Fallacies and Sweeping Generalizations in Ta-Nehisi Coates' Repudiation of The Liberal Founding

However, the greatest problem with historical revisionism is not its lack of objectivity but its lack of integrity. History is always being revised as new data come to light and new generations ask new questions. But ''revisionism'' has a characteristic trait: it is typically in the business of denying the obvious and uncovering conspiracies. ...
The bad faith of all such ultra-revisionist undertakings lies in a sustained preference for a priori reasoning over human testimony. ... Nothing can ever count as evidence against such assertions, because they do not rest on evidence in the first place. - Tony Judt, Writing History, Facts Optional, [NYT] April 13, 2000

The first post on this weblog was The Liberal Founding. I quote from that post to suggest a context for Ta-Nehisi Coates' arguments that African American reparations are a pressing policy issue:

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich. ... [His] Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to George H.W. Bush’s derogatory use of ‘liberal’) [argued]:

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” [...] In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.”

In The Case for Reparations, Mr. Coates asserts:

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

A number of well-intentioned public commentators have looked at this and written, in effect, mea culpa. They shouldn't. This is a confused, misleading, and ultimately dishonest passage. Mr. Coates commits the classic fallacy of attempting to refute an argument by impugning the character of those who present it. In celebrating the American Revolution we celebrate a wonderful transformation of the world in the model of a free and open society. As Thomas Paine wrote, for all their personal flaws, the Founders created "a world":

I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness.

This passage also illustrates a misleading technique which is found throughout the "white supremacy" and "reparations" articles: sweeping generalizations which conflate anecdotal, particular instances with the general. Most of us who celebrate the Declaration and Constitution and their principles do not "wave a Confederate flag"; we deplore it. A further example of Coatesian sweeping generalization:

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

Washington and Jefferson created a nation which is a living example of the principles of freedom, equality, and human dignity. To celebrate their example is not hypocritical. We celebrate Martin Luther King for effecting real improvement in the human condition. It is not hypocritical that we maintain a kind silence about his serial adulteries. As with King, so with Washington, Jefferson and the rest of the Founders: the good they achieved far outweighed their flaws.


As for Mr. Coates' suggestion that the nation founded on the Fourth is not a great democratizer, again he has, throughout these articles, loaded the deck and slanted his examples. In Ta-Nehisi Coates vs. Lincoln and MLK on "White Supremacy" this weblog cited Lincoln's examples of action which the Founders themselves took to set in process the end of American slavery: "In 1794, they prohibited an out-going slave-trade," Lincoln wrote," ---that is, the taking of slaves FROM the United States to sell." Further citations by Lincoln documented actions taken by the Founders in 1798, 1800, 1803, 1807, and 1820. Mr. Coates does not cite this because it does not fit his sweeping indictment: "A crime that implicates the entire American people." (Emphasis added)

Nor does he particularly credit the "great democratizer" for an agonizing civil war, fought to prevent the extension of slavery to new territories, and eventually to end slavery once and for all. Ta-Nehisi Coates also does not give due notice to the way that what he above describes as a crime-implicated American people fulfilled Martin Luther King's "American dream" in achieving the civil rights revolution of the last century.

In short, through a series of slanted examples, sweeping generalizations, and invalid inferences, Mr. Coates rejects, not only the Founding, but apparently its liberal principles as well. Instead of gladness in well-doing as we remember the Fourth of July, we should experience repentance and sorrow, for the nation as he sees it was conceived in sin. Despite the freeing of the slaves and the Civil Rights Ace, it has continued to be sinful and, Ta-Nehisi Coates prophesies, will because of its inherent criminality keep right on sinning: "An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future." (Emphasis added)

Did you think that the purpose of the money spent in reparations was to improve the condition of poor and disadvantaged people? No, according to Mr. Coates: the purpose is absolution: "What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt."

What is most disturbing in all this is not the bad faith, bad writing, and bad history, but the way Ta-Nehisi Coates imputes racial inferiority. Mr. Coates is not talking about "the entire American people," even though he says he is. He is engaging in a reckless dispensation of guilt: "the sins of the past," "the sins of the present," "the certain sins of the future," and "white guilt."

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not talking about a multi-racial society, "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress."

I'll let a companion of the Founders have the last say: "my solemn belief of your cause is, that it is hellish and damnable, and, under that conviction, every thinking man's heart must fail him."