Cornel West
Democracy Matters:
Winning the Fight against Imperialism.
Penguin, 229, $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 scholarly intelligence. If the public sphere draws an academic too far from his domain, he loses touch with that which keeps him judicious and deliberative: peer criticism. Without colleagues who thrive on punching holes in each other’s work, one’s conceptions are untested. Performance ends up counting for more than rigor does. In the strategic realms of media and politics, academics don’t reason or inquire. They opine.

There is nothing wrong with opinion, of course, except when one writes a book of lazy pontification and pretends that it is something more. Democracy Matters professes to be unflinchingly critical and prophetically intellectual, but in truth the content and rhetoric remind one of a Charlie Rose hour. While talking-head criticism makes for quality television, it comes off in print as a symptomatic utterance, the words of a man freed from accountability and enamored of his own voice. Examine it closely and one sees that the characteristics of this celebrity-scholar writing are wholly opposite to the adventuresome, incisive persona displayed by the author.

West’s ideas unfold with predictability and ease. The claim that Republicans engage in “myopic mendacity” comes as no surprise. That the “vicious legacy of white supremacy” need only be asserted, not explained, is a sign of West’s complacency. As in a talk show appearance, the important thing for West is to articulate his message, to give it urgency.

West’s language has no anchor in particulars. Bloated phrases and flamboyant epithets do the work properly done by concrete description. Sometimes, the language acquires a momentum of its own, as in West’s versions of life after 9/11. Early on, 9/11 marks “the full-scale gangsterization of America.” Before readers can digest that, a variant pops up: “9/11 plunged the whole country into the blues.” The next page provides a climactic alternative: “Since 9/11 we have experienced the niggerization of America.”

West’s professions of liberality are belied by vilifications of his opposition. He insists upon the value of “respectful and candid dialogue,” but every reference to conservatives drips with accusation. His roll call of “towering social critics” is packed with demonizers—Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Angela Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich.

Finally, against progressivist principle, the personal prevails over the political. The only sustained episode in Democracy Matters concerns West’s battle with Summers, recounted in a fifteen-page narrative aimed at shoring up his credibility. West’s testimony has the air of truth, and Summers may have acted as a clod, but his response bears the pique of one unaccustomed to challenges on his home turf. Additionally, there is something sad about a distinguished professor proving his seriousness by citing his rap CD and his weekly chats on the Tavis Smiley Show. As for West’s faith in the genius of hip-hop: What does it say of his judgment that he considers the following lines “powerful poetry and insightful social critique”?

What you trying to pull eatin’ us like cannibals
Whatever happened to that forty acres and that animal
Now you tryin’ to use integration just to fool us
Like Malcolm said we been hoodwinked and bamboozled.

It is fitting that celebrity academics should promote youth culture. West may invoke Emerson, Plato, and James Baldwin, but he saves his passion for the hip-hop performers DA Smart and Outkast. The average black student graduates from high school four years behind his white classmates. Close to 70 percent of black children are born without a father in the home. Literary reading rates for blacks fell eight points from 1992 to 2002. But the media prefers to highlight the juvenile rebelliousness and hokey cynicism of the hip-hop artist. Why should the talking head professor do any different?

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University.