In The Center Holds, Alter described a meeting Obama held with prominent black figures in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, during which radio host Tom Joyner “began to mix it up with the author Michael Eric Dyson, who wanted the administration to target its efforts more on particular black needs.” Alter wrote, “Obama jumped in to say he had no problem with Dyson or anyone else disagreeing with him about how to help the needy,” but that he got upset with “critics who ‘question my blackness and my commitment to blacks.’” I said nothing to the president that day that I hadn’t said many times over the years.

If West’s accusation that some progressives are Obama apologists rings false, his finding fault in those who crave access is downright laughable. That’s because West shamelessly flaunts his proximity to the rich and famous and takes pride in knowing there are powerful people who love and admire him. It’s all there in West’s memoir, Brother West. “It was the summer of 1988, and we were all gathered around the grand piano at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard,” he writes. The “we” includes Simon, West, and the opera singer Kathleen Battle, his girlfriend at the time. West got to meet other famous people because of Battle. “Roberta Flack invited us to her apartment at the Dakota,” and Battle “introduced me to two fabulous maestros: the inimitable James Levine ... and the famous conductor Christoph von Dohnányi.” Then there’s the time in 1998 that Warren Beatty phoned West and asked if he could take a look at a film he’d just made. “When the film was over, Warren turned to me and asked the $64,000 question, ‘Should I release it?’ I didn’t hesitate. ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s a fascinating critique of capitalism and market-driven politics. I think ... [it] needs to be seen.’” Thus we have West to thank for Beatty’s political comedy, Bulworth. After giving the actor-director the green light, West said he, Beatty, and their filmmates for the night, Norman Mailer and his wife, “talked our heads off till three in the morning.”

And then there’s music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, whom West met after the star’s attorney—“my dear friend Johnnie Cochran Jr.”—called him and said, “Corn, Sean is in deep trouble,” asking West to come to court with Combs for moral support during his trial for gun possession and bribery. There’s the time he met the hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg on a flight from Chicago to Houston. “I spotted Snoop Dogg and, just like that, announced publicly, ‘Lyrical genius on the plane!’” Or the time he hung out with Prince, who “had graciously invited me to his Bel Air mansion.” West said he was approached at Prince’s home “by a beautiful Latina, who was overflowing with intellectual passion,” and at “evening’s end, I told the sweet lady that it was a delight” as “Salma Hayek went her way and I went mine.”

There are literally pages and pages of illustrious name-dropping in Brother West, a book that owes its subtitle, Living and Loving Out Loud, to another boldface name—Bob Dylan. West was in an airport when Dylan’s drummer approached him and said that the legendary artist loved and respected West. The drummer relayed something Dylan said about the professor: “‘Cornel West,’ said Dylan, ‘is a man who lives his life out loud.’”

Perhaps West despises the access of Sharpton and others to Obama because, unlike them, he has heroically resisted such impulses and invitations. But he couldn’t hush his enthusiasm when another president, Bill Clinton, invited him to the White House after the publication of Race Matters. West said Clinton brought him to the Oval Office, “eager to engage in serious intellectual conversation about culture and politics.” Writing of Clinton, West says:

The brother was absolutely brilliant and I was having a ball. When I looked at my watch, though, I saw it was far into the middle of the night. We had been at it for hours. I realized I had an early morning flight back to New Jersey to teach at Princeton and needed just a little nod of sleep. But he was as fresh as ever. I remember thinking to myself—Does this brother have a job?—when I realized—He’s the president of the United States! I did leave, but only after another hour of conversation.

West offers himself a benefit that he refuses to extend to others: He can go to the White House without becoming a presidential apologist or losing his prophetic cool. He can spend an evening with the president, the first of many such evenings, without selling his soul. West can delight in meeting Clinton, with the sudden burst of recognition that he’s in the presence of the president of the United States!—the italicized enthusiasm is all his! West’s hypocrisy in the matter is radiant;it shines through his belief that only he can resist the siren call of presidential access and retain his “black card” and his three-piece prophet’s robe of honor.

West’s attacks on me were a bleak forfeiture of 30 years of friendship; it was the repudiation of fond collegiality and intellectual companionship, of political camaraderie and joined social struggle. I was a mentee and, according to West, who was kind enough to write a blurb for one of my books, “a rare kind of genius with organic links to our beloved street brothers and sisters.” But I had somehow undergone a transformation in West’s mind: I was an Obama stooge who had forsaken the poor. In November 2012, West, friend and mentor, one of the three men whose name is on my Princeton doctoral dissertation, let me have it in the national media.

It was during an appearance with Tavis Smiley on Democracy Now, shortly after Obama’s reelection. “I love Brother Mike Dyson,” West said. “But we’re living in a society where everybody is up for sale. Everything is up for sale. And he and Brother Sharpton and Sister Melissa and others, they have sold their souls for a mess of Obama pottage. And we invite them back to the black prophetic tradition after Obama leaves. But at the moment, they want insider access, and they want to tell those kinds of lies. They want to turn their back to poor and working people. And it’s a sad thing to see them as apologists for the Obama administration in that way, given the kind of critical background that all of them have had at some point.”

West was just warming up. After a fiftieth anniversary celebration of the 1963 March on Washington on the National Mall, a celebration Sharpton led and at which I spoke, West argued that Martin Luther King Jr. “would’ve been turning over in his grave” at Sharpton’s “coronation” as the “bona fide house negro of the Obama plantation,” supported by “the Michael Dysons and others who’ve really prostituted themselves intellectually in a very, very ugly and vicious way.” And recently, while promoting Black Prophetic Fire, West argued “the Sharptons, the Melissa Harris-Perrys, and the Michael Eric Dysons ... end up being these cheerleaders and bootlickers for the President, and I think it’s a disgrace when it comes to the black prophetic tradition of Malcolm and Martin.”

West, speaking at a 2014 rally, is renowned for an oratorical style that combines elements of jazz improvisation and the cadences of a gospel preacher. Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

West’s aggressions brought me great sorrow. In his anger toward me I was forced, for the first time, to entertain seriously the wild accusations levied against him: that he was consumed with jealousy of Obama, that he simply couldn’t abide the rise of a figure who eclipsed most other black personalities for the time being and who, for many, even competed with King for recognition as the “greatest black man in American history.” I still don’t buy those theories, but I do think West’s deep loathing of Obama draws on some profoundly personal energy that is ultimately irrational—it’s a species of antipathy that no political difference could ever explain. It is sad to think that West aimed at me because my criticism failed to comport with his shrill and manic dispute with the president; our lost friendship is the collateral damage of his war on Obama.

In his anger toward me I was forced, for the first time, to entertain seriously the wild accusations levied against him.

West has sacrificed friendships and cut ties with former comrades because he insists that only outright denunciation of Obama will do. It is a colossal loss for such a gifted man to surrender to unheroic truculence: If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, then the loss of a brilliant black mind is more terrible, more wasteful. At precisely the moment when we could use the old West’s formidable analytical skills to grapple with the myriad polarities that glut the political horizon, the new West, already in the clutches of a fateful denouement, has instead sought the empty solace of emotional catharsis.

If West was once Tyson in his glory, he is Tyson, too, in his infamy. Once great, once dominant, once feared, he is now a faint echo of himself. Like Iron Mike, West is given to biting our ears with personal attacks rather than bending our minds with fresh and powerful scholarship. Like Tyson, he is given to making cameos—in West’s case, appearing as himself in scripted social unrest, or playing a prophet on television in the latest protest. He has squandered his intellectual gift in exchange for celebrity. He’s grown flabby with disinterest in the work needed to stay aloft: the readiness to read, think, and recast thought in the crucible of written words.

West’s memoir offers a poignant and honest accounting of his relationship with women, and by extension, his relationship with Obama, who was, for a time, the object of West’s profound political affection:

Because I’ve never been an advocate of psychotherapy as a path to self- understanding. . . . I’ve avoided such therapy because I worry about how it might exacerbate narcissistic tendencies. . . . I’m not sure I know myself well enough to share my whole self with others. This, in part, might explain my volatile relationships with women. One might argue that because I don’t know myself, the more time I spend with a woman, the more various parts of myself emerge—parts that are, in fact, foreign to me. In short, my whole self surfaces, and it is precisely my whole self that strikes me as a stranger. To maintain a long-term and long-lasting bond with a woman may require the kind of soul-sharing or self-sharing that’s beyond my capability.

West’s fears of his narcissistic tendencies seem to have come true in his fight with President Obama. Hedges also used the language of the jilted lover in describing West, noting that he “nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated, and betrayed.” West admitted to Hedges in their interview that he went “ballistic” about Obama because he had been “thoroughly misled”; or, put differently, he was crushed that Obama had ideologically cheated on him.

West’s narcissism in this matter is not exemplified by his sense of being jilted but in the way he has personalized his grief. And the longer West has nursed his resentment, the more he has revealed parts of himself that even he may not understand or be able to explain, since political disappointment in a politician’s behavior rarely provokes such torrents of passion, such protracted, dastardly, and sadly, such self-destructive hate. The volatility that West said roils his personal relations may also mar his political ones. Now he lumbers into his future, punch-drunk from too many fights unwisely undertaken, facing a cruel reality: His greatest opponent isn’t Obama, Sharpton, Harris-Perry, or me. It is the ghost of a self that spits at him from his own mirror.

