The New Yorker:

The public intellectual’s Presidential campaign could ease Donald Trump’s path to the White House. Why won’t he drop out?

By Andrew Marantz

Two Tuesdays ago—Cornel West’s last day in New York before Election Day—I went uptown to see him at his high-end apartment building in Morningside Heights, between Seminary Row and Reinhold Niebuhr Place. He met me in the lobby and greeted me as “brother,” which was also how he greeted one of his neighbors, multiple doormen, and anyone else he knew or was politely pretending to know, except for the ones he called “sister.” “These are some grim and dim times, brother,” he told me, as he walked around looking for somewhere to sit. “How did Twain put it? ‘That damned human race’?”

In a profile that ran in this magazine, West was described as “one of the most talked-about academics in the United States.” That was three decades ago, and it’s been true ever since. One of his peers recently called him “undeniably the leading American public intellectual of my generation.” He was trained as a post-analytic philosopher, then gained fame for his best-selling books, and his frequent talking-head appearances on cable news, and his cameos in sequels of “The Matrix.” He was also an indefatigable political surrogate, crossing the country to stump for Bill Bradley, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders—all of whom he has since criticized from the left. Last October, after Hamas’s attacks in Israel and the beginning of the Israeli military’s retaliatory campaign, a few members of Congress, including Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called for a ceasefire. However, “it took Brother Bernie a number of months even to use the word,” West said. “We’re not talking about the highest level of moral heroism—just to use the word. So I think he lost some credibility there. I love the brother no matter what—I just disagree with him.”

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