We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The final thing that got me was the vaguely insulting way that “rising tide” rhetoric addressed the masses of whites. The presumption that they had, for centuries, acted “against their interests” struck me as saying that these whites had been, for generations, so gullible as to be fooled by a prejudice that paid no dividends. When rich Hollywood actors supported higher taxes, no one criticized them for “acting against their interests,” presumably because paying higher taxes aligns with those wealthy actors’ vision of the world as they would like it to be. Could it also be true that the masses of poorer whites might support lowering those same taxes for the rich in response to a different vision of the world? What if it was true that the masses of white Americans had not been fooled at all but that a critical mass of them had simply identified with a set of “interests” that were not purely economic and so powerful they overawed the class interests that liberals and leftists presumed should be broadly shared?