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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore—not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-’90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

The Irony of the American Blogosphere

By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Dec 16 2008, 4:09 PM ET Comment

I wanted to pull this out of so as not to derail the thread below. Here's Cobb on liberals and utopianism:

...any book that makes a broad call for caution against a kind of state-sponsored rationalist utopianism, gets a thumbs up from this Conservative. That is the fundamental lesson that we keep trying to teach. But when Jonah Goldberg says so, y'all get hysterical.
Right. Because attempting to establish a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq and remake the Middle East is the height of realism. Look, you can make the case that there was bipartisan support for the Iraq War because, well, there was. But here's what you can't do: Having watched one of the greatest foreign policy overreaches in American history committed with the near-uniform support of conservative institutions, committed while conservatives controlled every major branch of government, you can't ever, in any seriousness, pretend that utopianism is somehow merely the product of a brain addled by liberalism. I find it amazing that such a charge would be made in a discussion Neibhur. Simply amazing


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