Kanye West Presidential Bid Is No ‘Dark Twisted Fantasy’
Kanye West used the occasion of last weekend’s Video Music Awards to announce that he intends to take a tilt at securing the keys to the White House in 2020. Perhaps unsurprisingly, West was greeted with howls of derision from the press. It seems that no one was quite sure whether Kanye was serious about taking a shot at the presidency, but as time has passed, some are taking West more seriously. According to Rolling Stone, presidential race front-runner Donald Trump would relish running against Kanye.
Some may argue that West is too much of a divisive figure to secure a presidential election victory, but politics is a divisive business, and Kanye would hardly be the first divisive person to secure the oval office. American’s pride themselves on the fallacy that “anyone” can rise to become the most powerful person in the world. It is all bunkum, of course, as history shows that no woman and only one person of color has secured the presidency. That said, recent history perhaps indicates that things are changing.
Some may argue that West does not stand a chance in a presidential race because he is from the world of entertainment rather than politics. According to the Guardian, history shows us that if Ronald Reagan, a third-rate “B-movie” actor, can become president and Arnold Schwarzenegger can rise from movie actor to California governor, why not a musician?
Some argue that Kanye does not have the intellect to be president. George W. Bush, a man with all the intellectual dexterity of a rock, showed that intellect is not a prerequisite for the presidency. Bush and Kanye share two things, they are smart and they have a way of getting people to believe in them. No-one gets elected unless they have those things.
Today’s Guardian argues that West would make a great president, perhaps the greatest of them all and point to the political content of Kanye’s lyrics. If West’s lyrics are indicative of his politics, then he is anti-war, anti-violence, and a prison and education reformer. Above all, he would tackle racial issues, perhaps the most divisive issue in the U.S. today.
In his song “Power,” Kanye points out that the U.S. spends five times more on imprisoning people than it does on educating them. In “Murder to Excellence,” West points out that more U.S. citizens were murdered in Chicago in one year that there were soldiers killed in Iraq. West laments the facts that the U.S. imprisons more of its citizens than any other country on earth. Kanye also points out that the U.S., with 5 percent of the world’s population, is the scene of 31 percent of mass shootings.
If Kanye West were able to run on a platform that had a coherent solution for the issues he highlights in his songs, who is to say that West could not reach the Oval Office?
[Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images]
