West’s fall from grace has been occurring for so long now that it’s easy to forget what a cultural force he once was. In the 1990s, the theologian and philosopher gained unlikely fame for deftly weaving continental philosophy with contemporary political analysis and references to Black literature and music, all in the advocacy of social justice. His 1993 book, Race Matters, won him acclaim from fellow academics and general readers, climbed the bestseller list, and minted him as a major public intellectual. Even a cursory look through The Cornel West Reader, a collection of his writing from 1982 to 1999, shows a dazzling mind at work, his subjects ranging from Marxism to Horace Pippin to Anton Chekhov. Accordingly, he rose from a professorship at Union Theological Seminary to one at Princeton, and then, in 1998, he landed at Harvard. (He returned to Union Theological in 2021 after a dispute with Harvard over tenure.)
There was a dark side to these glory days. As Forbes revealed in an investigation earlier this month, West is broke—living “paycheck to paycheck,” he says—despite earning $500,000 per year over the past three decades. That’s because he has often failed to pay taxes, resulting in liens totaling in the hundreds of thousands; his current IRS bill is approximately $483,000. Despite his sizable debt, he has overspent—purchasing multiple homes, including a Four Seasons condo in Boston that one of his ex-wives claims was used to see lovers. Doling out large sums of money to support extramarital affairs is a pattern of his. According to several ex-wives and former girlfriends, he impregnates and abandons women. He even lies to employers, such as when he allegedly took medical leave from Harvard and spent the semester shacking up with a mistress who would bear his child.
But most, if not all of this was occurring in private. Then, in a reverse of Saul seeing the light on the road to Damascus, something happened to West: He became outrageous, untethered to reality, and politically reckless. It all began with the election of Obama. After making campaign appearances for Obama in 2008, West was so aggrieved over the president-elect’s failure to secure him more than one pass for the inauguration that he not only ridiculed Obama’s policies as “neoliberal”—sound familiar?—but became something of a left-wing Rush Limbaugh, referring to Obama as a “Republican in Blackface” and “a black mascot for Wall Street oligarchs.”