Cornel West Tries to Explain Democratic Socialism to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson
9th July 2018
Read it. And watch the video if you want the raw stuff.
This piece in Salon, of course, is apologetic in nature and attempts to turn West’s vacuous platitudes into something resembling actual arguments — unsuccessfully, since you can’t make bricks with just cotton wool.
West’s tap-dancing is just a variant of the myriad of folks who explain the fact that socialism has failed every time it’s been tried with the bromide ‘real socialism has never actually been tried’. They feel justified in saying this because they believe, deep down in whatever they use for souls, that (per Marx) there is an inevitable tendency in history toward socialism that will sooner or later result in successful socialism (this is what they mean by being ‘on the right side of history’). So, whenever socialism fails, it’s because it hasn’t really happened yet.
One of the things I find most interesting about this attitude is that Nazis (if you can find one) never say ‘real national socialism has never actually been tried’, nor do fascists (if you can find one that isn’t masquerading as a socialist) say that ‘real fascism has never actually been tried’. Socialists are the only brand of statist that actually stand there bare-faced and say ‘Who are you going to believe, Marx or your lying eyes?’.