker and others would resonate with so my critique already started there and then it began to deepen when i saw brennan from the bush administration tied to the same counterterrorist strategy of dropping those drones on terrorists and dropping drones on terrorists i can understand in terms of a just war theory but when it includes innocent people that to me is a crime against humanity i don't care what color you are i don't care what country you're from and when i saw that policy increased and that was tied to mass surveillance it was tied to national security uh policies that were cut that were continuous was something i was very critical of under the bush administration wall street on the one hand you got drones on the other hand and then the fundamental issue of poverty that i was hoping that he would make poverty much more of a central issue even as he was trying to reconstruct the economy but by reconstructing the economy he had a chance to render wall street elites accountable their greed was running amok there were crimes committed insider trading market manipulation predatory lending fraudulent activities at least i thought they'd have a justice department that would that apply rule of law to them the way they apply rule of law to jamal on the corner of juanita on the corner poor whites any poor folk who would actually violated the law so when i saw the tilt toward wall street to tilt toward the drone policies and then also no serious issue the hitting of poverty or the mass incarceration regime my critique began to deepen and it got you know it was consistently deep throughout the um his eight years well i remember my feelings when i saw right there and seeing in a screen that he won you know the tears of so much struggle against the vicious legacy of white supremacy in the history of this nation uh the slavery jim crow jane crow lynching spit on rebuked scorn now you've got a black man in that white house built primarily by black slaves that's the moment that i think all of us of all colors who have a care about human beings and the future of american democracy would feel very very deeply i'd never forget that as long as i live very very much so but then the question became now that we have the success let's see whether to be greatness see success and greatness is not the same thing for me success is being in position of authority power and influence greatness is what you do with it when i read in ron suskind's texts confidence men on wall street washington and the education of a president that meeting that took place march 2009 with those 13 firms seven of them had wall street leaders and he walks in he says i stand between you and the pitch forks but i want to let you know i'm on your side i will protect you that's what you say to poor people that's what you say to working people that's what you say to black people brown people red people yellow people women gays lesbians trans the ones who are being pushed to the margins wall street doesn't need that and i don't want to present myself as a wall street hater i just hate greed and i hate injustice and i hate entitlement and privilege that's not accountable to the demos to everyday people you see so when i saw that wall street tilt and the bailout i said oh my god we've got a continuation of neoliberal politics that tilt toward the corporate elites and not toward working people and that was the beginning of my deep suspicion that lo and behold he was leaning in a direction away from the legacy of martin luther king jr and somebody had to try to keep alive that legacy of martin and the others that very much were responsible for the election of a black man in a society so deeply shaped by white supremacy he would say over and over again that i'm not president of black america i'm president of america and i would say back i want you to stand for truth and justice you see black people poor people working people we're not asking for anything special we're asking for fairness we're asking for justice if you stand for justice then i know you're going to make the mass incarceration regime a priority you're going to make poverty a priority you're going to make accountability of wall street a priority you see but the sad thing was of course you had such massive black elite capitulation and you had ordinary black brothers and sisters who were so caught up in symbol that they downplayed the substance and i can understand that symbolically i mean barack obama will forever go down in the annals of time as having this great symbolic status struggle for freedom and justice is not just about symbols you've got to be able to seize the moment and let the world know you are a fighter for those who have been spit on subjugated dominated exploited they can't live vicariously through your symbolic success and see we live in a culture culture superficial spectacle all you gotta do is have successful warmer successful black or brown and all the other folk catching hell supposed to live through them and see that's not my tradition no no not at all we applaud their success now how you gonna use your success you see are you gonna continue to bend whatever you can your authority and influence to try to empower poor and working people now i think brother barack president obama would come back to me and say well brother wes i am a pragmatist i've got limited options i've got limited alternatives and i have to be able to maneuver i've got to be able to work in a bipartisan way i'm a politician i'm not just part of the prophetic tradition i thoroughly understand that we all have different lanes but then the question becomes how intense is your struggle so no medic when it came to health care he has been a supporter of single-payer right but then allow the voice is a single pair to come in he had the meeting with the pharmaceutical companies they cut a deal and i said you don't punt on second down you punt on the fourth down you push it as far as you can go then you say here's a compromise here are the concessions so that i knew that he would not be able to get the single payer but i thought at least we get the public option you got to fight for it you see you don't have these private meetings just to come out with success and it wasn't just him he had romney manuel he had a guide in there and a whole host of others whispering in his ear because he was he was relatively new at that level of power and he was falling back on his advisors and most of his advisors were old clintonites for the most part and i said exactly the same thing about bill clinton as i said about barack obama too close to wall street foreign policy that i had deep disagreements with and didn't hit the issue of poverty well i got a call from my dear sister valerie jarrett she said i want to know whether this is friendly fire or whether this is a critique of someone who is more and more a foe and i said well i'm trying to just accent the moral and spiritual dimensions of what i have to say i'm trying to look at the world through the lens of poor and working people and as a christian i'm looking at the limbs looking at the world to the left of the cross and that cross signifies unarmed truth and the condition of truth is always to allow suffering to speak beginning with the most vulnerable and that comes out of hebrew scripture you spread that steadfast love to the most vulnerable the god the motherless the fatherless the widow the stranger and so forth and then an unconditional love across the board so i'm loving the babies in somalia afghanistan and pakistan who have been killed as much as i'm loving the black folk who've been killed by police here or anybody else anywhere you see and so she made it clear they had a uh there was a piece of the new york times where she came out and said uh brother wes is not only crazy he's unamerican i said oh i'm an enemy of the state now i'm anti-american i just let them know no i'm anti-injustice in america no matter what color the president is now you can imagine it created tremendous controversy because my language was very sharp and very very uh intense and people were wondering wait a minute i thought fox news were the critics of the president what are right-wing critics most times they're wrong and you had to protect the president visa via the racist attacks because of course his family very precious could be killed any minute you see so you get the solidarity with the president on that issue but there are left-wing critiques of the president that need to be heard and people were saying no no criticisms at all my dear brother al sharpton well i've known for 30 years and he would tell me all the time any criticism of the president in public is not allowed because it reinforces the right wing and i said no we can't we can't have that i come from a people that says lift every voice that's the anthem of black people you got to lift your voice i'm not going to be an echo and just part of some kind of uh um protective crowd i'm going to protect when he's being viciously attacked for the bad reasons i'm going to critique him i try for good reasons but it's going to be in the name of the very people and tradition that put him in office the last thing you need now is a black president who gets milk toast when it comes to poverty spineless when it comes to wall street and still dropping drones on on folk and therefore not being able to create the kind of uh what i call you know a more more radically democratic presidency be a fusion of the best of fdr i think bernie sanders my dear brother in his critique of wall street that's what i wanted out of barack obama it was not in him bernie sanders is not a neo-liberal in that sense he's a social democrat he's more progressive and people say you're asking too much maybe you know but at least i have to let him know you know what what what some of us are thinking i wasn't all by myself but what so many of us were thinking in terms of him fighting for poor and working people uh in regard to political calculation how do you preserve your position how do you rethink your relation to your constituency but then there's what i call just moral witness and political courage and you see there's a difference between a states person who can bring together prudence with moral witness and political courage see when fdr said the wall street were greedy they were economic royalists and he said i welcome their hatred he said that in the white house that's what a statesman does who's in solidarity with working people what i saw with barack obama was he didn't have a lot of political courage he didn't have a lot of moral witness he was always obsessed with being in the middle and there's nothing in the middle but just that yellow line the truth is beneath the road the road is hiding and concealing all the suffering you see you think of the children one out of two black and brown children under six live in poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world where is the policy marian wright edelman she's part of the great legacy of martin luther king jr concerns the children's fund you see she's raising the same kind of issues can't get a word out of them i will not mention the word poverty of course my dear brother tavis smiley and i went on two poverty tours 21 cities the first time 14 cities the second time trying to raise the issue of poverty no response and most of his supporters and cheerleaders we don't want to hear it wait a minute how you going to have a president here and all these children catching hell and you can't even raise the issue and yet wall street is break dancing to the bank they got federal reserve given given this quantitative easing they're getting nearly zero interest rates free money flowing students have to pay interest rates to go to college something's wrong here in terms of the one percent visa be the 99 so again raise the issue put the critique forward and i think it's no accident that you end up with a black lives matter movement under a black president with a black attorney general with a black homeland security cabinet member if black lives mattered enough in the white house you would think they'd be able to come to terms with the accountabilities police killing too many of these precious young brothers and sisters you see and when it took place you know my dear brother brock says trayvon would have if i had a son it would have looked like trayvon i said that's a beautiful formulation but when zimmerman went free what did he say this is a nation of laws we must observe the law that's not what fathers say when their sons get shot down so don't act like you're a father one moment and the next moment you talk about this is a nation of laws slavery was law donation jim crow was the lawsuit women came vote to 1990 that's part of the laws too so don't invoke the laws in relation to your deep feeling and empathy of somebody who just got killed he said don't don't play that game with us you see them and i have to hit him hard on that too you know see in the end this is not about individuals it's not about a president it's not just about professor anything else a tradition has been put in place by great people who have been hated for 400 years and taught the world so much about how to to love justice and love truth and love beauty and love the good and for some of us religious love love god love the holy that tradition is richer and deeper coming out of the sweat and tears of everyday people than any president and that was part of my my struggle with uh so many of the black leaders and black pundits and so forth who wanted to be so uncritical so deferential and the kowtow and not recognizing there's principles involved here that was very interesting in the case of my dear sister michelle obama very interesting because when i saw her a couple of times and i would always see her give her a hug you know she she say hello how the kids are doing i'm praying for your whole family in terms of no violence no vicious attacks and threats being executed and so forth so we never talked policy or anything but she was always very very very very kind so it's a fascinating difference there actually it was surprising because uh one of course my dear brother jeremiah wright reverend jeremiah wright was supposed to be there he had been barack obama's pastor he had been he played a fundamental role in the marriage of course he he brought he he performed the wedding and so on uh and he had sent notes already that he was asked not to be there anybody said oh wait what's going on here and then barack obama said he would be at tavis smiley's state of black union and last minute said no he makes announcement in springfield tied to the legacy of abraham lincoln which is a rich one so we understood okay i mean political calculation every politician has to do that very much so and you don't want to alienate your white fellow citizens coming out of the box so you don't want to be too associated with with black people early on but you also want to be clear with the black folk you had promised to be there because we didn't know we found out right there on television it's like wait what's going on respect us enough to tell us why you can't do it so early on there was a certain suspicion no there's no doubt about that reverend jeremiah wright is one of the giants in the black prophetic tradition of the 20th century uh he's deeply influenced by malcolm x in some ways he molded martin luther king jr i studied university chicago so he's both a scholar as well as a powerful preacher now jeremiah wright has always been one to engage in a very very intense critique not just of white supremacy but of the american empire war invasions occupations and so forth you see and one may not always agree with him or not but there's no doubt that he has put his life on the line and that makes a difference that makes a big difference i've blessed the teacher in the basement of his church with uh maleficent one of the great black scholars afrocentric theorists so i go way back with brother jeremiah and i was deeply upset when he was disrespected like that you see when he talked about uh god damn america you know martha king jr's last sermon was going to be why america may go to hell it was not america should go to hell it was not america ought to go to hell it may go to hell because if you don't come to terms with racism poverty militarism materialism those evils are going to suck all the good stuff out of your democracy that's in part what jeremiah wright was talking about but fox news and the others you know they cast it in such a way that he was a hater of america rather than a hater of injustice in america and so unfortunately of course as an american politician you can't get too close to that kind of prophetic fire or you get burned so i can understand barack in some sense wanting to get a distance as a politician but on a personal level and on a very deep um truthful level you have to try to teach people that there are voices in our society that are radical that are not up for elections they're trying to tell the truth and you can give your own critique of those voices or your agreement with those voices and of course that didn't take place he just got completely demonized and that's a very sad thing somebody raised their voice and just completely demonized and in some ways people tried to dismiss him but i think i think i went on fox news and said that i take a bullet for brother jeremiah and i don't agree with him all the time but i know that he's got a deep love of ordinary people deep love of black people deep love of oppressed people the integrity is not about ideological purity or moral purity integrity is about saying what you believe meaning what you say saying what you mean and putting your life on the line that's bottom line that's martin that's malcolm that's ella that's fanny and it goes across the board dorothy day was like that rabbi abraham joshua heschel was like that edward zaid was like that this is a human thing it cuts across race and gender and sexual orientation in that regard and um and politicians are always a bit fearful of such people you know i i was i was a bit disturbed by it because he seemed to equate black rage after 244 years of barbaric slavery and almost a hundred years of american terrorism called james crow and lynching and jim crow that black rage had the same status as white resentment that these black folk were moving up too quickly now i believe in staying in contact with the humanity of my precious white brothers and sisters but they need to understand that in the white supremacist civilization when you've been the beneficiary of unbelievable privilege and entitlement that you have a right to justice you have a right to fairness but your resentment will never have the same weight morally and spiritually as a black rage who've had the term to come to terms with four mothers and forefathers raped and violated and exploited and lynched and when he presented that equivalent it made me upset i said you're not telling the truth you don't give speeches to make white fellow citizens feel better about themselves you give speeches that try to tell the truth and then win elections he decided he couldn't tell the truth he had to ease white fears insecurities and anxieties and make that equivalent and many many black folk of course were very deeply upset with the speech but it was a successful speech because it allowed him to continue on into the intellectual process in such a way that white folk weren't too upset with him or associated with that angry black man jeremiah right see part of the problem of having a silvery tongue is that it can be used as a substitute for moral backbone and a moral backbone you don't have to have a silvery tongue you just need witness courage fortitude you see so that for example even with the uh we come back to police brutality and black lives matter you can give a silvery tongue gives a formulation and pulls back no action at all you see what are you going to do about accountability of the police well we'll see with investigation we've seen investigations over and over again they still walk free so i think in some ways that kind of silvery tongue is a dangerous thing in terms of not allowing people to keep focus on what the real actions and deeds and policies really are i mean he gave a wonderful talk about income inequality did you say well why is it after you first turned the top one percent got 95 of the income growth so your policy going one way and you can wonderful speech on income inequality going the other way and the mainstream media i mean he had the uh you know corporate media in his back pocket i mean we got to be honest about this msnbc was basically a state media it was hardly a critical word said about him in eight years black white pundits if you're going to be a media obsessed with free speech and first amendment then engage in affirmation but also critique hardly none at all i did brother barack obama wins the peace prize and his last year he drops over 26 000 bombs he's got five wars going on simultaneously but he's viewed as a peaceman because that's the end was projected and you said well wait a minute where's the truth here they say oh brother where's how come you upset you ought to be supporting the black president i like the black brother he's brilliant i love him as a human being he's head of an empire he is the brilliant poised black face of the empire just like now we got no-nothing mean-spirited xenophobic white face of the american empire we got to keep track of the structures and institutions not just the styles and the temperaments now of course barack obama is much much much much better donald trump's no comparison but they're still running an empire well one is i think it sent messages in black america brown america yellow america red america white america that white supremacy was it's at a crucial level a lie and that's the symbolic indictment of white supremacy and i resonate with that deeply that's why i cry you see i resonate with that deeply the very notion that black people are human beings that the deepest level is still news for too many people and a lot of my fellow citizens have yet to get that memo the black man brilliant black wife charismatic black wife beautiful sharp black children symbolic indictment of white supremacy crucial that will never be taken away from brother barack obama the challenge will be and when the history books are written it's going to be more than just symbol it's going to be what kind of substance did you keep alive the legacy of the best of black people we talked about sarah vaughan we talk about donnie hathaway these are love warriors at the deepest level and if you're a love warrior you hate injustice and if you're not a love warrior you can hide and conceal the injustice with silvery speeches and get all the symbolic acclaim but when it comes to the rubber hitting the road that's a different thing that's a different thing marvin gaye could write some beautiful songs but if he can't sing it and what's going on it's going to be a different performance and you're going to feel it differently and i think as the years go by more and more black people going to say what a missed opportunity with the black president especially given this horrible nightmarish condition now how come he didn't hit poverty how come he didn't hit mass incarceration how come he didn't talk about race how come he kept dropping those drones on those folk how come he assassinated american citizen without due process we've been concerned about personal liberties as a people because they could assassinate us you can't assassinate american citizens because you disagree with them with no due process these are crimes and i got in trouble because i call them a war criminal you don't kill innocent people in in in pakistan and in somalia over 200 and some children killed those are war crimes bush 45 drones barack obama over 500. i call bush war criminal what does that make barack obama war criminal too you got to tell the truth you're not in it for popularity this is about an integrity of a people of a struggle of a movement of a grand effort to make the world a better place in the white supremacist civilization when you get a symbolic indictment of white supremacy you're going gonna get a backlash that's another reason why when you're in there you better fight you better fight this is not no popularity contest in terms of pr strategy and so that when the backlash takes place we better have serious substantive progress to have something to hold on to because believe me you i mean all the white supremacist militia groups are operating before barack obama many of us had to keep track of them because they coming at us with him almost doubled not just him but a whole lot of others too but especially him as the major symbol now that he's gone it's part of the mainstream when i'm there in charlottesville and i'm looking in the eyes of these neo-nazi thuggish brothers and sisters that hatred bubbling up it had been there for a long time but now it could come out and they willing to live and die so that's imparts a white supremacist backlash against a symbolic indictment of white supremacy which was the black president i also think that if if obama's neoliberal policies it actually spoke to the needs of working people he would have been able to to convince them not to go right wing he would give them a sense that they're not forgotten so when you get an authoritarian populist the crypto neo-fascists like trump and tries to convince them he's on their side because they have been forgotten and they were forgotten with the wealth inequality in place under his under obama's administration the stat wage stagnation massive redistribution of wealth from porn working people to the top one percent that had been going on for a while it escalated you see so that it helped set the context for the kind of both white backlash as well as the rule of big money the rule of big military the scapegoating of our precious mexicans and other immigrants the vicious misogyny that emerged all of the various forms of hatred that we've seen since uh since donald trump came down that escalator you know as somebody who you know for so long had to live under death threats myself it's clear to me that the levels of hatred and contempt and the willingness to kill and murder uh cut very deep in certain circles of my fellow citizens that's precisely the reason why when you get a chance to make your blow for justice you better do it strong because if you don't you'll still be misunderstood as being more militant than he is he was called a socialist everybody knowing that that's wall street whether he's socialist or not he's called a muslim we know the brother's not a muslim he was called somebody not born in america hawaii is in america last time we checked all these lies are going to go on that's par for the course so no i'm not surprised at all i mean my god this is america you got magnificent human beings in america of all colors and you've got some xenophobes in america who will hold on to that whiteness for dear life that's just the kind of country we are well i recall when it happened brother skipper just got back from china you know skip and i go back 40 years he's my very very dear dear brother and skip you know he's a liberal too now so we don't agree on everything but i have a deep love and respect for him and when i called him up i said this is a moment in which you can link your plight to the plight of everyday black people who get mistreated like this all the time when the first time he was on cnn that's exactly what he did then the intervention took place to somehow isolate him as this black professional who's tied to these particular kind of sites from martha's vineyard to harvard and so forth to create some kind of beer summit to bring them together so it's more individual as opposed to institutional and structural it's very important that the black middle class people that black bourgeois people link their plight with the plight of the black poor and black working class because one of the strategies of the powers that be is to isolate them extricate them make them exceptional negroes exceptional people and still treat the rest of black people in a disrespectful way and i thought and what was upsetting about the response from the white house it made it too individualistic as if this thing is not something that's widespread by the time you got to trayvon martin ferguson baltimore oakland chicago it became very clear of course it's systematic of course it is chronic of course it's something that's much more widespread than than these individuals especially these very brilliant well-to-do individuals like my very dear brother skip gates again i thought it remained on a superficial level uh this is not the time for singing this is a time for policies that speak to institutional racism that are responsible for the death of so many black folk you see so it was almost a kind of diversion or distraction in that way and i must say also i thought he sang the wrong song because when you got precious bodies in the court in the coffin onto a vicious white supremacist this is not about amazing grace at all it's not about worms that we are uh-uh we got some other songs in the black tradition you can sing wade in the water god gonna trouble the water we gonna meet god in this trouble in this struggle we're going to make sure that justice is is can can be found for these folk in the coffin you need a fighting song we got some fighting songs in the black tradition now now amazing grace is a beautiful song there's a time to sing that song he got the wrong song and what does that do that pacifies people you see so i was i wasn't that excited about that particular moment either i was glad he went down i thought he should have gone to ferguson barack obama he's got a decency about him he really does i don't want to downplay that i don't see enough courage in backbone he's got a decency about him so there's things that he's done that are beautiful i thought the speech that he gave for the brothers and sisters in connecticut newtown it was powerful when he cried those were genuine tears absolutely that's a decency about him you see but decency in tears is not the same as action based on political courage and moral witness and that's what i've seen that's relatively lacking in his eight years well i think first and foremost he provided a sense of hope optimism upbeat quality uh in the early part of the 21st century just as the american empire was beginning to undergo various forms of decline and decay and it looked as if he could provide a regeneration and revitalization of american democracy at that moment that's a major contribution it had repercussions all around the world africa was looking toward him latin america was looking the middle east was looking for him and so forth and that's something again that could never be taken away the problem is when you provide that level of hope if you don't come through the disappointment is felt in a very deep way now we talked before about this symbolic indictment of white supremacy being a black president that will never be taken away from it but when you do that you have to then also be measured by the best of that black tradition and when you got you know frederick douglass and harriet tubman and martin king and malcolm x and others in that tradition it doesn't get too much better than that that's like somebody's showing up going blow their horn why am sounding well you sounding good but let's play some cold training miles davis let's play someone mary lou williams on the piano and you listen to this oh i got to do some more practices you sure do yes you do that's true for black presidents too because the standards are set from inside of the traditions of the everyday people you set the highest standards of love courage fortitude service to others sacrifice that's where the standards are you see and it's not wall street it's not stock markets it's not harvard it's not princeton you see those are the elite institutions that will pat you on the back but the real measurement is going to be the ways in which you empowered or willing to serve and sacrifice for those don't call everyday people well i think the obama presidency was a neo-liberal rule and by neoliberal what i mean is the rule of big money with market logic shot through every sphere of our society militarism with wars and various countries disproportionately muslim countries you have a neo-liberal rule in place unable to speak to the wealth inequality unable to speak to the militarism in fact reinforcing it and here comes along somebody who calls for the collapse of that status quo and trump's called for the end of this kind of regime and what does he have well what we had was we had bernie on the left and i do believe bernie sanders could have beat him i knew that the old neoliberalism of clinton just didn't have enough gunf and gut and grit to deal with the newness of this spectacle substance xenophobic movement that that donald trump was was galvanizing and so there's a sense in which the the obama administration in no way is a cause of the trump administration no not at all but he helps set the atmosphere by not following through and speaking to the needs especially of working people and by working people i mean all colors across the board reigning in the wall street greed not allowing people to think they've been forgotten and so forth the rule of big money and the rule of military industrial complex you got to remember now for every dollar spent in the u.s budget 53 goes straight to the military-industrial complex so they already have they already feel very truncated and narrowed if it is the case that america can no longer generate high quality leadership or states persons of integrity then democracy is just sliding down a slippery slope the chaos and that means not just anarchy that means tyrants tyrannical rule plato becomes right every democracy produces a deimos that's driven by unruly passion and ubiquitous ignorance that becomes gullible to a strong man and so you end up with with a tyrant who takes over and democracy goes under slowly but surely it goes under we're already seeing signs of that under trump so i i refuse to believe that given all the magnificent human beings in this country full of unbelievable imagination intelligence courage that the best we can do is the kind of mediocre and under mediocre leadership that we have right now if that is the best we can do then you know something very precious is coming to an end democracy is a very fragile very fragile well you never know you never know you know i mean he's always been my brother he's always in my prayers in terms of his safety and so forth uh and my hunch is is that um there'll be context in which we'll get a chance to talk you know get a brother hug and tell him why i had my strong critique while i still think i'm right and so on but but maybe not two you know you never know you never know all of us need to be rendered accountable in some way i'm not always right either he could correct me on some things you see but you never know i'm always open i'm always over

Channel: Life Stories

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Keywords: Cornel West, Cornel West Interview, Disappointment of Obama's Presidency, cornel west is running for presiden, cornel west green party, progressive politics, democratic party, cornel west presiential run, cornel west vs joe biden, cornel west vs marianne williamson, green party, progressive, cornel west 2024, dr. cornel west cnn, cornel west president msnbc, dr cornel west, cnn cornel west, cornel west third party, Cornel west running for president

Id: 4eqQgippBEE

Length: 45min 55sec (2755 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021