Free Democracy Matters by Cornel West

racist German regime in Europe. With the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to symbolize the defeat of imperial Japanese aims of domination, imperial America was the last behemoth standing after the nihilistic frenzy of a world drunk with power and greed subsided.
    Yet, as is often the case in our sad human comedy, the peace did not last long, and in the cold war between the American and Soviet empires that immediately heated up in Turkey, Greece, Germany, and Korea, the major ideological weapon the Soviet empire could use against the democratic claims of the American empire was its racist treatment of black Americans and the refusal of the United States to support freedom movements in colonized Africa, Asia, and poverty-ridden Latin America. Then, as now, race and empire loomed large in America’s credibility in arguing about democracy matters on the global stage. No one in his right mind could deny the vicious forms of repression and regimentation in the Soviet empire—as well as Mao’s China—yet innocence and denial of race and empire in America vastly weakened a case that could have been stronger if candor had prevailed.
    Just as World War II lifted the American economy out of theGreat Depression, the cold war created a military-industrial complex in the United States that produced a vast concentration of military might—unprecedented in human history. Such might tends to intoxicate most, if not all, high-level public officials. To have such power at one’s command is itself nearly inhumane, and to remain anchored in one’s integrity and humility is nearly impossible. We should not be surprised when we get beneath the empty clichés and routine shibboleths so often uttered by American officials to discover that the obsession with power and might is so prevalent. Only the accountability of an informed citizenry and the intractability of a just rule of law can thwart the nihilism of imperial elites—here or anywhere else.
    This difficult lesson of the strength of the forces of nihilism within our democracy was taught most graphically by the black freedom movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. He understood it would take tremendous Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope to break the back of American apartheid. Yet he also realized it would take even more vision and courage to dismantle the imperial dimensions of the American democratic experiment and to provide genuine equality of opportunity to all. When he said that bombs dropped on Vietnam also landed in American ghettos—and in white Appalachia, on yellow street corners, in red lands, brown barrios, or black hoods—he was highlighting the close link between empire, class, and race; between imperial wars, wealth inequality, and racist practices. He died because his vision and courage were simply too much for the nihilists to stand—especially the FBI. His life—the intersection of love anddemocracy—constituted the most powerful threat to the mendacity and hypocrisy of the nihilists drunk with power, driven by greed, or blind to a more democratic future.
    King provided Americans with our last great call to conscience about the intertwined evils of race and empire, calling on us to choose between democracy and empire, between democracy and white supremacy, between democracy and corporate plutocracy. (We would add between democracy and patriarchy, homophobia, and ecological abuse.) Since his death, we’ve witnessed a conservative realignment of the citizenry principally owing to racially coded appeals (crime, busing, welfare, affirmative action). We have seen the southernization of American politics and the de facto racial segregation of American schools, churches, and neighborhoods. King’s movement did slay (legal) Jim Crow, yet (actual) Jim Crow Jr. is alive and well. And on the global front, American imperialism rules—with invasions of Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq (though not troubling with U.S.-friendly