Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

i suppose Teh Discourse was bad this week, but I've been p heartened by signs that irl politics are getting past 2016; Harris and Warren jumping on Bernie single payer and the left cutting Harris slack for having been a prosecutor as she adopts more left policies. like this guy ('which city does Adam Johnson live in again? NYC har har') was one of the worst sanctimonious Bernie ppl during the primary and,

she's acting like someone who a) can read the writing on the wall RE dem base b) not hung up on intraleft 2016 relitigation c) will win nom https://t.co/OKgyXmWKSB

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) September 9, 2017

imo for a black woman to beat trump and enact single payer is basically the only path to redemption left for America, after Trump

i like RL's writing on other stuff (and his DSA plank is sure better than the one that's all white dudes lol) but his critiques of TNC seem like some shit you would write in an comparative lit MA. fuck outta here with that imo. literary theory in left infighting operationalized as bitchmode petty sniping seems dated, from a time when the left had way less potential for power, like 80s or 90s...but the rest of his writing is much more substantive about left strategy & big picture policy:

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/housing-poverty-freddie-gray-racism-black-panther-party-baltimore

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/06/walter-scott-police-killing-michael-slager-race-class

yeah I have noticed a significant easing up on Harris this week

https://theoutline.com/post/2213/the-progressive-potential-of-kamala-harris

it's good

imo for a black woman to beat trump and enact single payer is basically the only path to redemption left for America, after Trump

It would be a beautiful thing.

I've had it with Left-on-Left aggro, since there are larger battles to pursue and a more relevant enemy

otm. too much 'lefty discourse' comes off as nerds jockeying with other nerds to sit at the cool kids' table imho

medicare for all. free public college tuition. reparations for african-americans fucked over for centuries. pay for it with tax hikes on trustafarians. rich people don't deserve their cool kid table. their parents bought them seats there, and seriously, fuck all of them. call me crazy but i feel a lot less sympathy for some poor little rich person who might have to pay higher taxes than i do for a poor kid who has no chance because the US is pretty much a neo-feudal pyramid scheme at this point

medicare for all. free public college tuition. reparations for african-americans fucked over for centuries. pay for it with tax hikes on trustafarians. rich people don't deserve their cool kid table

you just summed up the demands of the vast majority of left twitter, short of "nationalize the major tech companies" and "abolish the prison-industrial complex"

It's amazing how the centrists are in denial about the necessity of all those things.

Anyone who claims to GAF about race issues wants big changes to crime and punishment - private prisons are enslavement.

http://www.theroot.com/study-a-picture-of-a-black-person-can-anger-trump-supp-1802753905

I love Michael Harriot

once again i feel like this is missing the point dramatically

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/09/11/idylls-of-the-liberal-the-american-dreams-of-mark-lilla-and-ta-nehisi-coates/

tapped out of that real early, it's awfully written

yeah, the author sets up this extended Games of Thrones/fantasy metaphor and then says someone should tell TNC this isn't 5th century Europe as though he was the one spinning this bullshit.

I tapped out when I saw how long it was tbh

I read the opening paragraphs and thought "this person understands neither metaphor nor the arguments he is attempting to refute".

yeah, the author sets up this extended Games of Thrones/fantasy metaphor and then says someone should tell TNC this isn't 5th century Europe as though he was the one spinning this bullshit.

tapped out halfway thru this description

A little OT, but I'm increasingly annoyed that Mark Lilla's stupid ideas are being treated by many people as "what liberals think". I suspect there's a very large portion of liberals that don't wish to he associated with him in any way.

another reason I didn't get into this piece is I earnestly have no fucking idea who Mark Lilla is

He's the guy leading the charge for liberals to drop identity politics

This article is trying to chart a path between Coates and lilla but the comparison between the two is insanely facile. I have yet to read a piece by a socialist writer as convincing or persuasive as Coates's. Part of why his writing is so good is because he's just better at putting together history in a transparently ideological way, and these goofs are writing really mediocre responses. I don't know that Coates is 100% right but I can't help but feel like people are tweeting that these essays are great less because they are than because they need someone to reaffirm their overly optimistic world views

well and also they don't like talking about race because it makes them feel funny in a bad way and not in a 'dick and rap jokes on a podcast' way

From the little I've read that response is not as good as that twitter thread but Coates isn't strictly a socialist writer (its probably why he is so good lol), the focus is much narrower, for one.

I saw another reponse piece earlier that seemed to focus on the supposed attack by Coates on Sanders but he does understand the thin line that politicians in these systems have to walk:

One can, to some extent, understand politicians’ embracing a self-serving identity politics. Candidates for high office, such as Sanders, have to cobble together a coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes requires eliding uncomfortable truths.

Actions -- the way a candidate votes in office, what they do when they get there -- is ultimately what counts. If Obama could've stood for re-election and beaten Trump he would've funded weapons for Saudi. He wouldn't have made as big a deal of it, and perhaps not visited in the way Trump did, but the outcomes for Yemen would've been the same.

So in this hypothetical situation, how would you vote?

Or, more importantly, is there a viable candidate that doesn't have some disqualifying factor that would keep you from voting for them?

Obama in that scenario. TNC would clearly vote Sanders (and I suppose voted for Hilary).

My point is more around presidency, white or black, has its many faults, all to be fought against.

Obama visited Saudi Arabia four times, btw. I don't know why I think that is kinda funny, but I do.

well and also they don't like talking about race because it makes them feel funny in a bad way and not in a 'dick and rap jokes on a podcast' way

Yeah, that dick and rap jokes podcast definitely never ever talks about race.

Those three white guys are so good on race

My point is more around presidency, white or black, has its many faults, all to be fought against.

yes, every president has done more than their share of questionable things, they should be called out whenever they can be. But the fact remains, whatever bad things happened on Obama's watch, he also did a lot of good, and in many very specific and directed ways, the Trump admin has focused on rolling back many of those good things, and it is an undeniable fact that POC get hurt the most in the process. To me, that's a big part of Coates' argument, and enumerating all of Obama's flaws does not in any way contradict that argument or really address it at all.

this thread is comforting.

talking honestly about race is not the same as what those guys and their acolytes do.

Def psyched that the Ta Nahesi Coates thread is one more place on the internet where people can argue that a crowd-funded independent podcast needs to hire more POC.

Perhaps that crowd needs to be a bit more self-reflective regarding potential blind spots on the topic.

are we talking about the chompo tap house guys

yes and I have no idea why, nor how their POC guests would feel about being accused of not knowing how to address race

but my recommendation/request would be to not do this in the TNC thread

when CTH had a POC guest on to talk about TNC, the boys mostly hung back and snickered until they sprang forth and the end with great critiques like how libs love BTWAM the way they love "Hamilton".

lol i actually listened to that episode. it was awful

anyway yeah maybe save it for the chapo thread

I love both TNC and CTH, but the part where R.L. Stephens talk about how "black bodies" has become a pseudo-intellectual buzzword was OTM

*R.L. Stephens and the gang

I am sure on earth-2 people are complaining about Chapo hosts taking over the discussion with RL, how it shows they are not serious about including leftist voices in their discourse, etc.

i mean lots of things are pseudo-intellectual buzzwords these days (like... neoliberal???). it's fueled by social media's combination of fast-spreading information and performative insistence

anyway let's go back to the main topic, sorry everyone

Where were all these people complaining abt Coates before the podcast came along to give them a space to criticize him from "the left" lol

We were posting on Stormfront, obv.

give me a minute I'm sure I can sum this up with a terrible Metal Gear analogy

Snake Eater sucks

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/09/if-obama-said-that-ta-nehisi-coates-test-exposes-how-institutional-racism-helps-trump/

He was terrific on Chris Hayes' show.

George Packer responds.

When you construct an entire teleology on one cause—even a cause as powerful and abiding as white racism—you face the temptation to leave out anything that complicates the thesis. So Coates minimizes sexism—Trump’s disgusting language and the visceral hatred of many of his supporters for Hillary Clinton—background noise. He downplays xenophobia, even though foreigners were far more often the objects of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policy proposals than black Americans. (Of all his insults, the only one Trump felt obliged to withdraw was his original foray into birtherism.) Coates doesn’t try to explain why, at one point in the campaign, a plurality of Republicans supported Ben Carson over the other nine candidates, all white. He omits the weird statistic that slightly more black and Latino voters and slightly fewer whites went for Trump than for Mitt Romney. He doesn’t even mention the estimated eight and a half million Americans who voted for President Obama and then for Trump—even though they made the difference. No need to track the descending nihilism of the Republican Party. The urban-rural divide is a sham.

Then there’s the fact that Trump’s support among working-class whites has fallen from two-thirds on Election Day to 43 percent last month. Has Trump gone soft on the bigotry? Or has he failed to deliver on the rest of his package—cleaning up corruption and doing amazing deals and making America great again? Coates might need more than one cause to explain it.

That 46 percent of voters, overwhelmingly white, chose Trump—that some chose him because of bigotry and some while overlooking it—that more than a third of the country still supports him: all this is hideous enough. But we live in a time of total vindication, when complication and concession are considered weaknesses, and counter examples are proof of false consciousness. This spirit has taken over Coates’s writing. In this essay and other recent work, he’s turned away from the self-examining quality of his earlier writing to a literary style that’s oracular. He has become the most influential writer in America today; this latest Atlantic essay is already being taught in college courses. He has never written more powerfully, and the sentences sweep you along because they don’t yield for a second to anything.

But the style of no-compromise sacrifices things that are too important for readers to surrender without a second thought. It flattens out history into a single fixed truth, so that an event in 2016 is the same as an event in 1805, the most recent election erases the one before, the Obama years turn into an illusion. It brushes aside policy proposals as distractions, and politics itself as an immoral bargain. It weakens the liberal value of individual thought, and therefore individual responsibility, by subordinating thoughts and individuals to structures and groups. It begins with the essential point that race is an idea, and ends up just about making race an essence.

So Coates minimizes sexism—Trump’s disgusting language and the visceral hatred of many of his supporters for Hillary Clinton—background noise. He downplays xenophobia, even though foreigners were far more often the objects of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policy proposals than black Americans. (Of all his insults, the only one Trump felt obliged to withdraw was his original foray into birtherism.) Coates doesn’t try to explain why, at one point in the campaign, a plurality of Republicans supported Ben Carson over the other nine candidates, all white.

It's not a matter of TNC's "minimizing" sexism or "downplaying" xenophobia -- he has acknowledged those don't constitute his metier. Also, yes he HAS explained why Ben Carson drew support; even last night he detailed why a white voter who voted for Trump could vote for Obama twice.

It's not that TNC doesn't deserve criticism -- it's that his critics are a second-rate bunch.