Innocents Abroad

A public intellectual is a generally shabby human type, and one that should be avoided as much as possible—both in the sense that one should avoid others of that type and the sense that one should oneself avoid becoming one. A public intellectual’s job after all is firstly to opine on events in approximately inverse proportion to his knowledge and understanding of them, and secondly to do so as publicly as possible (it’s right there in the job title).

This has not prevented many of them—no matter how ridiculous—from achieving significant worldly success. Yet it is a rare figure who manages both material success and widespread approval. I think it is relatively uncontroversial to say that Ta-Nehisi Coates has attracted more (and more hyperbolic) public acclaim than any other public intellectual of the past couple decades.

But in his capacity as a public intellectual, he is also noteworthy for two other reasons. First, he is openly autodidactic: he never completed his formal schooling at Howard University, and was quite transparent about approaching many topics of the topics he wrote on, like the U.S. Civil War, as a novice, (he once admitted he had no idea who Augustine was in an exchange with Jeffrey Goldberg, his Atlantic editor, for example). This almost naïve method, along with the absence of formal credentials, surely contributed to his appeal to readers, but also undercut the pretensions that most intellectuals have to expertise—which is not to say he was without pretensions. Second, not long after he had reached the peak of the esteem he enjoyed among both cognoscenti and ordinary book club types, he retreated from the limelight (ostensibly because Cornel West called him a “neoliberal”), thus undercutting the “public” part of the public intellectual thing.

Now he has returned to the public eye, writing on another subject about which he has little prior knowledge, and it will be interesting to see if he will retain the saintly public image he has hitherto enjoyed as a result. For, in his new book, The Message, he takes on the Israel-Palestine conflict, a subject renowned for the reasonable and level-headed quality of the commentary it generates. Ahem.

Indeed, we are already seeing more-in-sorrow-than-anger takes from betrayed fans claiming that Coates has abandoned complexity and nuance in his treatment of the Israel-Palestine situation. But this is, as they say, cope. There was scarcely a shred of nuance or complexity to be found in, say, the pages of Between the World and Me, which hardly prevented it from earning a National Book Award. The simplicity of his message has just become newly apparent because the political cleavages cut in different ways this time around. Or, to put it more bluntly, much of his Jewish audience (and not only them) is far more sensitive to criticisms of Israel than of America, and will be unlikely to read him with the same forbearance as they once did.

Thus, the reception and impact of Coates’ new book will serve as a test of the Jewish position in America life and particularly within its dominant liberal institutions. This is partly to say that it is a test of Jewish political power, but this is putting it a bit crudely, because much of that power is simply a function of American sympathy for and identification with the larger Jewish experience. The irony, meanwhile, is that that his new book, even at its worst, is unlikely to be as damaging in its real-world effects as the work that made his name. I think this will go underrecognized amidst any controversy surrounding his new book—for there has been little retrospective appraisal of his influence on American politics. That influence in fact proved substantial.

The Rise and Resurrection of Ta-Nehisi

In retrospect, it’s difficult to explain the extravagant—even obsequious—praise that greeted much of Coates’ work during his heyday, above all Between the World and Me, written as a book-length letter to his son but doubling as a cri de cœur against what he viewed as the ingrained racism of his country. In a Twitter post I will never tire of referencing (since, sadly, deleted), the New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote:

‘Must read’ doesn’t even come close. This from @tanehisicoates is essential, like water or air.

That’s an extreme instance, but it gives a flavor of the kind of thing people were saying at the time, such that even conservative peers were hesitant to offer more than the most tepid criticism.

The fact is, however, that Coates was a sloppy, self-indulgent writer. Even the most charitable reader would have to concede that his enthusiasm frequently exceeded the clarity of his thought, resulting in lines better suited to a Tor Books fantasy paperback than social criticism: “But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”

Like many autodidacts, he frequently seized upon certain ideas or terms borrowed from academia—such as the repeated Foucaultian invocation of “Black bodies”—without seeming to understand exactly what their purpose was. None of this would especially matter if he were merely an overpraised writer—lord knows, we’ve had plenty of those. Thomas Friedman has served up an astonishing melange of mixed metaphors and instantly-falsified predictions several times a week for decades in the New York Times. Malcolm Gladwell has never written a book that didn’t read like it had been authored by ChatGPT, and this has hardly hurt his bottom line. One could go on. But, again, none of their writings were received by their readers as something closer to moral or religious instruction than sociopolitical commentary, and few of them have had such an impact on the changing tenor of political relations in America (about which, more below).

Given this influence, there is some humor to be had in considering that he has effectively emerged from semi-retirement carrying (rhetorical) cans of gasoline to one of the world’s longest-raging geopolitical fires. Indeed, it appears that what he has primarily done is bring an outside expression of ethnonarcissism to bear on a foreign conflict with no shortage of its own chauvinisms. For, Coates is a race man: his interests in any given situation are filtered through his perspective of American race relations (a particularly pessimistic one in fact). Thus, he writes of his time in Israel and the West Bank, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger [stronger?] and more intense than in Israel”—notwithstanding the fact that American-style racial coding isn’t particularly relevant to the distinction between Israelis and Palestinians. For example, it is not uncommon to see dark-skinned (even black!) Israelis holding a gun on European-looking Palestinians at the checkpoints that dot the West Bank.

But Coates isn’t especially interested in the particulars of the conflict or the region, and lacks a prior fund of empirical or historical knowledge to fall back on. What is left is a kind of free-floating moralism anchored to his understanding of the history of American race relations, but which—once it is passed onto his readers—begins to look suspiciously parochial. In this of course Coates is thoroughgoingly American. For this parochialism that allows us to see all global conflicts as extensions or mirror images of our own domestic problems is a supremely American quality. Indeed, to use a phrase Coates himself is fond, it is among the privileges of those residing in the metropole. In any case, this tendency is hardly unique to the Israel/Palestine conflict. This is why, for example. South African apartheid loomed so large for us in comparison with other contemporary injustices and horrors about the world. It reminded us of something.

But more than an American, Coates is an ethnocentrist. This is the grund of his moral landscape. He is far less crude about it than some of his epigones, but it is there all the same. What is interesting is how his new message (or “Message”—per the title) brings him up against a group that is not really less so: namely, Jews.

Jews, Still News

The paradoxical appeal of Coates’ past work is that it invited the reader to implicate himself in its judgments while simultaneously absolving him of them in the process. For it is by accepting the book’s broad and punitive judgments that such a reader subtly distances himself from those who fail to do so. We are all guilty, the logic goes, but those of us who acknowledge their guilt are perhaps less so.

There is some irony here, too, in that Coates was handsomely rewarded in both money and prestige for telling Americans how irredeemably steeped in racial plunder their country really was. His racial pessimism was in many ways strange and personal, as well as at variance with objective social metrics at the time, but it undeniably found its audience. As for those white Americans who might have objected to this account of their political legacy—not just historically but contemporarily—most either failed to read his book or elected not to comment on it.

Jewish Americans, however, are (surprise, surprise) unlikely to be so reticent. Indeed, this has been a visible dynamic over the past year since the attacks of 10/7: the highly emotive and hyperbolic mode of progressive political rhetoric that had been directed at an undifferentiated white majority— “settlers,” “colonists,” “supremacists,” etc.—found much greater pushback when directed in a similar fashion at Jews.

Now, there is certainly a contingent of American Jews whose uneasiness about and even opposition to Zionism has become an increasingly central part of their identity. And while it is unlikely that this book will have anything substantively new to tell them about the conditions in Israel and Palestine, it will surely find favor with a crowd glad to see their arguments repeated by a public intellectual with a higher profile than, say, Peter Beinart.

But this contingent is itself a minority within a minority, and what will really tell will be two things. First, the response by the greater majority of American Jews, who hold a disproportionate (relative to their total numbers) influence in most major elite institutions. These tend in the main to be broadly liberal, and if not ardently Zionist in the manner of the Commentary crowd, at least generally inclined to be suspicious of if not hostile to anti-Zionism. The majority of this minority (Jews, I mean) tend to be liberals and Democrats, and in the manner of their political tribe (liberals and Democrats, I mean) tend to be well-disposed toward Coates’ past writings. Those writings, however, tended to give the appearance of challenging elite shibboleths while in fact flattering them. This mostly worked, because liberal Jews—like other liberals—weren’t particularly patriotic/nationalistic; yes, sacred cows were gored, but the blood was fake. Israel is a different matter, however.

Most Jews, even those who acknowledge the crimes involved in both Israel’s establishment and the post-’67 occupation, do not in the end believe that they are obliged to do penance (the Jewish Voice for Peace crowd remains an exception, and their position vis-à-vis their own Jewishness is not unlike that of those liberal whites who found Coates’ message—not to say DiAngelo, Kendi, the 1619 Project, etc.—about America so compelling). But the standard default assumptions American Jews hold are more or less as follows: 1) Jews, even those who are observably white, remain a global minority and thus subject to the dangers of bigotry and prejudice; 2) the history of the Shoah, along with the lengthier legacy of antisemitism, significantly outclasses the harms visited upon the Palestinian people, such that they are not quite prepared to surrender their own victim status; and 3) the Palestinians, along with the Arab states, played a non-trivial role in their own misfortune and thus bear at least some blame for their present condition, in a way that most Jews wouldn’t feel comfortable claiming about, say, black Americans. These positions, while somewhat expedient, are nonetheless sincerely held in varying degrees by most North American Jews. Coates’ prestige is unlikely to sway many of them.

It is one thing for them to accept in some vague way, that Israel has a moral obligation perhaps to redress wrongs done to the Palestinians or to sacrifice some measure of security in order to end the occupation of the West Bank. But to believe that their fellow Jews stand in essentially the same position to Palestinians as postbellum/pre-Civil Rights era southern whites to blacks, and that moreover this is the essential story of the state of Israel, is another matter.

Meanwhile, the second thing the reception to this book may do is serve as a testing ground for the position of American Jews in the present political scene. If the majority of American Jews end up rejecting Coates’ new message (as they likely will, even as they embraced his previous ones), it remains to be seen whether the broader elite institutions in which they have historically maintained strong, even dominant, positions will cleave to them or go the other way. Academia and the arts, where Israel has been a controversial subject for decades, has already gone that other way, and we have lately seen signs of rupture on this issue in media and publishing. Coates is not the first figure to express a strident critique of Israel, but he may be the most widely esteemed one to so in some time, hence the significance.

All this focus on the book's reception may may seem rather blinkered, but the fact is that the controversy over Coates’ new book only exists as a tangent to these sociopolitical questions. The actual substance here is less novel than people are likely to think.

Déjà vu again

Coates’ latest book and his associated media appearances have already attracted criticism—and now this criticism has been criticized on what appears to be the grounds of lèse-majesté. But all of this has much more to do with the audience than the content. Doubtless, Coates’ latest reveals a rigid and sanctimonious mind, but so of course did much of his previous work. Doubtless, he is less than generous in his treatment of Israel and Zionism, but I also doubt there is anything here that is necessarily uglier than his heartless and solipsistic response to the 9/11 attacks, as recorded in Between the World and Me:

I could see no difference between the officer who killed [former classmate] Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature...

The difference is that for largely biographical reasons, readers were more inclined to attribute authority (the etymological link between “author” and “authority” is relevant here) to Coates when his subject was American race relations. Nonetheless, all the flaws in his new book were already present in its predecessor, thrown into stark relief by his dilettantism here: oversimplification, sanctimony, vagueness, and an excessive reliance upon personal anecdotes in lieu of clear detail.

This is also where his autodidacticism—his “innocence”—remains a rhetorical advantage. He spent 10 days in a foreign land, Lonely Planet-style, observed it through the simplifying lens of his moralistic American rubric, and returned with a Message. The insights gleaned are already being praised for their moral clarity by his admirers or accused of simplicity by his critics. But as with his previous writings, his “clarity” is a function of what Nietzsche called “only a perspective seeing”; it is how the lens refracts the phenomena under view, not how it reveals them. What is interesting is that now his way of seeing is viewed as distortive when applied to the Levant but wasn’t when applied to the American political scene.

For, probably more than any other living writer—any other public intellectual—he established what has become over the past decade the prevailing paradigm to interpret otherwise isolated incidents as falling into a distinct pattern amidst all the noise generated by the activities of 325 million Americans. Specifically, a pattern of deep structural violence—what he called the plunder of black Americans continuing to the present day.

It is similarly noteworthy that his clear view did not issue in an equally clear set of political prescriptions, just as it does not in his new book. His clarity, such as it is, has always come through eschewing political thinking. No slow boring of hard boards for him. The appeal of this should be obvious: it relieves his audience of the burden of making difficult judgments with all the trade-offs they imply, without imposing any cost in return. Very little is in fact required of them, but that they accept his way of seeing as their own, which is what many readers did up to a point. What Cornel West perceptively referred to as his “apolitical pessimism” proved highly appealing.

That so many Americans found Coates’ way of seeing their own country so compelling suggests something interesting about the national psyche around the time of the second Obama administration. I have no great theory here, except that the hopes raised by the lofty rhetoric surrounding Obama’s ascendancy made the drab reality that followed that much more unbearable in comparison. As Tocqueville put it: “The abuses which are removed seem to lay bare those which remain, and to render the sense of them more acute; the evil has decreased, it is true, but the perception of the evil is more keen.”

Though both crime and prejudice had waned, and various achievement (at the high end) and incarceration (at the low end) gaps had narrowed, the gaps nonetheless remained. Disappointment set in, and Coates became the bard of that disappointment. These ideas, which proved so compelling, built up, however unsystematically, to a broader rhetoric around a set of deeply pessimistic beliefs about race relations in America, and perhaps about America itself. And though analytically imprecise, its message was both understandable and, in its way, seductive: these difficult political judgments are in reality simple moral ones. Nonetheless, these moral judgments inevitably issued in political choices. Thus, the delegitimization of basic law-and-order policies through their association with white supremacy had practical results: less policing and excess violent deaths from crime.

It is all well and good to point out that many of the people who espoused them in fact only held these ideas at arm’s length; to mix metaphors, they had no real skin in the game. They could mouth the slogans and support de facto policies of de-policing at a safe remove from the consequences of those policies. This may be true, but the effects were the same.

I do not at all think that Coates’ writings (or anyone else’s) “caused” the social and judicial turbulence of America’s past decade. That’s not how these things work. But they offered many people in positions of real influence a simple framing for the otherwise complex reality of American political life, as well as a moral justification for viewing that reality in simplified terms. Finally, in lieu of practical considerations, with their difficult trade-offs, it legitimized a kind of phantasmagoric way of thinking about American history and present, that has made it harder to think and talk clearly about how to address the actual problems we face. Such is the wages of what Tocqueville called the literary approach to politics.

Whatever the final measure of Coates’ role—not to say the role of his even more simplistic intellectual successors—the casualty rate is not ambiguous. We can at least take some cold comfort in the fact that where the Middle East is concerned, the casualties will come with or without help from our parochial class of public intellectuals.