Righteous Indignation, Love, and Running for President w/ Dr. Cornel West
Jul 2, 2024
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Dr. Cornel West, a political activist and philosopher, discusses his presidential run with the Justice for All Party. Topics include electoralism, love, art in movements, and the challenges of US imperialism. The conversation explores fighting injustices with radical optimism, integrity, and anti-imperialism.
Dr. Cornel West advocates for truth, justice, and love in his life's work.
Running for President, he challenges corporate influence in politics with a broad leftist toolkit.
Addressing imperialism, Dr. West emphasizes combating fascism and promoting justice rooted in love.
Deep dives
Dr. Cornel West's Commitment to Truth, Justice, and Love
Dr. Cornel West, a prominent political activist and public intellectual, discusses his long-standing commitment to truth, justice, and love in his life's work. From teaching courses at prestigious universities to engaging in social movements, he emphasizes the importance of staying true to principles and challenging corporate influence in politics.
Running for President: Challenging the Corporate Parties
Dr. Cornel West explains his decision to run for President as an independent candidate, aiming to confront the decay of the American empire perpetuated by corporate parties like the Democrats and Republicans. He advocates for electoralism as part of a broader toolkit that includes trade union organizing, direct action, and building class consciousness.
Combatting Imperialism and Promoting Justice for All
Dr. Cornel West highlights the necessity of addressing imperialism and its global impact, emphasizing the need to infuse struggles in the U.S. with an understanding of imperialism's effects. He critiques the two-party system, advocating for a broader perspective to combat fascism and promote justice for all, rooted in love and a deep concern for the planet and its oppressed peoples.
Radical Optimism in the Face of Challenges
Embracing a form of radical optimism, the speaker reflects on the societal challenges like political economy and addiction, with a sense of uncertainty towards overcoming them, especially in the shadow of looming climate change. Despite questioning the possibility of success, the speaker ponders whether their actions are rooted in achieving outcomes or simply doing what they believe is morally right, emphasizing the daily struggle between hope and doubt in societal progress.
Dismantling US Imperialism and Confronting White Supremacy
Discussing the urgent need to dismantle US imperialism, the podcast explores the role of the US in global conflicts, specifically emphasizing the ongoing joint US-Israel campaign against the Palestinian people as part of the broader US empire. The speaker delves into the distinctiveness of American empire compared to historical empires, critiquing its self-perception of innocence despite perpetuating devastation and controlling resources. Furthermore, the podcast highlights the necessity of confronting white supremacy, critiquing political parties' failures in addressing systemic racism at their core, calling for a fundamental shift in addressing racial injustices in the political landscape.
Righteous indignation, truth, justice, and, maybe most important, love. These are some of the pillars that support the work that Dr. Cornel West, today’s guest, has been committed to throughout his entire life.
Dr. West, as you may likely already know, is a longtime political activist, philosopher, theologian, and public intellectual. He is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary where he teaches courses in Philosophy of Religion and African American Critical Thought. He’s the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Dr. West has written 20 books and has edited 13, and is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters. Dr. West is running for President of the United States with Vice Presidential candidate Melina Abdullah with the Justice for All Party.
In this conversation, we explore what inspired Dr. West to take up the electoral path and take a stand against the corporate parties of our decaying empire—the Democrats and the Republicans. We talk about electoralism as a tool in a much larger toolkit of the left, a toolkit which includes trade union organizing, direct action, and building class consciousness. We talk about the importance of love and art in our movements as an antidote to capitalism’s totalizing, soul crushing hegemony in these dying years of the U.S. empire, and we discuss why it’s necessary to infuse our struggles here in the United States with an understanding of imperialism and the impact that the United States has on a global scale.
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