Coates and Chait occupy a similar niche of thoughtful progressive journalism; each freely acknowledges he has been inspired by reading the other’s like-minded work. But for the past several weeks they have not only read each other; they have actively responded to one another. In doing so, they have revealed an important fissure in liberal thought. Coates and Chait are not just splitting hairs; they are two writers with profound agreement on many issues, who have nevertheless arrived at different, and powerfully charged visions of our country's history.

Their conversation began with Paul Ryan. In remarks that many commentators instantly pounced on (cue the pile-on), the Republican congressman offered this diagnosis of American poverty:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

This has all the ingredients to arouse liberal ire. A privileged white politician talks down to the strata of society that existed somewhere beneath him—what he calls the “culture” of “inner cities,” and what everyone else understands to mean the culture of black people.

Plenty of coverage treated the incident as first and foremost about Ryan and the Republican Party: what it says about their budget plan, what it means for 2016, what it reveals about the probable palette of future electoral maps. In an ever-refreshing news cycle of controversy, which gives special attention to politicians’ missteps, this story quickly runs its course.

Coates’s first essay makes clear he does not think the real drama here is Ryan’s or the Republican Party’s view of inner-city poverty. The story is much bigger, he writes, because “in America, the notion that black people are lacking in virtue is ambient.” Nor is this, he argues, a peculiarly white or conservative belief. Bill Cosby famously voiced a version of this notion when he criticized black men for “not holding up their end of the deal.” And Coates believes President Obama has become among the most aggressive champions of this view.

In short, this is not about what partisan politics look like today. It is about what America’s racial politics have been for centuries. For far too many years, far too many Americans have believed much of what Ryan says because, Coates says, “it is a message that makes all our uncomfortable truths tolerable. Only if black people are somehow undeserving can a just society tolerate a yawning wealth gap, a two-tiered job market, and persistent housing discrimination.”

The ripple effect of Coates’s analysis was more prolonged than any other because it did not merely take aim at a politician or a party; it leveled a criticism against Americans irrespective of political allegiance or racial identity. (Some white conservatives interpreted Coates’s searing appraisal of black Democrats as backhanded praise; they simply weren’t reading carefully.)