We are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s June 10, 2023 session on Cornel West’s Presidential Run. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube. Note: This discussion was held prior to Cornel West’s announcement that he would seek nomination in the Green Party.
As everyone knows, Cornel West, a very unique figure in American public life, last week threw his hat into the presidential race. He will run as an independent on the People’s Party. Thus far he is the only, as far as I know, independent candidate – perhaps the Greens will field somebody, and perhaps the Libertarian Party will do the same.
Cornel brings special talents to the politics of this time. As we’ve said in the past, he is I think the most well-known public intellectual, public philosopher, and activist in the country. In a broad definition, we would place Cornel on the left, but most importantly he emerges and gives voice to what we like to refer to as a coalition of the discontented, a coalition of those who have lost all hope in the current system. And Cornel is joined here in this project by Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But before going any further into Cornel’s candidacy, just at the same time that he’s announcing that he will run, the system does something I think very desperate, and only has deepened the political crisis, and that is the indictment of Donald Trump on federal charges of taking classified materials from the White House, and then something about his not being truthful or obstructing justice when he was questioned about it by the Justice Department.
Clearly Trump has not denied that he took classified material from the White House. He has argued that he had every right to declassify this material. However, the question is, well why did he take it? And we know that Biden as vice president took a lot of stuff from the White House, we know that Pence has taken stuff from the White House or from the vice presidential mansion, and it’s not unusual obviously.
However to me it seems apparent that Trump wanted to use these documents for several reasons in several ways. But before I get to that, we cannot underestimate what this means in terms of the weaponization of the state against a candidate that the ruling class finds unacceptable. I wish to underline that – the weaponization of the institutions of the state, including the intelligence services like the CIA and FBI, the Justice Department, and even the White House itself.
All of these institutions, ultimately the power of the state is being brought against one of the candidates in the upcoming election. Think about it. This has never occurred in American history, and there are many things that have happened to Trump over the last five or six years that have never happened in the history of the United States. Clearly the Justice Department is under the control of the Biden administration. The FBI is an arm of the Justice Department and we could go on and on. And now the courts are being bent towards the interest of the dominant sections of the ruling class, that is, those sections of the ruling class represented by Biden and the Biden administration.
The indictment, which came out of a grand jury hearing – now this is very interesting, this whole grand jury process – because the grand jury that was looking into whether Trump had broken laws began in Washington D.C. And for most of the time of this grand jury, it was in D.C.; suddenly, maybe a week and a half before Trump is indicted, the special prosecutor sets up a grand jury in Florida. And the indictments seemingly come out of the grand jury in Florida which for the most part had not heard anything that the grand jury in Washington had held. So, what’s going on here? And in a little more than a week after that grand jury is set up in Florida, Trump is indicted in Florida. Not in Washington. And again this is a federal indictment, it is not the same as what took place in New York, and it’s not what is going on in Georgia, which are state indictments.
This is a federal indictment, and you know, we cannot overlook the fact that the FBI attacked Trump’s home in March. And even though again, Biden has all of this stuff in his garage and other places, there was never this type of harsh treatment that’s been applied to Trump. While the published indictment, which I have not read, has to do with classified documents and the obstruction of justice – and let me tell you, just because there is an indictment, that’s what a prosecutor brings. A prosecutor set up a grand jury because they want the appearance of objectivity. An indictment does not mean that the person is guilty. The person has not yet been allowed to put on a defense. But if you listen to MSNBC and CNN and other news outlets, they are acting like the indictment shows that Trump is guilty.
However there is a subtext here, and if you listen closely they expose the subtext, which is I think the real text – they are saying that Trump is not only guilty of taking classified documents out of the White House which he did not have the authority to do, they say. Not only did Trump engage in obstruction of justice to prevent him having to give those documents back, but this is the key – they say that he has committed something comparable to sedition or treason. In this respect, interestingly, the prosecution of Donald Trump reminds one of the prosecution and indictment of Julian Assange, of Chelsea Manning, of Edward Snowden.
I think that Trump wanted to use, and will in fact use these documents in the upcoming presidential election. His argument will be as it has been, that all of this stuff, classified stuff, there are over billion classified documents in the U.S. government, and there’s more classification now than ever. But what Trump will argue, what others have argue is that this is not keeping secrets from our adversaries in Russia or China or wherever. Really, it is a way of keeping government and state secrets from the American people.
In this respect, Trump is preparing an ideological assault upon the Deep State and its lying to the people. This is very similar to what Daniel Ellsberg did in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, showing that the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about the war in Vietnam and the reasons we were involved in a war in Vietnam. That is precisely what Trump, I think, wanted to use these documents for. There might be some stuff in those documents about the nefarious behavior and activities against Trump himself.
You know, in a certain way even though it’s not being discussed, this is a civil libertarian, civil rights question of the highest order. Because it is Trump, it is not looked at that way let us say by the ACLU or other civil libertarian and legal organizations. This is unusual, unprecedented, it is election interference, it is the attempt to undermine the candidacy of Donald Trump, to get him out of the election, to criminalize him, and to diminish him as a candidate. However, and this is what many writers in mainstream media are saying, all of this has the opposite effect. Because people say, “Well why is he the only one being attacked in this way?” And as more and more of the American people become discontented, they will find a symbol and a voice in Donald Trump.
So I think we’ve got to keep our eyes on this. The political crisis has only deepened, it is unprecedented in the history of the United States, and I don’t think the government has a serious case against Trump. On the other side, I don’t think, even if it goes to court in 2024, I don’t think it will be resolved before the election of 2024. So Trump will run as the candidate who is being attacked by the ruling elite of this country because he stands up for ordinary people.
It’s into this political crisis – and it is that: a deep and profound political crisis – that Cornel West made his announcement. He did not contextualize his announcement within the framework of this deep political crisis. And by political crisis, what we’re saying is that the ruling elite cannot rule in the ways that it is accustomed to ruling, and the people do not accept their rule. The other way of talking about this, as we’ve always said: a crisis of legitimacy. There is no major institution of American life that is not experiencing a crisis of legitimacy.
The mainstream media, the government, the Supreme Court, the Congress, you know, everything is in the low 20s. And of course Biden is the most unpopular, according to polls, president that we’ve had since polling started looking at presidents. And he’s a very weak candidate, I doubt that he will last beyond the end of this year. They have to find someone to replace him. But Cornel announces in this situation, he makes no mention of this crisis. But he is joined in his candidacy by Trump and RFK, a coalition – they represent, the three of them, they are a crucial triad and they represent a coalition of the discontented, those multi-million, tens of millions of Americans who are unwilling to accept the authority of the ruling elite. The majority of these people, only a decade ago – only a decade ago, would have argued strenuously on behalf of the uniqueness of American institutions.
These same people today reject these institutions. The coalition of the discontented might represent as much as 50% of the U.S. population. This coalition does not yet have a single leader or a single center of operation. However it is a populist movement of diverse ideological, religious and political views. It is a coalition which had another manifestation in the February 19th Rage Against the War Machine march. It was a coalition of discontented people that brought that into being. Cornel’s announcement of his candidacy on Democracy Now this past week showed strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions in Cornel’s politics and philosophy.
Most glaringly, he seemed not to have his legs under him in discussions of war and peace. He asserted that Russia is an empire, that China is an empire, and that the United States is an empire. And by empire he means repressive or oppressive state structures. Even if Russia and China were empires, you cannot equate them with the United States which has, according to some estimates, 1,000 military bases on foreign soil all over the world.
It is the United States that has provoked the war in the Ukraine. Cornel West both acknowledged this in his Democracy Now conversation and at the same time acted like he didn’t understand what that meant, sadly. So there were contradictions here, and he’s incapable at this point of dealing with Russia and its leadership – referring to Putin, the president of Russia, as a “gangster.” How we arrived at that, I don’t know.
This idea that every major state in the world is an empire – if you look at BRICS for example, the BRICS nations – are they all empires? Is South Africa an empire, is Brazil, is India? I don’t think you can make that case. However, and we’ll return to this when we talk about the relationship of philosophy to politics – Cornel West, a pragmatist, a neo-pragmatist as we’ve talked about it – when it comes to matters of the state, is a libertarian or an anarchist, or both really, they’re not that different.
In this regard he is very similar to Noam Chomsky, who defines his politics as libertarian socialism or at other times, anarcho-syndicalism. Anarcho-syndicalism is the theory that socialism will build itself from the factory floor up. That the state or the government should be demolished as quickly as possible, and Cornel seems to adhere to that, that the state itself is the enemy of the people and is oppressive in and of itself.
For example, we’ve talked about China and we’ve talked about North Korea and other places as trying to forge a state of the whole people, as against a repressive state of the bourgeoisie, of the capitalist, and so on. But the state itself, according to libertarian and anarcho-syndicalist theory, is the enemy. Even as Cornel talked about being against the war in Ukraine, and even going as far as saying that the United States and the Biden administration provoked it, he has not yet developed an approach to what we would call positive peace, that is peace with justice.
And he did not yet articulate something that is kind of fundamental to progressive anti-war advocacy, that is a U.S. peace economy: from a warfare and national security state economy to a peace economy. He doesn’t have that yet, and he has to develop it.
His neo-pragmatist philosophy shapes his politics. It is an instance of something we talk about in Free School, of philosophy being a site for politics. That there is hardly any philosophy that does not carry with it politics. By politics I mean not electoral politics but ideology, and what side of the great battles for humanity you stand upon. You know, what we discover in our study of Paul Robeson and of course the documentary that people in the Free School made, is that Paul Robeson did coordinate his politics with his philosophy. He coordinated his philosophy to what side of the great battles of humanity he would stand on. This is difficult for Cornel, and I think it is difficult because of the predispositions of neo-pragmatism which I’ll return to.
But it seemed, at least from the Democracy Now interview, that Cornel sees the principal edge of the crisis as a spiritual and moral catastrophe that the country is living through. He would argue that Trump is a neo-fascist manifestation of this crisis. As I’ve said before, I would highly recommend to Cornel that he back away from that hyperbolic kind of discussion – you know, it would make over half of the American people pro-fascist. That’s a hard place to be in right now, for obvious political reasons which I’ll return to.
But Cornel’s concept of catastrophe, which we talked about before, is ultimately a pessimistic worldview and it sees the United States and the American people as sui generis, unto themselves. Rather than a thing or people for itself, Cornel sees the American people as a people in ourselves. A people for ourselves says that we are at the same time a people for humanity. That is Paul Robeson. That is not Cornel. One of the weaknesses is the absence in his discourse of a social historical understanding of the moment. And out of the crisis of this moment, something new is emerging. We like to talk of it as an Afro-Asiatic reconstitution of humanity, which does not exclude any part of humanity but recenters the foundation of humanity in the civilizations of Africa and Asia, which are also the civilizations of Europe. Europe is a derivative of this as well as being its own civilization.
Cornel does not see, as we see, both the Afro-Asiatic reconstitution of humanity and the aspiring of the American people towards a new democracy and a new people. Again, you know, I guess I’ve said this so many times. Cornel is absolutely wrong about Trump being a fascist, and Biden being a milquetoast liberal. No, Biden is a warmonger. This is the most dangerous administration in the history of the United States which is bringing us to the brink of war, not just with Russia but with China and the possibility of nuclear war.
Biden is not, you know, your crazy grandfather. Although he looks it, he looks the part. He has been, all of his career, and is now, an advocate of war. And now in the White House he is even more dangerous, so it is the opposite from what Cornel is perceiving, and the situation in the Ukraine, contrary to what Cornel sees, is not just a country being invaded by an evil neighbor. It is a regime controlled by neo-fascists – open, I won’t even say neo. Open fascists who regularly praise Hitler and the local Ukrainian fascists back in the days, like Stepan Bandera.
However, one cannot underestimate the significance of Cornel running on the People’s Party platform. You know, we all remember how viciously the People’s Party was attacked by forces in the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) and aligned with their ideology. We can’t forget that. And that Cornel will be attacked by the black political class who really don’t like him anyway. Their dislike of Cornel goes back to his criticisms of the Obama administration. And now they’re going to say that he will be a spoiler, that enough black people will vote for him in a close election which will deny Biden the presidency.
So he’s going to come up under tremendous attack. On the other side I suspect that organizations like DSA, the Communist Party, and PSL are going to find themselves in a crisis. DSA, which has hitched its wagons to the Democratic party and AOC and Bernie Sanders, is going to have to decide if they follow Bernie in particular into the deep night of militarism and war in supporting the Biden administration so as to block the alleged neo-fascist from winning the White House.
I think Cornel in the race will attack the Biden administration, as is the case with Robert Kennedy and Donald Trump. This is very important, and they will do this from the standpoint of vast millions of Americans who are deeply discontented, including growing numbers of African Americans who are the political voting base of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party wins statewide in Pennsylvania because of Philadelphia and it wins Philadelphia because of the black vote.
We just had a mayoral primary, which is tantamount to the election, and under 30% of registered Democrats turned out. Over 70% did not. I’m of the opinion that between 75 and 80% of African American voters did not vote in the last primary. It is a deep reflection of discontentedness with the political class and the black political class in particular. Those voters will either not vote for Biden, and that’s not hard to do when you look at him and his performance, just look at him; or they might vote for one of the candidates that represent a coalition of discontented people.
Some polls show, and this is highly important, that one-third of African American Democrats say they have a favorable attitude towards Donald Trump. But the People’s Party has come under attack recently, it was mentioned on Democracy Now that an article in the New Republic attacked the leader of the People’s Party because he spoke positively about Robert Kennedy and Robert Kennedy Jr’s position on vaccines, the pharmaceutical industry, and I think they said Ukraine. But that Robert Kennedy Jr. has taken anti-establishment positions, surprise surprise.
And what they’re saying is that Cornel West, in accepting the People’s Party platform to run on, is thereby aligning himself with forces that are anti-vaxxer, allegedly anti-science, and not so anti-Putin in the Ukraine. These are red lines for the ruling class. The other thing is that it was brought up that Cornel West was on the Joe Rogan show. Now Joe Rogan is defined by the mainstream media as a right-wing race nationalist, white nationalist. And I’m not convinced that he is, they said that he was using the n-word on his show, but what Cornel said is that, “Hey you know, I’m meeting with everybody, and I want to campaign among the Trump voters.” And I hope he does, and if he hears them I think he will change his attitude about them.
But here is the key thing: if one looks objectively, Cornel West is closer to Trump than he is to Biden on issues and on sentiments. I do not rule out, and knowing Cornel the way I do, I do not rule out a meeting between Trump and Cornel at Trump’s invitation. Trump will reach out to Cornel West. And it is not out of the question that a rapprochement between Trump and Cornel is possible. And if that occurs, if that bridge is surmounted, why not Trump, Robert F. Kennedy, and Cornel West? And it can happen.
But then where does that put “the Left”? Well, out in the cold. Because the PSL, at least the way I see them, have such a deep animus toward the People’s Party and its alleged move to the right to support a peace coalition. I think it will be difficult for them to join a candidacy on the People’s Party. I think that makes sense. As far as the DSA, and we kind of see it in their electoral activities here in Philadelphia, they are so bound to the Democratic Party, although here in Philly they’re not the machine as such, but they’re so aligned with them that they’re incapable of independent political action, especially the type of bold action that Cornel is taking. I think the Left will be left out in the cold, and so on.
I mentioned already the black political class, how they’re going to come after Cornel because they don’t like him that much anyway, and that goes back to his critiques of Obama which were justified and correct. But he’ll be able to surmount it. None of them – Trump, Cornel or Robert Kennedy Jr. – are going to run the same types of campaign. They’re all tremendously different, and that’s not bad. Cornel will run as a philosopher, as something like Martin Luther King although not quite there yet. And Trump and Bobby Kennedy will run kind of like who they are: anti-establishment, anti-ruling elite candidates. But in spite of the differences, their base, their audiences, the people who hear them like ourselves – we hear them, and we welcome them. The people who will be the base of what they do will move them further together, will push them further together, and one can only imagine all of the creative possibilities from people such as Tucker Carlson, you know, who would welcome Cornel.
People such as Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Dennis Kucinich, my good friend Don Debar, although he thinks Cornel talks too much shit. I mean I’m not gonna argue that, but they could all see common ground. The last thing I’ll just say on this point is the long-awaited collapse of this iteration of the American Left is probably before us. I don’t see how they, “the Left” – the Communist Party which is communist in name only, the DSA and PSL, let us say, the nonprofit industrial complex and all of that which identifies and calls itself left – can withstand this great movement of the people which we’ll see again. They will see in either Trump, Robert F. Kennedy, or Cornel, their voice, their candidate.
In some ways we could call this a very radical move on the part of all three. The interesting thing, they don’t seem to recognize each other yet. They’re so involved in themselves and what they’re doing that I don’t think they see a bigger picture. But they will.
I just want to end on philosophy as politics by other means. What separates Cornel from Martin Luther King is philosophy. King was more of a Hegelian and less of a neo-pragmatist. It makes a difference. Neo-pragmatism, as we said, I think last week or a couple weeks ago, is a uniquely Anglo-American philosophy which goes back to David Hume and John Locke, and it is rooted in the idea that freedom is actually the freedom of the individual, not the freedom of large groups of people.
So if you say black liberation, a neo-pragmatist would say that black liberation means providing opportunity for each individual black, or creating the conditions where an individual black, if she or he is so is capable, can rise to the highest levels of society. Well, that’s a beautiful philosophy if you’re only thinking about the individual. And you know, we can see in American society where black people, black individuals are in places we never thought possible, including President of the United States. And if you consider Kamala Harris black, Vice President of the United States, not to mention mayors and all that type of thing. But in spite of that, the education of black people, the health of black people, the futures of black people are less bright than they were fifty, sixty years ago.
So the bourgeois liberal or Anglo-Saxon idea of freedom, which is freedom for the individual, that society becomes free to the extent that individuals are free to achieve whatever they can – the conflict between continental European philosophy i.e. let us say Kant, let us say Hegel, let us say Marx going forward and Anglo-American philosophy, is that continental European philosophy sees the collective as the central category to be understood. You read Du Bois, I mean, he said it himself, he said he was never impressed with Anglo-American philosophy, he was obviously more influenced by German philosophy and Hegel. But freedom, Du Bois said, was always freedom for the group. The oppressed group. Similarly for Martin Luther King. And it is the contradiction of the group and the people as it were – that is a contradiction I don’t think Cornel can resolve within the framework of his philosophical system.
But then he has a backup position, and that is the Black Prophetic Tradition, which does prioritize the group, does prioritize humanity, does reject the pessimism and negativity of Anglo-American individualism and would see, as Robeson would see, that the individual is free to the extent that humanity is free. And of course, thinking in these terms of totalities always shows a way out of the crisis. You can think of ways to move out of the crisis, and the potentiality of people to resolve the crisis.
Neo-pragmatism, or pragmatism’s concept of democracy is very limited. We could go over this some more, I don’t know whether we want to do it today. But it is not the concept of the will of all. Anglo-American philosophy begins with the individual will. If you go to China, if you go to Vietnam, if you go to South Africa, they begin with the category, the will of all. It is a distinct difference, how you proceed.
Having said that, we in the Free School and others have a lot in front of us ideologically and politically in this moment. We are more than capable, I’m really so happy to say this, I don’t think there’s any other way to assess it. We are more than capable of understanding the complexity of this moment and providing thinking that could be helpful to all sides in this great battle for democracy and peace.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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