LEADERS TO MEET AN INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE
West, Cornel
Leaders to Meet an Intellectual Challenge BY CORNEL WEST The progressive movement in the United States is in profound disarray. We face an unprecedented crisis of leadership. Never before has the...
...Which moral visions or values apply...
...But progressive taxation, well-meaning legislation, and liberal judges are not enough...
...His books include "Prophetic Fragments" and "The American Evasion of Philosophy...
...It is difficult to arrange our lives so that communal activity supersedes personal pursuits...
...Third, the American Left faces an intellectual challenge of enormous proportions...
...And, in a fundamental sense, the starting points—though not the landing grounds—for progressive politics in the 1990s must be enhancement of the poor and protection of women's rights...
...How do we organize and mobilize both victims and persons of good will...
...Market mentality makes it difficult for us to believe our efforts will make a real difference in our busy and short lives...
...Cornel West is a professor of religion and Afro-American studies at Princeton University...
...Aside from visible spokespersons preoccupied with electoral politics and admirable local activists with little national attention, we simply have no major leaders who can articulate, with genuine passion and analytical clarity, the maldistribution of resources, the disparities of wealth and power, the escalating xenophobia, the ecological devastation, the cultural deterioration, the national decline, and the spiritual impoverishment that characterizes American life...
...A second reason for our disarray is the tendency of consumer culture to sap and disperse our energies for collective struggle...
...Never before has the American Left been so bereft of leaders who possess courage, vision, intelligence, and integrity—that is, formidable figures identified with progressive causes in the eyes of the larger public...
...What are the dynamics of such complex and ugly phenomena as racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, class subordination, and ecological abuse...
...This crisis of leadership adds to the balkanization of progressive politics—its fragmentation, isolation, and insularity...
...And since there can be no substantive progressive politics without oppositional subcultures, institutions, and networks, the pervasive "market way of life" presents perhaps the major challenge for progressive politics...
...We also need a progressive cultural renaissance that reshapes our values, We are in disarray...
...restructures the way we live, and puts struggle and sacrifice closer to the center of what we think and do...
...Market morality engulfs us...
...What are appropriate responses to the collapse of repressive communist regimes, the new developments in southern Africa and Brazil, the economic power of Japan and Europe, and the "invisibility" of most of Africa, Asia, and Latin America...
...How do we best understand and transform our society and world...
...At the moment, the most explosive issues in American society revolve around black bodies and women's wombs—race and abortion...
...Only when we achieve that will we have even a fighting chance to turn back a market-driven, conservative-led America that is already far down the road to social chaos and self-destruction...
...What do we mean by such terms as democracy, freedom, and justice...
...We lack articulate, passionate leaders, and the consumer culture saps our energies for collective struggle...
Vol. 54 • November 1990 • No. 11
