Ta-Nehisi Coates and Our Political Imagination

It’s rare, in campaign seasons, to see substantive debate within the primary process. In the contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, one is taking place. At stake are questions about the nature of political change, the role of the state, and the reach of the Democratic Party’s demographic nets.

Several weeks ago, within this context, Ta-Nehisi Coates intervened. Coates, whose 2014 case for giving reparations to African-Americans allied the history of slavery and civil rights with rigorous ethical thinking in one of the finest essays in recent memory, argued that Sanders — whose appeal arises, in part, from the forthrightness of his views on income inequality and corporate power — merited censure for rejecting reparations outright. In his first post, Coates wrote:

If not even an avowed socialist can be bothered to grapple with reparations, if the question really is that far beyond the pale, if Bernie Sanders truly believes that victims of the Tulsa pogrom deserved nothing, that the victims of contract lending deserve nothing, that the victims of debt peonage deserve nothing, that that political plunder of black communities entitle them to nothing, if this is the candidate of the radical left — then expect white supremacy in America to endure well beyond our lifetimes and lifetimes of our children.

This socialist’s failure to embrace what Coates believes to be the just, but radical, solution to America’s racial legacy speaks ill of Sanders, as well as of our country. If he can’t bring himself to come to grips with the reality of racism, Coates argues, what hope have we? How might we ever destroy white supremacy when even our most radical public figures deny the right in favor of the pragmatic?

The argument fit within a larger story: that Sanders neglects the experiences of people of color and of women in favor of, at best, a single-minded focus on working-class white men. Thus, that’s how Coates’s argument was read: as excoriating Sanders to support Clinton. Clinton’s supporters reveled in the vindication, while Sanders’s accused Coates of capitulation or, worse, betrayal.

Unfortunately, Coates’s follow-up self-defenses surrendered to the misapprehension. The bulk of his effort concentrated on justifying the choice to attack Sanders. And, in so doing, he made his most instructive mistake. In his second post, “Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination,” Coates said:

But hope still lies in the imagined thing. Liberals have dared to believe in the seemingly impossible — a socialist presiding over the most capitalist nation to ever exist. If the liberal imagination is so grand as to assert this new American reality, why when confronting racism, presumably a mere adjunct of class, should it suddenly come up shaky? Is shy incrementalism really the lesson of this fortuitous outburst of Vermont radicalism? Or is it that constraining the political imagination, too, constrains the possible? If we can be inspired to directly address class in such radical ways, why should we allow our imaginative powers end there?

Coates’s argument in this piece, and throughout his posts, is ultimately this: that Sanders’s failure should matter so much to us by virtue of his self-definition. Clinton, who also opposes reparations, is wrong, but that’s “unsurprising”: she “has no interest in expanding the Overton window. She simply hopes to slide through it.” Because he is radical, Sanders should be held to higher standards; his sin was that he rejected outright what, by Coates’s account, his political imagination ought to have accepted.

But meeting expectations should not be the limit of our own political imaginations. Whether a candidate comports well to their professed character type matters much less than the ideology’s character itself. Allowing a candidate’s own goal-setting to be the measure of their political ethos is a flimsy relativism, providing no mechanism to evaluate actions on their own merits in the public sphere.

It’s also unlike how we judge political actors in hindsight. Coates himself alludes to the “divisiveness” of the work to advance civil rights undertaken by Presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant and Martin Luther King. He chooses, however, the verb “embrace” to describe their actions. Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, and King did more than tacitly “embrace” the value of freedom and civil rights — they marched, they shepherded legislation, they organized people, they enforced laws, they went to war and set their blood and the their compatriots’ blood against slavery and racism’s evil. All the harm, slander, and death inflicted upon these men came not from what they told America to expect, but from what they did.

A candidate who fails to live up to the broad potential of their political imagination is still better than a candidate whose political imagination was never broad enough to admit just answers in the first place. Candidates are people: they err, and sometimes fail to comprehend wholly their beliefs’ demands upon them. Because they are people, though, they can also make realizations, they can change, and they can adopt different positions when their ideologies ask more from them. If a candidate’s political imagination is so narrow that we can treat their error as uninterestingly expected, what hope do we have that they’ll ever make the just choice? Rewarding narrower imagination for its narrowness does not befit mass democracy; it makes feeble our role in deciding the direction of American society.

This is a call for some standards for what we expect of our country, whatever we decide through democratic mass participation what those standards are. Coates’s second argument — that Sanders’s failure illustrates a failure in our national political imagination — has such power precisely because it focuses beyond the election on America’s whole character. To his credit, Coates seems to understand this. Reparations may not be the appropriate answer to these founding-old problems of race and citizenship in America: Cedric Johnson disputed Coates’s argument in an article on Jacobin, to which Coates responded, though not entirely graciously. Yet insofar as we believe them to be, we must measure candidates’ specific stances and their ideologies against and within larger external benchmarks, rather than merely measuring a stance against the ideology’s internal ruler. To attend to broader judgment is not only to invite honest debate, but also to invite debate in which we ourselves can take part. And wouldn’t that be more worthwhile, more befitting a mature democracy, than continuing to fight with foils and buzzers?