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  • Democracy, the Catastrophic, and CourageA Conversation with Cornel West and David Kyuman Kim
  • David Kyuman Kim

October 2008

DKK:

This is a conversation with Cornel West for Theory & Event about the upcoming presidential election, about political possibilities, and about the state and status of democracy. Cornel, perhaps the most direct way to start is to ask how can we assess the significance of this election. There are "common" characteristics that are played out in terms of having the first black man as a major candidate for his party, and with Hilary Clinton as the first major female candidate for her party. But my sense is that there are many, many more things playing out in this election that make it significant. From your vantage point, from your estimation, how would you begin to break it down?

CW:

I think that we're dealing with an empire in decline, a democracy in decay, and a civilization that is wobbling and wavering. So this is one of the pivotal moments in the history of the United States, with significant ramifications and repercussions around the world. So when we look at this election what we're really looking at is wrestling with the question as to whether America has the wherewithal for democratic revitalization, or whether we will see the extension of a political ice age where the numbed hearts and the coarsened conscience, and the frozen democratic possibilities really reinforce the decline and the decay. To that degree, we could not be facing a more significant election. Wall Street now is in catastrophe, corporate greed running amuck, hand in hand with the indifference toward the weak and the most vulnerable at the cultural level. And then of course the same politics of fear that we've seen associated with the Southern strategy going all the way back to Reagan. McCain is a catastrophic response to a catastrophe. Obama we'll see whether he has more than a timid and anemic response to the catastrophe. I hope he does. I'm supporting him. Not just supporting him but putting pressure on him, especially his advisors. He is recycling the same old neoliberal economic advisors, which is not encouraging at all: the Rubins and the Summers and the Tysons. He needs the Robert Kuttners and the William Greiders and the Joseph Stiglitzs and the Paul Krugmans. Instead, he holds them at arm's length. That's not a good sign, at all. On the international scale, of course, both candidates fail, in a major way. They claim concern about Latin America, but they have no sense of the rise of Latin America. They are still tied to the Washington consensus. They are still tied to neoliberal economics policies. I was just in Brazil with Roberto Unger who is in the cabinet of Lula. In Brazil, they almost laugh at the kind of things said about Latin America among the Obama people. McCain they don't take seriously. The same would be true in terms of the Middle East. There is a sense in which we are wrestling with despair at the deepest level. Is it the case that the democratic project is just running out of gas? Is it the case that this is the moment for the American Gibbon? I hope not. I don't like doom and gloom, but it more and more looks that way. It really does. It more and more looks that way.

DKK:

Well, you've covered a lot, and have already hit on a number of important issues I'd like to talk about. Let's start with the catastrophic. Very few would deny that we're living not just in the midst of a catastrophe but multiple catastrophes. We have financial catastrophe. We have Wall Street with the banking crisis. We have political, military, and humanitarian catastrophes with wars on multiple fronts. And frankly we have a moral catastrophe, where we as a nation have legitimated the use of torture such that we seem to have lost the ability to say "no" to it. So it seems to me that a catastrophic element has found its way into multiple spheres as well into our moral...

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