“If Martin Luther King responded to American terrorism the way we [America] respond to foreign terrorism, we’d have a civil war every generation,” he says.

West’s solutions are three-fold, yet also largely theoretical. He urges America to affirm “the Socratic commitment to questioning,” a “prophetic commitment to justice,” and a belief in “tragicomic hope.”

From behind the pulpit, he emphasizes the Socratic questioning most of all, urging his congregation to ask “What does it mean to be human?”

West believes that such questioning will empower humans to overcome the oppressive status quo they see in society. He says that blacks have historically been forced to do this in the face of continual oppression, but that today all Americans have succumbed to an insidious nihilism that has allowed them to become permissive of tyranny and oppression in their midst.

And citizens must use their power within a democracy to bring about the necessary changes to the system.

“Democracy is always a movement of an energized public to make elites responsible,” he writes in Democracy Matters. “Democracy is not a system of governance, as we tend to think of it, but a cultural way of being.”

But West’s solutions have become a source of criticism of his book—while he is able to point out concrete ways in which democracy is ostensibly crumbling, his solutions remain largely theoretical and ill-defined. Essentially, encouraging Americans to engage in Socratic dialogue with their inner self—to have them ask “what it means to be human”—is easier said than done.

Caleb Crain, reviewing in the book in the New York Times, writes, “Unfortunately, whining about the hyenas [that assault democracy] is, for the most part, what occupies West in Democracy Matters. I agree with his sense that ‘we have reached a rare fork in the road in American history.’ But I am not sure this book will be much help.”

The book has also struggled elsewhere in the New York Times—on its bestseller list. It debuted at #11 on the October 10, 2004 listing, but has since dropped every week and is no longer among the top 35 sellers.

But reception of the book has not been completely negative. Tony Norman, reviewing the book in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, praised West for his famous eloquence.

“His work displays a clarity of language that Race Matters, for all of its ground-breaking insight, lacked,” Norman writes, referring to West’s 1993 bestseller that has sold more than 400,000 copies. “West is still capable of getting tangled in sentences of unnecessary complexity, but he does a better job making his points without resorting to distracting jargon.”

Yet Crain criticizes West’s writing style for what he sees as its “eccentricities of tone.” In particular, West is very ready to lavish praise on friends—he lauds the Wachowski brothers, who cast him as “Counselor West” in The Matrix sequels for their “deep democratic vision” and Tavis Smiley, on whose National Public Radio West is a habitual guest, as “the most influential democratic intellectual in mass media of the younger generation—and possibly of any generation.”

And he does this while reserving his harshest words for enemies—most prominently, Harvard President Summers.

JUST LIKE OLD TIMES

Norman writes that “even [West] isn’t above settling old scores as he lays out a blueprint for a more progressive politics of engagement,” and the 11 pages that rehash West’s version of his notorious spat with Summers bear this out as fact.