Cornel Wests nedgång och fall

I The New Republic skriver professor Michael Eric Dyson om en av den amerikanska yttersta vänsterns särskilda favoriter: Cornel West. Vreden är stor i amerikanska vänsterkretsar. Men Dyson ger en såvitt jag kan förstå helt rättvisande bild av ett fortgående intellektuellt förfall.

Själv läste jag om West först i samband med hans frontalkrock med Harvards dåvarande rektor Larry Summers.

Dyson berättar om Wests ”pronounced and decades-long scholarly decline, something that did not escape the notice of other academics and intellectuals, none more notably than Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, who clashed publicly with West. (West departed Harvard for Princeton in 2002.) Summers had reprimanded West for his varied side projects, everything from advising Reverend Al Sharpton’s failed presidential bid to his vanity musical ventures. I couldn’t endorse these criticisms, but I knew Summers was right when he pointed to West’s diminished scholarly output. It is not only that West’s preoccupations with Obama’s perceived failures distracted him, though that is true; more accurate would be to say that the last several years revealed West’s paucity of serious and fresh intellectual work, a trend far longer in the making. West is still a Man of Ideas, but those ideas today are a vain and unimaginative repackaging of his earlier hits. He hasn’t published without aid of a co-writer a single scholarly book since Keeping Faith, which appeared in 1993, the same year as Race Matters. West has repeatedly tried to recapture the glory of that slim classic by imitating the 1960s-era rhythm and blues singers he loves so much: Make another song that sounds just like the one that topped the charts. In 2004, West published Democracy Matters, an obvious recycling of both the title and themes of his work a decade earlier. It was his biggest seller since Race Matters.

Even a cursory survey of West’s recent work captures the noticeable diminishment of his intellectual force.