On June 15, after a nearly six-month wait from his previous magazine piece, revered liberal pessimist Ta-Nehisi Coates weighed in at Vanity Fair with, “Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House?” And what a dense, heavy load he dropped—at least 5000 words on topics all over the map.
The white-supremacy-obsessed Coates purports to be giving an analysis of how Kamala Harris’ lackluster performance in 2024, ostensibly because she was too wishy-washy on the bombing of Gaza, will affect the Democrats’ performance in the 2028 presidential election, but those readers with the fortitude to read it all are unlikely to be able to pinpoint its thesis.
The author begins: “The patron saint of the 2024 Democratic National Convention was Fannie Lou Hamer—recalcitrant sharecropper turned agitator and, like the Democratic presidential nominee, a black woman.” While Hamer was a brave and charismatic civil rights hero in Mississippi in the 1960s who took beatings for her activism, referring to her as the patron saint of the 2024 Democratic convention as if that's axiomatic doesn't ring true. It's Coates’ personal observation.
The author’s referring to when, in 1964, Hamer delivered testimony at the Democratic National convention in Atlantic City challenging the all-white Mississippi delegation. He writes that Hamer became a hero to black women “who see in her an ancient tradition of politics that extends back to their arrival on these shores.” According to the author, that same political tradition, 60 years later, delivered Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket.
However, it's not clear what tradition Coates is referring to, given the fact that Harris ran for president in 2020 and couldn't even hang in there until the Iowa primary. She then became VP only because of a gift—Joe Biden was only going to have a black woman as his running mate—and then became the Democratic presidential candidate without receiving a single primary vote in either 2020 or 2024.
After eight paragraphs on Hamer, Coates gets around to how Harris’ stance on Gaza messed up her candidacy. He replies to the question posed in his essay’s title by saying he doesn't have the definitive answer to why Harris lost: “It's hard to identify a singular flaw that cost Harris the election.” So anyone wanting to hear this writer make the case that Gaza did cost the former VP the election can stop reading here.
Coates is right that Harris’ failure to distance herself from the Biden administration’s stance on the bombing of Gaza hurt her at the polls. He writes that while Harris won the Arab-American vote, Biden won 12 percent more of that bloc in 2020. He attributes that disparity to Harris’ relative silence on Gaza, and there's ample evidence of that claim. A good case could be made that a stronger stand against the Israeli bombing would've won Michigan for Harris, due to that state's many Arab-American voters. But to win the election, she also needed to take Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
While it's conceivable that the Arab-American vote could've swung those two states as well, a comparison of Harris 2024 to Biden 2020 reveals that, except for college-educated whites, she was down among all demographics. Among black voters, Harris was down six to nine points; among Hispanics, she was down 12 to 15 points; among voters 18 to 29, down six to seven points.
These numbers make it difficult to pin Harris’ loss on the Gaza issue. Straining to make his case, Coates quotes Joy Reid, who sees every issue through the prism of race. According to the fired MSNBC host, Harris turned off black American voters when she didn't address the mass killings in Gaza. Given Reid's track record, she's talking about only the narrow cross section black Americans she talks to, as there are a host of reasons why the Democrats lost black voters in 2024, especially black men. Only about 30 percent of Democrat black voters call themselves “liberals,” but during Biden’s time in office his party took a leftward turn that turned many of them off, especially men. Economic issues—the “affordability” problem—were also a factor.
After making a half-hearted effort to call out Harris for not distancing herself from Biden, the author then veers way off course by making the claim that the next black president must add “imperialism” to their list of adversaries that already includes “white supremacy, a rapacious billionaire class, and an energetic Christian nationalism.” He then spends nine paragraphs detailing the horrors of American empire-building, starting with this Thomas Jefferson quote: “I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self government.”
In this “empire” excursion, Coates brings up the following topics: Woodrow Wilson’s colonialist rhetoric; Dwight Eisenhower’s efforts to expand the nation's imperial reach; JFK’s making peace with “cloak-and-dagger imperialism; LBJ’s contribution to the “imperial boomerang; Richard Nixon’s role in the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia; the annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines; Muammar Qaddafi getting dragged out of a drainpipe, sodomized with a bayonet, and Obama’s secretary of state Hillary Clinton laughing about it with a CBS reporter; Trump's collaboration with Israel to kill Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
This wordy listicle on American imperialism reads like an essay within an essay—but not an original one. Boilerplate material that's already been written umpteen times that could've been condensed into a single paragraph. After all, Coates is writing for progressives, and progressives know everything about America's imperial past.
Coates then devotes his next nine paragraphs to the marginalization of black women voters with a lengthy history lesson. The subtext is that Palestinians are in the same category as black Americans on the oppression scale, and the author provides a rundown on the horrors of slavery for context.
In this additional essay within an essay, Coates mentions the 2020 coalition that demanded that Joe Biden include a black woman on his ticket. He quotes fired MSNBC journalist Tiffany Cross, who said that underlying this demand was the assumption that a black woman “could not see tens of thousands of children being murdered and not be struck by that, not be moved by that.” While the brooding, tunnel-visioned Coates isn’t able to see this, making such assumptions amounts to the racial determinism that progressives claim to abhor by equating a person’s race with how they think and act. If the real goal was to have a vice president who’d feel compelled to speak out against the Gaza situation, maybe that coalition should’ve picked someone whose public opinions had already indicated that outcome rather than making the selection based on skin color.
Although Harris made comments in favor of stopping the bombing of Gaza, she’d always stopped short of calling for what people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Joy Reid, and Tiffany Cross insisted on—an arms embargo against Israel.
In the final section of this self-indulgent piece, Coates talks of his trip to Dublin to meet Dima Shamaly, an electrical engineering student at University College Dublin whose father was a fatal victim of an Israeli air strike in Gaza. Instead of summarizing her thoughts, the author quotes her words verbatim, which takes six paragraphs.
It was an exhausting way to end an exhausting essay. Ta-Nehisi Coates has reached a pinnacle on the Left that he’s above being edited. The author's prose is supposed to be so “elegant,” but he includes this sentence, referring to the leaders of the Arab and Muslim world: “It is not a surprise that a kind of casual contempt for its leaders and peoples oozes from the orifices of both Republican and Democratic administrations."