Cathedral Studies: Cornel West is Confused

I like the concept of “Cathedral Studies” as a field of specialization within the NRx; indeed, it was the heart of the beginning of the enterprise. It was Moldbug’s raison d’etre.

As Stirner comments at Outside in on UNESCO Man:

Unesco Man lays out how the progs wormed their way into the heart of UNESCO, and then used that as a platform to elevate the social science view of face and sideline to biological view of the physical anthropologists and evolutionary biologists.

Of great interest to NRxers with an interest in Cathedral Studies or the alt-History of the 20th century.

Today, our Cathedral Study will look at confused and confusing statements from the very heart of the Cathedral, the Harvard/Princeton/Union Theological Seminary/Washington DC/Salon axis, as  Thomas “The Baffler” Frank and Professor Cornel “Enter the Matrix” West come together to bitch about the insufficient Progness of our beloved Prog-in-Chief, President Obama. Looked at as a whole, the interview, or dialogue, or whatever the format is supposed to be, is just an extended bull session by a couple of creaky, cranky Pee-aitch-dees, but one section made me smile widely:

We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free. The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair. And that’s a very sad moment in the history of the nation because we are—we’re an empire in decline. Our culture is in increasing decay. Our school systems are in deep trouble. Our political system is dysfunctional. Our leaders are more and more bought off with legalized bribery and normalized corruption in Congress and too much of our civil life. You would think that we needed somebody—a Lincoln-like figure who could revive some democratic spirit and democratic possibility.

REALLY? How nice of Distinguished Comrade West to note The Demotist Decline that he helped to further with his own work, that demotism produced Obama who couldn’t stop the demotist decline, and that “The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.”

Oh, sorry Professor, you didn’t say that, that was Dr. Land in Dark Enlightenment, Part I.

I thought we elected Obama to accelerate our Empire in its Decline. He seems to be doing a fine job. Perhaps, more than we can believe as yet, The Cathedral is a House built upon sand.