Always Controversial Cornel West Disses Obama, Survives Cancer and Almost Spent His Life in Prison | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet

McNally: My fiancee said the saddest moment for her was watching how excited people were the night Barack Obama was elected. Share a little bit about your feelings that night and your feelings today.

West: I was ready because I draw a radical distinction between the symbolic and the substantial. As a critical supporter of Barack Obama, engaged in over 50 events for him from Iowa to Ohio, I knew that at a symbolic level something could happen that was unprecedented. And it did happen. At that symbolic level, I can understand the tears, I can understand the jubilation, I can understand the euphoria. But I always knew there was a sense in which he, now heading the American empire, was tied to the shadow government, tied to CIA, FBI, tied to the establishment waiting to embrace him. It was clear when he chose his economic team, when he chose his foreign policy team, he was choosing, of course, the recycled neo-liberals and recycled neo-Clintonites that substantially you're going to end up with these technocratic policies that consider poor people and working people as afterthoughts. Beginning with bankers, beginning with elites.

Symbolically, black man breaks through makes you want to break dance. So, yes, we have to be able to relate to both of these. So I resonate with your dear fiancee, because the hopes that were generated and the call for change, and then we end up with this recycled neo-liberalism. There's no fundamental change at all.

That's very real, but I think we do have to understand we had to bring the age of Reagan to a close. We had to bring the era of conservatism to a close. And then you try to unleash new possibilities. Of course, the question now is, how do we keep our fellow citizens awakened so it goes beyond the campaign for a candidate and really begin engaging in grassroots organizing and mobilizing.

McNally: I'm more disheartened these days than I was during the eight years of Bush. During those eight years I expected nothing. I was surprised by almost nothing. We fought, we did what we could But I feel a little sadness in my soul as I watch this one. You've said that Obama's looking at the wrong Lincoln and I think of Roosevelt who shows so well in Michael Moore's movie when he declares the New Bill of Rights.

West: The Four Freedoms, yes.

McNally: Roosevelt came to power as a moderate. Lincoln came to power as someone who had worked very comfortably with slavery. And it was the movements, it was the people that challenged and inspired them. How are we doing, and how are we going to do?

West: We are not doing well at all. If you look at the abolitionist movement and its impact on Abraham Lincoln. The Frederick Douglas's, the Harriet Beecher Stowe's, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Wendell Philips, Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman. The powerful abolitionist movement put pressure on Lincoln. Trade union movement put pressure on FDR. What kind of movement do we have? Hardly anything at all.

That's where the analogy breaks down. Barack Obama leans toward Wall Street, mesmerized by the elites, wants to be embraced by the establishment, wants to preserve his legacy as a president, more in the language of the neo-liberal and neo-conservative columnists than in the hearts and minds of everyday people.

McNally: So we both agree, this election does say the age of Reagan is over but it doesn't say what's starting, does it?

West: I think even my dear brother Michael Moore tends to put too much confidence in Barack Obama. In his film you get the sense that here comes Barack Obama speaking the language of deep democracy. No, no, no, he's been a liberal all his life. He uses that language to mobilize, but in the end he's going to capitulate and defer to the neo-liberal establishment, which is what he has done so far. Now gran

via www.alternet.org

Comments

[Alain]

Thanks for posting this Jodi. Its interesting that West equivocates when asked if this last election ended Reaganism. It seems that if Obama is a neoliberal than nothing has really changed?

I agree with West that it would take a movement to pressure Obama into a real transformation. And this movement simply does not exist.

[pollywog]

he shouldn't have bailed out the banks...let them crash and deal with the aftermath of whatever rises from the ashes.

[pH]

It seems West has confused the Symbolic with the Imaginary, no?

- PH

[hal]

With Obama I believe we are as follows:

Silently the corpse awaited the autopsy............2666 Roberto Bolano

[lafayetc]

yawn

The worst part is the grammar: "Always Controversial Cornel West Disses Obama, Survives Cancer and Almost Spent His Life in Prison" should have been (at worst) "Always Controversial...and Almost SPENDS His Life in Prison". Probably written by some redneck.