On Saturday, the Sanders campaign suffered what the candidate described as a decimation at the hands of Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, losing his third election by nearly 50 percentage points.

“In politics, on a given night, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Tonight we lost,” Sanders gracefully conceded that evening, before moving on to campaign in the Super Tuesday state of Minnesota. But some of Sanders’ surrogates haven’t been so graceful in their concession of defeat after putting up a valiant fight for the African-American vote.

Cornel West told Vice News last week that he feared many of Clinton’s most prominent African-American supporters had lost their way. The vocal Sanders supporter singled out Congressmen John Lewis and Jim Clyburn repeatedly.

“There’s no doubt that the great John Lewis of 50 years ago is different than the John Lewis today,” West asserted. “He’s my brother. I love him, I respect his personhood, but there’s no doubt he’s gone from a high moment of Martin Luther King-like struggle to now [a] neoliberal politician in a system that is characterized more and more by legalized bribery and normalized corruption. That’s what big money does to politics. And the Clinton machine is an example of that.”

West argued that “most black politicians these days are neoliberal politicians, so it’s almost natural for them to side with Hillary Clinton.” West said that Clyburn and Lewis had become “too well adjusted to Wall Street” and are now a part of a system “in which politicians are well adjusted to injustice owing to their ties to big money, big banks, and big corporations, and turning their backs, for the most part, to poor people and working people. Poor people and working people become afterthoughts.”

The John Lewis I dedicated my novel MERIDIAN to all those decades ago could not be this one.  That is true and deeply sad. Return of the Dark Ages, indeed.

-AW

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