Ivy League scholar and progressive activist Dr. Cornel West said presidential candidate Joe Biden and running mate Sen. Kamala Harris won’t govern successfully without fully embracing progressivism.
During an interview with CNN host Anderson Cooper, West said that Biden and Harris were centrist Democrats and that they’d guide the country to a “slow disaster” without abandoning their “ties” to Wall Street, militarism, and other figures.
“You’ve been critical of Harris in the past, I know at one point in the past, you called her a centrist candidate that acts progressive,” Cooper said. “Do you think those who’ve criticized her prosecutorial record or maybe her record as attorney general, will be able to see past it? I mean, obviously, right now, the choices are Biden-Harris or Trump-Pence?”
West, a professor of philosophy at Harvard’s Divinity School, said he’d vote for Biden but wouldn’t endorse him because he was concerned they’d slowly lead the country to disaster, which he contrasted to Trump being a “quick catastrophe” if reelected.
“If they’re still tied to Wall Street, still tied to the militarism … if they’re still tied to not dealing with quality, public education, if they’re still tied to their same, old, neoliberal elites, then we’re just going to have another slow disaster, rather than a quick catastrophe. With Trump, you’ve got a quick catastrophe. He’s got to go. That’s why myself, even as a radical, and I just want Trump people to know, I’m a radical. My dear sister Harris is not a radical. She’s a centrist and a moderate,” West said.
