Cornel West: “Bernie Was Crushed by Neoliberalism”

Cornel West

Cornel West talks to Jacobin about what the Bernie Sanders campaign represented, what its failure means, and why Democrats think they can win over black and brown voters with just “symbolic decorative changes.”

Cornel West at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona in January 2018. (Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons


There is only one Cornel West. For years, Professor West has been one of the sharpest minds on the American left, and perhaps our greatest moral critic of capitalism and inequality.

A scholar in the Harvard Divinity School, West began his political life in the tumult of the civil rights movement — becoming a Christian radical and later a socialist who served for years as a chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Part activist, part political philosopher, West remains a singular voice in the wilderness of American politics and brings an indispensable compassion to the position of public intellectual.

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