How U.S. policy got hijacked

Cornel WEST’S “Democracy Matters” is a jeremiad against contemporary America. West writes that it is ironic “9/11 -- a vicious attack on innocent civilians by gangsters -- becomes the historic occasion for the full-scale gangsterization of America.”

Three dogmas, he says, have contributed to this gangsterization: free market fundamentalism, which “posits the unregulated and unfettered market as idol and fetish”; aggressive militarism, which “takes the form of unilateral intervention, colonial invasion and armed occupation abroad”; and escalating authoritarianism, which “is rooted in our understandable paranoia toward potential terrorists, our traditional fear of too many liberties and our deep distrust of one another.”

This perilous development has also been assisted, he argues, “by the market-driven media -- fueled by our vast ideological polarization and abetted by profit-hungry monopolies.” As a result, political dialogue has narrowed and the American people are “sleepwalking.”

West is particularly critical of President Bush and his administration, but he does not absolve the Democrats, whom he sees as part of the same problem. “Senators Hillary Clinton and John Kerry,” he writes, “are contemporary paternalistic nihilists -- contemporary Grand Inquisitors who long to believe in a grand democratic vision yet cannot manage to speak with full candor or attack the corruptions of the system at their heart.”

A decade ago, West wrote in his book “Race Matters” that black America lives “a life of horrifying meaningless, hopelessness and (most important) lovelessness.” The same is true of America as a whole, he writes now. All political leaders are infected with “nihilism”: “the flip-side of the nihilism of despair is this nihilism of the unprincipled abuse of power.”

Like most prophets, West is sharper in his denunciations of evil than in prescriptions for reform. Yet he does offer some possibilities for solution, focusing on a “Socratic commitment to questioning ... of ourselves, of authority” and all forms of dogma; “the Jewish invention of the prophetic commitment to justice ... echoed in the fundamental teachings of Christianity and Islam”; and a “tragic-comic commitment to hope ... expressed in America most profoundly in the wrenchingly honest yet compassionate voices of the black freedom struggle ... in the painful eloquence of the blues” and “the improvisational virtuosity of jazz.”

The bulk of “Democracy Matters” is a reiteration of West’s prophetic denunciations and his proposals for renewal. But two other elements stand out. One is his hostility toward the “moral hypocrisies of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.” Although he is careful to denounce the anti-Semitism of despotic Arab regimes, he shares with other leftists over the last few decades a deep anger about Israeli policy toward the Palestinians that makes his prose quiver with fury.

The other is his personal quarrel with Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard. In a well-publicized confrontation, the new president took on West, a star of the school’s Afro-American studies department, for, it appears, not doing enough scholarly work and paying too much attention to making rap CDs. In West’s account, Summers comes off much the worse in their dispute, which West characterizes as “a fundamental clash between the technocratic and the democratic conceptions of intellectual life in America.”

West considers it important that Summers is Jewish and writes that “the tensions between blacks and Jews are so volatile ... that thoughtful dialogue is all but impossible.” He says that “at our country’s leading university, there is little sensitivity to and awareness of the legacy of that tension.” (West now teaches at Princeton University.) In the end, West’s cry of “Woe!” in “Democracy Matters” is most likely intended to be disconcerting to readers. Yet it is the unsettling emergence of personal animosities in the book, perhaps inadvertently, that leaves the strongest impression.