121 | Cornel West on What Democracy Is and Should Be
What this covers
Cornel West and Sean Carroll discuss what democracy actually is and what it demands of citizens in a conversation recorded on the eve of the 2020 US election. West argues that democracy is fundamentally a way of life grounded in two legacies: the Socratic tradition of relentless questioning, fallibility, and answerability, and the prophetic tradition of love of neighbor tied to justice. He walks through how this dual inheritance shapes what democratic governance requires—not merely institutions, but a spirit and sensibility that must be continuously cultivated and renewed. Carroll poses questions about the temptations that pull democracies toward authoritarianism, the role of education, and how citizens navigate disagreement when they genuinely believe their opponents are wrong.
The conversation ranges across philosophy, history, and contemporary politics. West draws on John Dewey, John Rawls, and Sheldon Wolin's concept of Fugitive Democracy—the idea that democratic expression is episodic and perpetually crushed by oligarchic power. He examines why Coalition Without Endorsement is necessary: the model of the US-Soviet alliance against Hitler shows how one can ally with someone you criticize without lying about them. The discussion turns to the 2008 financial crisis as a case study in oligarchic unaccountability, the way concentration of power threatens democracy under any economic system, and why Donald Trump represents a neo-fascist threat to democracy itself. West also considers what genuine education looks like, why science alone cannot address human experience—which requires stories and meaning—and how democracy attempts to transcend tribal egoism in light of deep human anxieties about mortality and loss.
West argues that democracy is not merely an institutional arrangement but a demanding way of life built on two pillars—Socratic fallibility and prophetic love of neighbor—that is inherently fragile, perpetually threatened by oligarchy and nihilism, and sustained only by self-cultivated, accountable citizens who must constantly improvise between criticism and coalition.
- Democracy rests on the Socratic legacy (relentless questioning, fallibility, answerability) and the prophetic legacy (love of neighbor tied to justice).
- Sheldon Wolin's 'fugitive democracy' shows democratic expression is episodic and easily crushed by oligarchs under any economic system.
- Genuine democracy demands education, improvisation, and the willingness to vote for a coalition partner without hero-worshipping or lying about them.
Democracy is fundamentally a spirit and way of life, not merely institutional arrangements, requiring critical thinking and answerability over dogma.
- The democratic project is tragicomic because it fuses the tragic exercise of courage and freedom against constraints with the comic, which is located in the everyday lives of ordinary people; democracy is everyday people cultivating themselves to moral and spiritual excellence and raising their voices to shape their collective destiny through mechanisms of accountability.
“when you get a fusion of the tragic and the comic, then you find some of the richest exercises of courage and freedom among those who I still would call everyday people, and that's where the democratic project is”
- Democratic citizenship requires jazz-like improvisation—being flexible and adaptable, a distinctive feature of our species per Darwin—but improvisation is not opportunism; it requires disciplines, namely building on the best that has been bequeathed by tradition, producing a dialectic between innovation and tradition.
“improvisational is not just opportunist, you have to have certain kinds of disciplines that are the basis of improvisation. And by disciplines what I mean is being able to build on what has been bequeathed to you that is useful”
- Democracy is fundamentally founded on a suspicion of dogma in opposition to domination, derived from the Socratic legacy of relentless questioning, fallibility, and humility, combined with the prophetic legacy of Jerusalem—a love of neighbor tied to justice—producing a mode of governance grounded in fallibility, accountability, and concern for fellow citizens.
“democracy is fundamentally founded on a certain suspicion of dogma in opposition to domination”
- Following Dewey, democracy is a way of life and mode of existence carrying its own spirit, sensibilities, and sentiments that inform institutions; when democratic institutions are no longer informed by a democratic spirit, they get manipulated, dominated, and colonized by oligarchs who may still call it democracy though it has little to do with democratic practice.
“"Democracy is a way of life, it's a mode of existence, it carries its own kinds of spirit, its own kind of sensibilities and sentiments that inform the institutions."”
- The democratic ideal requires people to think for themselves critically rather than participate in an echo chamber or tribal consensus; pluralism at a high epistemic level, where diverse voices enter public space and are heard through mechanisms of accountability, is essential and avoids both reductionism and sophomoric epistemic relativism.
“The anthem of Black people is lift every voice, it's not lift every echo. So you don't want an extension of an echo chamber, you just don't want an expression of some kind of tribal consensus. But you want people to think for themselves critically”
Human flourishing demands dimensions beyond reason and science: love, vulnerability, narrative, and confrontation with mortality and suffering.
- Science, while indispensable and one of humanity's most fundamental tools, does not take us far enough because being human involves fears, anxieties, death, dread, despair, and betrayal, which require stories, narratives, symbols, and metaphors—the domain of poets and philosophers—rather than scientific frameworks.
“science itself, indispensable, science itself, unavoidable, crucial... still doesn't take us far enough. We need to have visions that are tied to what it means to be human beings who have fears, anxieties and insecurities on our way to being the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.”
- Education is fundamentally about the formation of the right kind of attention—learning to attend to life, death, love, joy, and the things that really matter—rather than to the superficial status, appearance, image, and spectacle that increasingly bombard younger generations and starve them of the capacity for love and joy.
“education is about the formation of the right kind of attention, to attend to life and death and love and joy. And the things that really, really matter, not the superficial things.”
- Late modern American culture suffers increasing lovelessness and joylessness because careerism, opportunism, image, and spectacle push aside vulnerability, humility, and the raw caring and nurturing required for genuine love—yielding a joyless quest for insatiable pleasure generated by distraction, which constitutes spiritual decay.
“A lot of American culture is a joyless quest for insatiable pleasure. And the pleasure is generated by a certain kind of titillation and stimulation owing to the distractions.”
- Even a thoroughgoing atheist can learn humility and profound wisdom about the human condition from religious traditions—as when reading Dante's Comedy moves a non-Catholic—because some of the most rigorous thinking about being human has come from within religious traditions, and figures like Toni Morrison cannot be understood apart from their faith.
“You're secular to the core, and you read Dante's Comedy, and you see the ways in which he is in awe and humbled by all of these various voices... you say to yourself, "Oh, my God, I don't have to be Catholic... to resonate with his sense of sensitivity and humility."”
- We should exhaust all the forces of reason, but not 'one-eyed' narrow instrumental reason of the kind the Frankfurt School criticized; genuine reason includes all its dimensions and a wise person always knows reason has limitations even where those limits cannot be precisely located.
“I think we've gotta exhaust all the forces of reason we can, but it can't be what Whitehead called one-eyed reason... It's got to be reason in all of its various dimensions”
- America has grown rich and powerful but, like Peter Pan refusing to grow up, prefers a Main Street Disneyland of fun and smiles, denying death, domination, dogma, ecological catastrophe, and empire—parts of the human condition it refuses to confront.
“you end up with Peter Pan and Main Street Disneyland which are refusing to grow up. We've grown rich and grown powerful. But, like Peter Pan, we don't want to grow up”
Unaccountable concentrated power in corporate, oligarchic, and state forms corrupts democracy across capitalist and communist systems alike.
- John Rawls's 1971 theory of justice was predicated on consensus and agreement 'in the metropole' while ignoring hundreds of US military interventions abroad—a disassociation of foreign from domestic policy—and rested on disproportionate corporate and professional influence, so the suffering it overlooked (empire abroad, race and class at home) comes back to haunt the system.
“his text was all about the agreement in the metropole. Okay, okay. You have an agreement in the metropole, but there's other people in the world, and your policies are crushing some of them, and it's gonna come back to haunt you”
- The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the unaccountability of concentrated power: Wall Street received trillions of dollars in bailouts while homeowners received almost nothing, and not one Wall Street executive went to jail despite insider trading, market manipulation, fraud, and predatory lending.
“We saw it, for example, in 2008, when Wall Street got bailed out and received trillions of dollars and homeowners received hardly anything at all. Not one Wall Street executive went to jail after all of that insider trading, market manipulation, fraudulent activity, predatory lending and so forth.”
- Fukuyama's End of History thesis, expecting a homogenizing global liberal-capitalist order after the Cold War, failed because the trans-Atlantic consensus was predicated on war, empire, and foreign interventions whose denial creates blind spots that come back to haunt the system.
“the very consensus, the very widespread agreement among the trans-Atlantic countries were too often themselves predicated on war and empire and foreign interventions”
- Concentration of unaccountable power at the top occurs under capitalism, socialism, and communism alike—communist systems have party oligarchs unaccountable to workers, and capitalism has monopolies, oligopolies, and Wall Street with limited accountability—so any genuine democracy must guard against concentration of power in both private and public spheres.
“under capitalism or socialism or communism, you still have your oligarchs and plutocrats at the top. Unaccountability meets at the top, and therefore any genuine democracy has got to be concerned about the concentration of power in the private and the public sphere.”
Trump represents neo-fascist nihilism requiring an honest anti-fascist coalition including flawed allies like Biden to preserve democratic possibility.
- Trump represents a neo-fascist threat that calls into question the very possibility of any democracy through wholesale mendacity and denial—denial of white supremacy, of ecological catastrophe, and of empire—which is why an anti-fascist coalition including critiqued neoliberals like Biden is necessary to keep alive the possibility of democracy.
“I believe brother Trump is a neo-fascist gangster who could bring down the curtain on the democratic experiment. Therefore, we must have an anti-fascist coalition.”
- A Socratic and prophetic political calling requires honesty: one can urge people to vote for a candidate like Biden as part of an anti-fascist coalition without endorsing, accepting, or lying about him, refusing the circus-like propaganda that tells lies about candidates to win votes.
“I'm pushing for people to vote for Biden. But I don't endorse him, I don't accept him, I'm not gonna lie about him, I'm not gonna argue that somehow he's some grand progressive that expresses my own values”
- The US-Soviet alliance against Hitler models honest coalition-building under democracy: one could ally with Stalin, who was a gangster and thug, to crush a greater threat without lying about him or pretending his social system was good, just as citizens can ally with candidates they criticize when honestly facing themselves.
“It's like the United States creating a coalition with the Soviet Union to crush a gangster named Hitler... without the communists and the capitalists, without Russians and the United States coming together, they would never have crushed Hitler.”
- The followers of Trump are not all racists; many have been crushed by neoliberal policies that redistributed wealth upward to the 1%, and their contempt for insular neoliberal elites drives a populism that can swing left or right—and when it swings right, white supremacy becomes its public face.
“that's what people don't understand about the followers of Trump. They're not all racists. No, no, they're not all racists, even though too many are, but they've been crushed by neo-liberal policies, the wealth distribution going from them to the 1%.”
The blues and jazz enact democratic spirit through antagonistic cooperation and voice, expressing democracy even where institutional democracy fails.
- Even towering geniuses can be wrong within their own domain—Louis Armstrong wrongly disliked Charlie Parker, and Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics in resisting that God plays dice—demonstrating that no one, however great, holds a monopoly on truth.
“Louis Armstrong did not like Charlie Parker. Now, Louis Armstrong is the genius of geniuses. He was wrong, he was wrong as two left shoes. And the same way with Einstein, vis-à-vis quantum mechanics.”
- Like a jazz musician, one cannot find one's own voice without listening to other voices—including the voices of the dead across civilizations—yet one must also critically filter what one hears, because not everything heard is worthy of acceptance; this is why answerability sits at the center.
“you can't find your voice without listening to other voices... you have to cultivate a faculty of receptivity, a faculty of listening, and yet even as you listen, you've got to critically filter what you hear, because everything you hear is not worthy of acceptance”
- The blues is a tragicomic form in a minor, dissonant key that expresses democratic spirit even where political regimes fail; cultural arenas like a jazz orchestra can enact symbolic democratic action—voices raised, received, and engaged in antagonistic cooperation—even when, as under apartheid America before 1965, there is no institutional democracy to translate it.
“The blues is the music where democracy hits through political regimes, you see, that it's in the minor key, it's dissonant. And Duke Ellington says that dissonance is a way of life for blues people.”
Hope as active commitment to truth, goodness, and beauty sustains democratic motion and possibility even amid massive contradiction and loss.
- Hope is as much a verb as a virtue: as long as there is motion, activity, and dynamism tied to the love of truth, goodness, and beauty—whether in political demonstrations or the vitality of the scientific community—real possibilities remain, and hope, in Shelley's phrase, creates from its own wreck the very thing it contemplates.
“for me, hope, it's as much a verb as a virtue, you know, brother. As long as you've got some motion, some activity, some dynamism taking place, tied to the love of truth, goodness, beauty, then we've got some real possibilities.”
- Rawls's theory of justice was grounded in a deeply tragic, Hobbesian sensibility born of his experience of mass suffering in World War II and personal loss, which is why he revered Lincoln as a figure who sustained rational democratic experimentation amid massive hatred and division.
“The problematic for Rawls was always a Hobbesian one, the war of all against all, irrationality. He had seen massive, massive suffering... So when he talked about reason, it was grounded in a deeply tragic sensibility.”
Democracy is episodic and fugitive, emerging from dominated peoples' visions and demands, which are typically crushed yet leave legacies carried forward.
- Democracy, in Sheldon Wolin's conception, is not primarily an institutional arrangement but an episodic, fugitive expression of the visions and demands of the dominated; for the most part these expressions are crushed, marginalized, and dishonored, but their legacy is remembered and carried forward.
“his notion of fugitive democracy, that democracy is not so much an institutional arrangement, but rather it is an episodic and fugitive expression of the visions and demands of those who are dominated”
- The democratic spirit retains a legitimate, well-warranted elitism—hierarchies of cultivated talent and gifts arising from the choices people make and the gifts they cultivate—which is entirely distinct from the vicious elitisms of racism, sexism, and tribalism, as long as mechanisms of accountability and answerability are in place.
“there's going to be a certain kind of well warranted elitism that has nothing to do with color, or gender, or where you were born... it has to do with the choices you make and the gifts that you cultivate”
- Practical judgment (Aristotelian phronesis) is deeply shaped by the exemplary figures, movements, and institutions held in our minds; as Kant noted, examples are the go-cart of judgment, and because one cannot appeal to a rule to teach how to apply a rule, bedrock practical wisdom and exemplars are needed to get rule-following off the ground.
“Examples are the go-cart of judgment, the judgments that we make, practical judgments that we make, what Aristotle would call phronesis, the practical wisdoms that we exercise are deeply shaped by the examples that we have in our minds.”
- There is no known democracy that is not founded in some way on a form of barbarism or structures of domination—imperial, patriarchal, or racist—yet democracy uniquely has the capacity to speak against those very forms of domination and unleash self-determination across the board.
“we don't know of a democracy that's not founded in some way on a form of barbarism, on various structures of domination. So most of them are imperial democracies, they're patriarchal democracies.”
Formal education and expertise alone cannot produce genuine wisdom; exemplary figures and Socratic-prophetic pedagogy shape practical judgment.
- Following Dewey, there is a distinction between scientific method and scientific temperament: a method can become a form of idolatry and prevailing paradigms can become blind spots, but the scientific temper—the Socratic energy—remains critical of all dogmatism even within the scientific community itself.
“he makes a distinction between scientific method and scientific temperament. And he understands the way in which dogma can surreptitiously operate within the scientific community itself, so you become too tied to one method, so the method itself becomes a form of idolatry.”
- Making everyone as educated as they want—better public schools, free college—is a move in the right direction but not a panacea, because formal institutions can produce mis-education; genuine education must be Socratic, Deweyan, and prophetic, and must defend people's right to be wrong, requiring a libertarian strand of rights and liberties alongside democracy.
“there are forms of mis-education that go hand-in-hand with these formal institutions associated with education. It would have to be Socratic, Deweyan, prophetic, with an acknowledgement that we are going to always defend people's right to be wrong.”
- As a species we are deeply tied to egoism and tribalism, and democracy is fundamentally an attempt to transcend this in light of our fears and anxieties—a point E.O. Wilson reached after a career of sociobiology—just as the ancient Greeks under Cleisthenes tried to replace tribal identity with allegiance to a public demos larger than the tribe.
“it really comes down to trying to transcend the pervasive egotism and tribalism of the species in light of the fears and anxieties that we have”
- Nihilism—the triumph of 'might makes right' over Socrates, where one gives up the quest for truth and beauty and instead manipulates and dominates people by keeping them in a fog—is, in Heschel's phrase, the largest ecumenical movement on the globe, appearing in both secular and religious forms.
“The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel used to say the largest ecumenical movement on the globe is nihilism... what he very much meant was the triumph of Prosemicus over Socrates in Plato's Republic. Might makes right.”
Political finance systems rooted in big money exclude candidates with critiques of Wall Street and whole categories of people from meaningful participation.
- Because being a politician requires big money, the background conditions of elections—not just the elections themselves—exclude whole categories of people, both for lack of wherewithal and because anyone with a critique of Wall Street will receive no funding from corporate elites, as illustrated by Bernie Sanders refusing corporate money.
“when you're talking about elections you have to be as concerned about the background conditions of the elections, because we know to be a politician already means you need big money”
Democracy must protect both religious and non-religious voices in shared public space, hybrid rather than purely secular in character.
- Democracy is better understood as a democratizing rather than secular project—a hybrid product that acknowledges the indispensability and protection of both non-religious and religious voices in a shared public space, rather than purely secularization.
“I'm not sure that's a secular project, it's simply a democratizing project in which you recognize that there is a public space that transcends the secular and the religious. It's a community with a variety of voices.”