A few days ago, I had a strange experience. I got trolled—some might say gaslighted—by the person who many think will be Hillary Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff. Her name is Neera Tanden. Tanden is the head of the Center for American Progress, the Democratic Party think tank that works closely with the Clintons. Though you may know of Tanden for other reasons. I’ll come back to that. It began on Tuesday afternoon, when I tweeted this. Take six minutes to watch Cornel West take on the DNC re Israel/Palestine, while Neera Tanden rolls her eyes. https://t.co/XZkQ5Moe4V — corey robin (@CoreyRobin) June 22, 2016 Cornel West represents Bernie Sanders on the DNC Platform Committee. Tanden represents Clinton. Electronic Intifada had excerpted some clips from the Committee’s […]
According to the Washington Post: Sen. Bernie Sanders was given unprecedented say over the Democratic Party platform Monday in a move party leaders hope will soothe a bitter split with backers of the longshot challenger to Hillary Clinton — and Sanders immediately used his new power to name a well-known advocate for Palestinian rights to help draft Democratic policy. The senator from Vermont was allowed to choose nearly as many members of the Democratic Party platform-writing body as Clinton, who is expected to clinch the nomination next month. That influence resulted from an agreement worked out this month between the two candidates and party officials, the party announced Monday. Clinton has picked six members of the 15-member committee that writes […]
Yesterday, Dorian Warren had me, Johns Hopkins political scientist Lester Spence, and New Republic editor Jamil Smith on Dorian’s MSNBC show, Nerding Out, to discuss public intellectuals, black politics, and Michael Eric Dyson’s recent critique of Cornel West in The New Republic, which has attracted a lot of attention on social media. I was brought onto the show in the third segment to talk more generally about public intellectuals, whether they were a thing of the past or not, but I did briefly share my own thoughts about Cornel West and his contributions to the culture. Here is the entire show, in three segments; as I said, I appear in the third.
Van Jones to Cornel West: Do you think that you’ve shown enough love toward President Obama?…Where is the love for this president?…You’ve got the first black president, and where is the love? I understand the critique, but where is the love?” It’s like what Gershom Scholem wrote to Hannah Arendt in response to Eichmann in Jerusalem: There is something in the Jewish language that is completely indefinable, yet fully concrete — what the Jews call ahavath Israel, or love for the Jewish people. With you, my dear Hannah, as with so many intellectuals coming from the German left, there is no trace of it. Only classier.