Our Black Jeremiah.(Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism)(Book Review)

Cornel West Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism. Penguin, 229 pages, $24.95

Cornel West is known as a fiery professor intellectual who brings bookish learning and argumentative rigor to political and social issues. Few academics slide so smoothly from the classroom to the rally or from the library to the talk show. While teaching at Harvard and Princeton, West worked for the 2000 campaign of Bill Bradley, traveled with Al Sharpton to Africa, appeared in The Matrix 2 and on TV with Bill Maher. The profile seems a perfect mix of inquiry and activism. Set him on a panel on racism and he'll jump from welfare to the Republic to rap to Protestantism.

To sustain a public "professor" persona, though, one must not only play the media and mingle with political figures, but also compose works of intellectual heft. Ever since West became a public figure in the early 1990s, this has been a problem for him. A notorious review in The New Republic by Leon Wieseltier in 1995 judged West's books "almost completely worthless ... sectarian, humorless, pedantic, self-endeared." And three years ago, President Summers of Harvard started a tempest by raising questions about West's recent efforts. Defenders retorted that Summers misunderstands the nature of public intellectual activism, but the best scholarly evidence they could marshal was The American Evasion of Philosophy, a middling survey of pragmatist thought that West had composed over a decade earlier.

This latest book doesn't advance the dispute. Democracy Matters purports to sketch the degraded state of democracy today, and to find inspiration in traditions of Socratic questioning and Jewish prophecy, as well as in youth culture. The thesis comes in fast and furious indictments. An "unholy alliance of plutocratic elites and the Christian Right" has hijacked the state for greedy and parochial ends. Free-market ideology has led the government to abandon the poor, the uninsured, the unschooled. Foreign policy is "[f]ashioned out of the cowboy mythology of the American frontier fantasy." Republican Party leaders are "drunk with power and driven by grand delusions of American domination of the world." Legal discrimination is over, but "Jim Crow Jr. is alive and well."

The charges pile up, but they never coalesce into an argument. West doesn't reason his way to conclusions, nor does he fortify his complaints with empirical evidence or illustrative cases. He simply tells us The Way Things Are. West is, Henry Louis Gates declares on the dust jacket, "Our Black Jeremiah," reciting the sins of what he believes are a fallen people and a corrupt leadership.

The solutions West proposes are just as hyperbolic as his complaints. To face the wrongs, he counsels, we need a mode of Socratic questioning that will "expose and extricate the antidemocratic impulses within our democracy." To act upon the ensuing insights, we must "draw on the prophetic," like the Jewish prophets who, invoking divine justice, stood up to tyrants and overcame the predations of might and wealth. Finally, to temper the Judaic law "we must draw on the tragicomic," that vision of jaded but living hope (best represented in blues and hip-hop) that keeps fatalism at bay and lightens the spirit in a world of pain.

One might rebut every paragraph in this book, but they are stubbornly resistant to discussion. West's language is overheated; his descriptions are tendentious; his moral judgments are held up as gospel from page one. West doesn't back his charges, so why bother? It is better to interpret Democracy Matters as a case study in academic celebrity. It shows what happens when a scholar is thrown into the media arena, hailed as an "eloquent prophet with attitude" (Newsweek), courted by rival universities, and invited, interviewed, and idolized without end. The process is fatal to the ...