Last year, when Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency, few believed that it would have any success. Many assumed that the public endorsement of ideas like ‘democratic socialism’ or ‘political revolution’ would alienate the American political electorate. But what followed was a series of surprising victories in several states.
Few are more appropriate to explain such developments, along with the troubling rise of Donald Trump, than the American philosopher and public intellectual Cornel West. His work on the role of race, gender and class in American society, and his political experience as prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America gives him an insightful understanding of today's political momentum, and its meaning for the left. His voice has even greater significance within the current American political scene, considering that Sanders selected him to be part of the Democratic Party platform-writing body....
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/cornel-west-black-americas-neoliberal-sleepwalking-ending
