a-Nehisi Coates's new essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power is challenging and troubling, but the trouble does not derive mostly from the challenge. In the introduction Coates sets forth the following thesis: Donald Trump was elected as a backlash to the “Good Negro Government” of Barack Obama. The “symbolic power” of the latter “assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries,” and “fear . . . gave the symbols Donald Trump deployed — the symbols of racism — enough potency to make him president.” The model for this fear is a Confederate legislator who argued against recruiting black soldiers into the Southern army on the basis that, if they performed effectively, they would undermine the rationale for slavery.
It's hard to tell if Coates really intends this to be an object-level causal explanation. His theory requires that the Rust Belt voters who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 and were subsequently integral to Trump's 2016 victory both fully grasped and accepted a symbolic power and then reacted against a wound it caused. White voters did not prefer Trump over Hillary Clinton to a greater degree than they preferred Romney over Obama, and Trump did better among black voters than Romney did. White turnout was at best steady in 2016 as compared to 2012, but black turnout went down. Nobody denies that if he had been able to run for a third term against Trump, Obama would have won handily.
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