Tag: politics of the United States

What Ta-Nehisi Coates Gets Wrong About American Politics. It’s the overwhelming, the single cause that Coates finds for the phenomenon of Donald Trump. Because he takes all white American political behavior as undifferentiated and founded on the idea of race, he faults me for writing a pre-election essay in The New Yorker about the white working class. But it’s not alone—there’s also greed, and broken communities, and partisan hatred, and ignorance. Any writer who wants to understand American politics has to find a way into the minds of Trump voters. Did I also fail to understand that there’s such a thing as white identity politics? 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. 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. Coates might need more than one cause to explain it. 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.