I think the last thing we want to do is to fetishize any one individual. To fetishize Trump and ascribe to him magical powers as if somehow if he were not here, the same social, historical, and cultural forces would not be operating is highly problematic. Now, Trump plays a role, there’s no doubt about that. Tied to the MAGA movement and so on. But there is no Donald Trump in the White House without those major monopolies and oligopolies.
And at the same time, the massive complicity of slices of the professional-managerial class — the lawyers, college presidents, professors, doctors, pharmacists, and churches. There’s no Trump without right-wing, white supremacist Christian nationalism either. It doesn’t exist without them. Eighty percent of the votes he got from my fellow Christian evangelicals, you see.
On the other hand, I want to always begin with the notion that the first thing we go to is not Trump, Trumpism, neofascism. See, I never begin by looking at my foes as the point of reference. I begin with people. I love what I’m willing to speak for, who I’m willing to live and die for. So I look at it through the lens of the tradition, in my case of the black freedom struggle. That’s in solidarity with other struggles, and I look at Trump through those lenses so that he’s not my primary point of reference.
That way, he’s not the host and I’m just a parasite on the host reacting every day a zillion times to what he’s saying and what he’s doing. There’s never enough energy for that. You’ve got to fall back on your tradition of remembrance, reverence, and serious resistance, and you begin to see, well, lo and behold, we are in movement.
Now, if you look in a broader sense as a spectator and you say, oh my God, we up against a Goliath, he would never have a chance. Because you become so distant from the movement on the ground, and that’s why grassroots activism goes hand in hand with the most sophisticated social analysis,…
Auteur: Cornel West
