Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

("good to see" just bcz of the relative lack of clarity around the term being alluded to itt)

Yeah except I don't think West's definition of it quoted in that Root piece really applies to Coates in any way. Privatizing and militarizing schools, e.g., is not in any way something you attribute to Coates' worldview. (Or Obama's, for that matter.) That would be Betsy DeVos.

also agree!

idrg where he gets NL from w/r/t coates

guilt by association. coates defends obama, obama is neoliberal, ergo coates is neoliberal.

It seems to me as though from what West perceives as the lack of an actionable structural critique, he extrapolates "neoliberal."

yeah, no place in his guardian piece is 'neoliberal' defined.

I think it's more an accusation that he provides cover for the neoliberal hegemony by not supporting revolution

By Simons definition Baldwin, Morrison, everyone ever who has dared write anything but an anarchists cookbook is a neoliberal...

dude I wasn't agreeing with him

I don't think he's in any way saying DON'T organize or work to address them. It's more like, "Look at all of this goddamn bullshit."

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, December 20, 2017 2:50 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean in a lotta interviews i can recall reading he's expressed general pessimism about the usefulness of efforts to dislodge inequities, which for me is the root of critiques that his pessimism can be an action inhibitor especially among people predisposed to do nothing already

yknow marshall ganz talks about emotions that are action inhibitors or action motivators, and surely its clear that coates as an essayist is more interested in examination & consideration than action motivation--and i'd never hold his personal emotional pessimism against him obviously--but it seems to me that in the interests of thoroughness we (if not TNC himself) ought to consider the social effects of one of the most widely read authors on a subject leaving his readers in a place of action inhibition, and whether that helps or hurts efforts to do something about the things he illuminates so well.

I guess? Some of these critiques of Coates are predicated on presumptions about how people respond to his writings -- white people in particular -- that I'm not sure have any clear basis. If there's a notion that TNC is giving some kind of comfort to white people, I don't know what it is -- he's emphatically NOT a comfort-giving writer. If the accusation is that he's allowing people to substitute reading his books for actual action, I mean, you can basically say that about anything (including people cosigning or retweeting a Cornel West column).

yeah i'd not at all argue he gives people "comfort," on the contrary i guess my concern is the broad effect of leaving readers in a place of agitated hopelessness

tipsy extremely otm throughout this thread recently

"i guess my concern is the broad effect of leaving readers in a place of agitated hopelessness"

white people love this feeling. #breakingbad

he's emphatically NOT a comfort-giving writer

from the side of an idealist of whatever stripe, this can readily serve as a substitute 'satisfaction' for real/radical change of the underlying discomfort

Yeah I get that but it can also be a prod to action. Depends on the person. Like, how many people are more open to the idea of reparations than they were before reading TNC's essay on it? It's some number greater than zero. He says himself in that essay that he understands it's a huge political boulder to roll, but he wants to start to change the dialogue around it. That in itself sounds like political activism to me.

agreed, he totally changed the dialogue on reparations & that kind of impact is imo absolutely a powerful political act

dude I wasn't agreeing with him

― Simon H., 20. december 2017 16:30 (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that, wrote that wrong.

Coates, at least in BTWAM, writes about 'The Mecca' as the thing to engage in. Which is again metaphorical, for him it's HBCU's and his writing, for someone else it might be political activism. He writes that everyone should find their Mecca to keep themselves alive, and specifically warns his son to spend his life on trying to convince white people of anything. I don't think there's anything in that book that specifically goes against political activism? It's just not what Coates himself does.

just want to raise my anecdotal experience that plenty of white readers resent Coates for making them feel bad about themselves, just to throw that on the pile. not sure it makes sense to hold Coates accountable for the stuff white readers may or may not project onto his writing. tipsy already said this, so I’m just amplifying.

West’s critique was in bad faith in places inasmuch as he deliberately misread Coates. West and Coates have substantive differences which West is, of course, well within his rights to discuss. His critique, though, read to me as in the spirit of academic culture wars in terms of his rhetorical strategies. In all the worst ways.

It seems to me (disclaimer: ignore me) that one of the key points in discussing Coates visa vis “neo liberalism vs the left” is his underlining of the historical fact that efforts to bring about equality which aren’t explicitly anti-racist won’t help black people, and will probably hurt them more. If you want to paint that as being pessimistic because of the general chances of a plan that starts “Step 1: fix racism” then that’s reasonable, but I think he’d consider that a better idea than one starting “Step 1: fix everything else”

an example of what I mean by West’s bad faith:

God knows my politics are closer to West's and I owe him a lot re: my personal development, but come on man, what the hell pic.twitter.com/lwTkDeAVmY

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) December 17, 2017

Andrew Farrell otm (and tipsy & horseshoe & the people saying “neoliberal” is becoming a buzzword /signal w no real meaning)

The idea that one must address these separate but connected entities is correct at its core, but it is also neoliberal thinking at its highest level.

This is a peculiar sentence. It seems to be saying that something that is objectively correct is also inherently wrong, not because it is wrong in any particular, but because it can be labeled "neoliberal".

And again the notion that it is inherently "neoliberal" to take this line of attack is outright bizarre

i can't wait for boomers to die everyone who can remember the 2016 primary to die, then we can be free

Neoliberal has a precise meaning. It means you support policies that let loose the creative destruction of the market, at the expense of systems that have been put in place to shield certain workers from volatility. Ta Nehisi Coates is not a neoliberal and neither, really, was Obama because he wasn’t trying to accelerate the process of privatization (as Bill Clinton did.) He also didn’t try to overturn this trend either — he wasn’t talking like Sanders about going back to a New Deal era thinking.

West thinks capital turns people into commodities and the US military is opening markets at gunpoint and that the only moral thing to do is to oppose capital and empire. The fight against racism, to him, is a humanistic struggle and so it’s connected to all the other fights for liberation, equality, and human dignity. It’s extremely straightforward. Coates is neoliberal, to him, because he isn’t engaged directly in anticapitalist activism. I’d probably be a neoliberal too, to him.

I don’t really think it’s a manipulative or underhanded argument he is making. It might be anti-intellectual, though — Coates is a unique writer because he faces difficult truths and follows them, even into the abyss. He’ll be read for decades but it might be worth asking what effect his extremely influential texts might have on a generation now ocmi g to politi al consciousness. West is also a teacher.

*coming. Jesus. Typos.

It’s unfortunate to me that these conversatioms become so vindictive and maybe West’s haranguing tone is partly at fault for that. But I kind of think an older generation of activists more steeped in like, humanism and Christianity rather than like, critical theory, which Coates has been able (remarkably, I think) to turn into literature.

*(it’s worth listening to) an older generation of activists

He scores rhetorical points off misreadings of Coates. Cornel West knows how to read, so I don’t know how else to understand that than bad faith.

Neoliberal has shifted in meaning recently to mean you are a liberal like me, but our views line up at most 99%, therefore you deserve the firing squad.

I’m not saying there are no good critiques of Coates possible, but I honestly don’t think West came for Coates in a fair way. And I suspect the thing that frustrates West about Coates’s work is its reception, to which I say it’s going to take more than a radical black prophet to unsettle comfortable people’s complacency about the order of things. The fact that the literary ruling class likes to anoint a single black male writer is not Coates’s fault, nor is late capitalism.

Horseshoe in my absence from ILX I missed ur posts ur great

Tbf though I respect Cornel West’s intelligence and believe his politics to be sincere, his persona as a public intellectual is offputtingly slick to me and Coates’s is easier to take. I may be biased in my reading of his critique as a result.

<3 hoos how u been man???

I felt like it was unfair when Coates tweeted that Richard Spencer “agreed” with West. He knows it’s logically impossible for them to actually agree and Spencer was just trolling.

But also i agree with you horseshoe, broadly, that West wasn’t being totally fair either and was blaming Coates for things beyond his control.

Maybe, but he was hurt. West knew his dad, I think!

Neoliberalism is when traditional conservatives embraced the free market: i.e. Thatcher, Reagan and so on. The idea that it means 'modern liberals' (liberals in the American sense) is a sign of how fractured political discourse has become. I still think it's mostly a definition of the internet, rather than concrete politics. People reasoned from the name to the definition, and assumed it meant centrist.

But the mainstream Democratic Party has supported neoliberal policies for decades now. It isn’t totally off the mark.

I guess so. But there is still a difference between Thatcherism and this attempt to rebrand Neoliberalism as third-way Blairism (to use British examples).

West seems off his rocket three days, my 1cents

Nice

(I felt uncomfortable about the fact folks were using US party names and I was responding with UK names. I wasn't doubting folks knowledge, just being anxious)

Well the rise of Neo-Liberalism roughly coincides with the death (by merger) of the UK’s Liberal Party, which was just slightly younger than the United States. They did a lot of good, but the line still sticks that they were devoted to everywhere upholding the lot of the working class, as long as they never had to meet any.