Ta-Nehisi Coates—national correspondent for the Atlantic, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, National Book Award winner—has a new essay out Thursday, which makes it something of an intellectual holiday for America’s liberals.
It might also be an intellectual holiday in more ways than one, as hinted first by the headline: “The First White President: The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.” Conservatives have long looked askance at Coates’s identity politics driven worldview (see THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s own Chris Caldwell for a withering assessment of Coates’s last book), but Coates is not without talent and can certainly turn a phrase. However, the problem with Coates, as evidenced by this essay, might not just be disagreeable politics.
He seems to have vaulted into the rarefied realm of writers whom people are afraid to edit. How else to explain sentences such as this one? “But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.” When the Federalist’s Ben Domenech quoted that sentence on Twitter, I honestly thought it was some sort of parody.
The rest of the essay is similarly overwrought, and additionally, at times it doesn’t quite make sense. The first paragraph, for example
What jumps out here is the reference to Woodrow Wilson, i.e. “presided at Princeton.” Wilson kept blacks out of Princeton, his writings more or less excused lynchings by the Klan, and his supposed objections to slavery were economic, not moral. As president, he put segregationists in his Cabinet and actively ignored the pleas of the civil rights activists he met with to do anything about Jim Crow or change racist federal policies. I know about all of this, because among other things, the Atlantic, which published Coates’s essay, had a good piece two years ago on “The Racist Legacy of Woodrow Wilson.”
And yet, not two sentences later, Coates declares that Donald Trump has made America’s racist legacy explicit “more than any other” president. Now this magazine, along with other conservative publications and thinkers, has harshly called out Trump’s response to Charlottesville and other dubious decisions he’s made. But it should be obvious Donald Trump is in no way explicitly racist the way that Woodrow Wilson was.
Now if the American left, in spite of the fact they are at their lowest ebb of power in generations, wants to continue duking it out in defense of identity politics as a winning electoral strategy, who am I to criticize Coates? May his pen reflect the wisdom of the elder scrolls of whatever realm of light that stands opposed to these dark eldritch energies, or something.
But I do feel like someone should say out loud that this essay and so much of what’s out there is a reflection of the need to pad out what their audience wants. And that is nearly always “F—- TRUMP,” with the trappings of Smart People Relevance. As a far less literary man might say, “Sad!”
