President Donald Trump “is not the cause of anything,” philosopher, theologian and former Independent presidential candidate Cornel West said during a recent lecture in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Rather, West said, “He’s a deep sign and symptom of an unbelievable bankruptcy that allows him to have facilitators and their neighbors so that he goes on to engage in his gangster activity.”
West offered his thoughts on the president, whom he also said he would neither vilify nor demonize “because he’s a human being like anyone else,” in response to a question from an audience member at St. John’s College, where West delivered on April 10 the school’s annual Steiner lecture to a packed house.
The audience member asked West for his thoughts on authoritarianism, and specifically “the path of authoritarianism in today’s world.”
West, as he had throughout his hour-long lecture, threaded his response with multiple strands of literary, philosophical and personal observations. In this case: Plato, Socrates, Toni Morrison, Fyodor Dostoevsky and B.B. King. He also shifted the terminology, noting: “I call it neofascism. I think it’s much worse than authoritarianism.”
Bottom line, West said, “We have to be stronger in our opposition, but our opposition can’t be so obsessed and preoccupied with it that we downplay the resources that we fall back on.” Because, he continued, “if you’re just reacting to an evil, you can end up being a parasite on that host.”
Put another way: “You can’t sing the blues if the only thing on your mind is the evil.” You have to have something to fall back on, West insisted.
West, who currently holds the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary, previously served as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, where he received his undergraduate degree. He holds a professor emeritus position at Princeton University, where he was the first black person to receive a Ph. D in philosophy. He’s authored 20 books, including Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his memoir Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He ran as an Independent in the 2024 presidential race and also appears as a character, Councilor West, in both sequels to The Matrix (a film reportedly influenced by West’s work).
St. John’s College faculty member Ron Martin Wilson studied with West at Princeton during graduate school and introduced him at the event, noting that “introducing a man who truly needs no introduction” required offering a story not found elsewhere. In this case, Wilson related a time during a lecture at Princeton when West “out of nowhere, began to recite and recite and recite what seemed like pages and pages of Melville.” Everyone “in the room that day,” Wilson said, “stopped breathing and listened more deeply than I probably had … since seeing Ornette Coleman play the Jazz Fest in New Orleans some years before.”
Wilson’s story rang true throughout West’s talk, as he expounded on the lecture’s theme, “The legacies of Athens and Jerusalem in our catastrophic times” to a captive audience largely composed of St. John’s college students, faculty and larger community. The school offers an undergraduate Great Books program based on a shared classics curriculum, as well as graduate programs in liberal arts, Eastern and Middle Eastern classics.
West’s relationship with St. John’s stretches back decades, and he delivered the school’s commencement speech in 2001. He offered the program many compliments throughout the evening, while also suggesting its curriculum could use more comic writers.
“The sense of the comic,” he said, “is so appropriate in these grim and dim times, and has always been appropriate.” Comics, he continued, try “to muster courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope in the face of overwhelming catastrophe.”
While the notion of “catastrophe” was baked into the lecture’s thesis, with references to historical examples of human evils such as slavery and antisemitism, West returned more than once to a stance that was both hopeful and challenging. He cited a variety of historical figures who had chosen to do so as well, including Mamie Till, whose son Emmett Till was brutally murdered in 1955 by white supremacists, but nonetheless refused to succumb to hatred, West said.
“We’re talking about … what kind of human beings we’re going to choose to be,” he said. As to that, he noted, plenty of reasons exist to be pessimistic. “We all ought to be pessimistic about the way the world has been,” he said. “We just don’t allow it to have the last word.”
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