Cornel West - Democracy Matters Are Frightening in Our Time 5

Let us not be deceived: the great dramatic battle of the twenty first century is the dismantling of empire and the deepening of democracy. This is as much or more a colossal fight over visions and ideas as a catastrophic struggle over profits and missiles. Globalization is inescapable - the question is whether it will be democratic globalization or a U.S.-led corporate globalization (with thin democratic rhetoric). This is why what we think, how we care, and the way we fight mean so much now in democracy matters. We live in a propitious moment in which it has become fashionable to celebrate the benefits of imperial rule and acceptable to condone the decline of democratic governance. The pervasive climate of opinion and the prevailing culture of consumption make it difficult for us to even imagine the revival of the deep democratizing energies of our past and conceive of making real progress in the fight against imperialism.

But we must remember that the basis of democratic leadership is ordinary citizens' desire to take their country back from the hands of corrupted plutocratic and imperial elites. This desire is predicated on an awakening among the populace from the seductive lives and comforting illusions that sedate them and a moral channeling of new political energy that constitutes a formidable threat to the status quo. This is what happened in the 1860's, 1890's, 1930s, and 1960s in American history. Just as it looked as if we were about to lose the American democratic experiment - in the face of civil war, imperial greed, economic depression, and racial upheaval - in each of these periods a democratic awakening and activistic energy emerged to keep our democratic project afloat. We must work and hope for such an awakening once again.

-pg. 22-23 of Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism by Cornel West

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Cornel West - "Democracy Matters Are Frightening in Our Time" 4

"The fight for democracy has ever been one against the oppressive and racist corruptions of empire. To focus solely on electoral politics as the site of democratic life is myopic. Such a focus fails to appreciate the crucial role of the underlying moral commitments and visions and fortifications of the soul that empower and inspire a democratic way of living in the world. These fortifications also fuel deep democratic movements both within the American empire and across the world in global democratic efforts." (15)

"Three crucial traditions fuel deep democratic energies."

1. "In the face of elite manipulations and lies, we must draw on the Socratic. The Socratic commitment to questioning requires a relentless self-examination and critique of institutions of authority, motivated by an endless quest for intellectual integrity and moral consistency. It manifests in a fearless speech - parrhesia - that unsettles, unnerves, and unhouses people from their uncritical sleepwalking. As Socrates says in Plato's Apology, "Plain speech [parrhesia] is the cause of my unpopularity" (24a)."

2. "In the face of callous indifference to the suffering wrought by our imperialism, we must draw on the prophetic. The Jewish invention of the prophetic commitment to justice - also central to both Christianity and Islam - is one of the great moral moments in human history. This was the commitment to justice of an oppressed people....Prophetic witness consists of human acts of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. Prophetic witness calls attention to the causes of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery. It highlights personal and institutional evil, including especially the evil of being indifferent to personal and institutional evil."

3. "In the face of cynical and disillusioned acquiescence to the status quo, we must draw on the tragicomic....Within the American empire it has been most powerfully expressed in the black invention of the blues in the face of white supremacist powers....This powerful blues sensibility - a black interpretation of tragicomic hope open to peoples of all colors - expresses righteous indignation with a smile and deep inner pain without bitterness or revenge."

"Much of the future of democracy in America and the world hangs on grasping and preserving the rich democratic tradition that produced the Douglasses, Kings, Coltranes, and Mobleys in the face of terrorist attacks and cowardly assaults. Since 9/11 we have experienced the niggerization of America, and as we struggle against the imperialistic arrogance of the us-versus-them, revenge driven policies of the Bush administration, we as a blues nation must learn from a blue people how to keep alive our deep democratic energies in dark times rather than resort to the tempting and easier response of militarism and authoritarianism.

No democracy can flourish against the corruptions of plutocratic, imperial forces - or withstand the temptations of militarism in the face of terrorist hate - without a citizenry girded by these three moral pillars of Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope. The hawks and proselytizers of the Bush Administration have professed themselves to be the guardians of American democracy, but there is a deep democratic tradition in this country that speaks powerfully against their nihilistic, antidemocratic abuse of power and that can fortify genuine democrats today in the fight against imperialism. That democratic fervor is found in the beacon calls for imaginative self-creation in Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the dark warnings of imminent self-destruction in Herman Melville, in the impassioned odes to democratic possibility in Walt Whitman. It is found most urgently and poignantly in the prophetic and powerful voices of the long black freedom struggle - from the democratic eloquence of Fredrick Douglass to the soaring civic sermons of Martin Luther King Jr., in the wrenching artistic honesty of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, and in the expressive forces and improvisatory genius of the blues/jazz tradition, all forged in the night side of America and defying the demeaning strictures of white supremacy. The greatest intellectual, moral, political, and spiritual resources in America that may renew the soul and preserve the future of American democracy reside in this multiracial, rich democratic heritage."

-pg. 16-22 of Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism by Dr. Cornel West

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Cornel West - "Democracy Matters Are Frightening in Our Time" 3

"Democracy matters require that we keep track of the intimate link between domestic issues and foreign policies. Like the empires of old - especially the Roman and British ones - what we do abroad affects what we do here and what we do here shapes what we can do abroad." (10)

If we are to grapple critically with the three antidemocratic dogmas that are raising their ugly heads at this critical juncture, we will need a more realistic understanding of the crushing ways in which they have operated in the country throughout our history. The first step for any critique of a dogma is to lay bare the history of that dogma - to disclose its contingent origins and ignoble beginnings and to show that the critique of that dogma in history has its own tradition and history. America has a long tradition of excoriating, painful, and powerful critiques of the arrested development of our democracy - critiques of the ravages of our imperial expansionist genocide of the Native Americans; of the crushing of the lives of workers by the callous machinery of capitalist excesses; of the wholesale subjugation of women, gays, and lesbians; and most especially and centrally of the deeply antidemocratic and dehumanizing hypocrisies of white supremacy. This is why the lens of race becomes indispensable in our attempt to understand, preserve, and expand America's democratic experiment.

The brutal atrocities of white supremacy in the American past and present speak volumes about the harsh limits of our democracy over against our professed democratic ideals. Race is the crucial intersecting point where democratic energies clash with American imperial realities in the very making of the grand American experiment of democracy. The voices and viewpoints of reviled and disempowered Amerindians, Asians, Mexicans, Africans, and immigrant Europeans reveal and remind us of the profoundly racist roots of the first American empire - the old America of expansionist Manifest Destiny.

-pg. 13-14 of Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism by Dr. Cornel West

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