By Max Blumenthal
As the Obama era sputters to an end, new social movements
are erupting in rebellion against a bankrupted bipartisan order that has
doomed Americans to record levels of economic inequality, warehoused
black bodies in a rapidly privatizing prison system, torn thousands of
migrant families apart, outsourced unionized jobs to China and spread a
dystopian assassination program across the far reaches of the globe.
Activists confronting militarization on the US-Mexico border and
organizers protesting lethal police violence under the banner of Black
Lives Matter are sharing tactics with their counterparts from the
Palestinian-led BDS (boycott, divest, sanctions) movement challenging
Israeli apartheid on university campuses.
The personal and intellectual
cross-pollination between these variegated struggles is producing the
most exciting surge of grassroots mobilization I have witnessed in my
adult life. Not everyone is happy about it, however, and it’s not hard
to understand why.
The structure under-girding movements
like Black Lives Matter is intentionally non-hierarchical, making them
difficult for institutional liberal political entities to co-opt or
control. Organizers eschew a programmatic agenda that demands alliances
of convenience with entrenched power, resorting instead to divestment
drives, civil disobedience and Situationist-style urban disruptions.
With their populist sensibility, they are capturing the sense of
betrayal that is mounting among millenials, and they show little
appetite for electoral contests that fail to answer the crisis. “I
decided it is possible I’ll never vote for another American president
for as long as I live,” the Ferguson-based rapper and activist Tef Poe
has said about his past support for Obama.
Organized
with little regard for the imperatives of the Democratic Party, and
often aligned against them, the wave of grassroots mobilization is
increasingly viewed as a wild beast that must be tamed. The
condescending rants delivered
against Black Lives Matter activists by Oprah Winfrey and Al Sharpton
are salutary examples of the irritation spreading within established
Democratic circles.
Few public intellectuals have
positioned themselves at the nexus of these emerging movements as firmly
as Cornel West has. Earlier this month, I joined him on a panel at
Princeton University to support a group of students and faculty seeking
to pressure the school into divesting from companies involved in human
rights abuses in occupied Palestinian territory. His presence boosted
the morale of the young student activists who had suddenly fallen under
attack by powerful pro-Israel forces.
Days later, West joined veteran
human rights activist Larry Hamm at Bethany Baptist Church in Newark for
a discussion on local efforts against police brutality. It was in
places like this, away from the national limelight, where West gathered
his vital energy and his righteous anger.
West’s
investment in grassroots struggles ignored and even undermined by the
Democratic Party has thrown him in direct conflict with the president
and his supporters. He has been particularly withering in his criticisms
of high profile African-American intellectuals and activists who have
served as Obama’s loyal defenders.
In an August 2013 episode of
the radio show he hosted at the time with Tavis Smiley, West mocked
Sharpton as “the bonafide house negro of the Obama plantation.” He then
let loose on his former friend and understudy, Michael Eric Dyson,
describing him and Sharpton as White House tools “who’ve really
prostituted themselves intellectually in a very ugly and vicious way.”
The
stage was set for an epic response from Dyson, the Georgetown
University professor of sociology, frequent MSNBC contributor, and
committed Obama ally. Dyson’s counter-attack arrived on April 19 in The
New Republic with an essay that
read more like a diatribe, and which seemed unusually disproportionate,
not only because it clocked in at 9309 words.
Re-purposing attacks on
West by Leon Wieseltier and by Larry Summers, Dyson excoriated his
one-time mentor as “a scold, a curmudgeonly and bitter critic who has
grown long in the tooth but sharp in the tongue when lashing one-time
colleagues and allies.” (He would later accuse West
of "assaulting Black people.") The malevolent thrust of the piece was
encapsulated in its title: “The Ghost of Cornel West.” Dyson had
condemned West as politically irrelevant and intellectually exhausted — a
dead man walking. Back in the early 1990's, West served on Dyson’s
dissertation committee, helping earn him admission to Princeton’s school
of religion. Two decades later, Dyson authored West's obituary.
Much
of Dyson’s harangue was comprised of complaints about West’s
unnecessarily ornery tone. Dyson went to great lengths to demonstrate
that West’s experiments in spoken word poetry and acting were cringe-worthy, and he wrote miles to prove that West was not, in fact, a
Biblical prophet. But these details of what Dyson described as West’s
“rise and fall” were at best peripheral to his real grievances. The fact
is, if West had not taken on Obama so forcefully, Dyson would not have
tried so hard to take him out.
Having spent much of the
past seven years slathering praise on Obama to an almost embarrassing
degree, Dyson was unable to find any space in TNR to acknowledge the
president’s shortcomings. Refusing to concede the sincerity of West’s
criticisms, he dismissed them instead as the product of personal
pathology, casting West as a jilted lover who “felt spurned and was
embittered” by Obama.
Dyson went on to belittle West’s arrest in
Ferguson alongside 49 others at a Moral Monday protest as a “highly
staged and camera-ready gesture of civil disobedience.” At no point
did Dyson recognize West’s outspoken opposition to the Obama-backed
decimation of the Gaza Strip, his rejection of Obama’s drive to pass the
secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal, or his
condemnation of the administration’s embrace of drone warfare. According
to Dyson, West’s opposition to the president’s agenda could only be
guided by an irrational madness.
While West engages with
a panoply of urgent, interconnected human rights issues driving
activism around the country, from mass incarceration (he authored the foreword to
Michelle Alexander's groundbreaking "The New Jim Crow") to Palestine,
Dyson has kept at a convenient arm's length from any cause that might
conflict with White House imperatives. BDS might be sweeping American
campuses, but Dyson has been largely silent on Israel's endless
occupation. Dyson carps about character assassination, but he is
reticent on drone assassinations. Since Obama entered the Oval Office,
Dyson has had much more to say about Nas than the NSA.
There
was a fleeting moment when Dyson’s language on Obama tracked closely
with West’s. It was back in March 2010, at Tavis Smiley’s “We Count!” convention,
an experience he briefly alluded to in TNR, but which he failed to
convey in detail. Before an audience of thousands, at a roundtable
filled with civil rights icons from Jesse Jackson to Louis Farrakhan to
West, Dyson launched into an impassioned sermon accusing Obama of
abandoning black America. “Why is it that to deal with black folk, we
are persona non grata?..” Dyson boomed. “You bailed out the notorious
AIG, you bailed them out. You bailed out General Motors but you can’t
bail out African American people who put together dimes and nickels…to
make sure that you could get up in the White House?”
As West gestured
his enthusiastic approval and the crowd roared, Dyson ratcheted up his
rhetoric: “You think Obama is Moses. He is not Moses, he is Pharaoh!”
All of a sudden, Dyson’s audience turned against him, groaning its
disapproval. With his confidence visibly shaken, he quickly qualified
his comments: “I’m not doggin’ [Obama], I’m talking about his office!”
In
the months and years that followed his dramatic We Count! appearance,
Dyson registered at least 19 visits to the White House. He became a
fixture on MSNBC, delivering regular punditry on the Comcast-owned
network that was functioning as the outsourced public relations arm of
the Obama administration. By Obama’s second term, Dyson was filling in
for MSNBC host Ed Schultz, rattling off teleprompted scripts about
Republican wingnuttery while hailing Obama’s
National Security Advisor Susan Rice as “one of the most brilliant
minds alive.” Following the publication of his TNR essay on West, he has
begun trumpeting the book he is writing on Obama.
"You know, I got like 17 books in," Dyson boasted to Ebony. "I gotta make my first like my last and my last like my first."
In
the twilight of the Obama era, Dyson has become a political prisoner
trapped within the stultifying confines set by the president, his party,
and network executives with little patience for dissent. He has linked
his reputation to Obama’s legacy to an inextricable degree, prompting
him to defend them both against their most relentless critic. Dressed up
as a high-minded scholarly critique, his attack on West was ultimately
an exercise in self-justification.
Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for AlterNet, and the award-winning author of Goliath and Republican Gomorrah. Find him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal
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