This self-infantilization of the Left proceeded apace with the construction on the Right of a kind of discursive ark, a place of refuge, fueled by an emergent Tea Party and a waxing Fox News. In due course, the id-amplifying panopticon of social media helped produce hermetically sealed political ontologies on the Left and Right, completely self-sustaining and utterly irreconcilable. The politics of demonization gave way to something even worse: politics as onanism. How else to explain safe-space culture, or the Mizzou protesters who didn’t want their protests covered, or the Black Lives Matter activists who deemed a meeting at the White House counterproductive to the movement, or the blunderbuss nihilism of the Republican nominee’s campaign rallies.

All of this is very bad. Most of it is not proximately the president’s fault. But even the bits of it that arguably are are not the result of his excess faith in the American promise, any more than it was reverence for good-ol’-fashioned liberal democracy that catapulted the latest inchoate plurality to victory.

It’s true that there was plenty of racist opposition to Obama, and it’s true that the president-elect has the support of many racists both brazen and shy. But one can’t pin Hillary Clinton’s loss solely on racist blowback. Electoral landslides are easy to account for, squeakers are overdetermined. The nature of the president-elect’s win was so narrow, and his path to it so bizarre, that there is an infinite supply of counterfactuals that credibly explain it. It seems to me, then, trivially true that if there were fewer racists in America, Hillary Clinton would be president elect. Just as it seems trivially true that she’d be president elect if she’d used a State Department email server, or advocated a pro-coal energy policy, or visited Wisconsin and Michigan a dozen times more each.

But it also seems plausible that most of the white people who voted for both Obama and his successor, and whom Coates counts among the “badge holders” of white privilege, don’t imagine themselves privileged. That they don’t know what “white innocence” is or could possibly mean. That Hillary Clinton’s loss is not a sign that America is irredeemably bigoted.

In an elegant bit of rhetoric, Coates argues that Obama had to be exceptional to win, while all the president-elect needed was “white bluster.” But he’ll no doubt be aware that, by curriculum vitae, candidate Obama was not exceptional in 2008, a fact pointed out by both John McCain and Hillary Clinton. What’s more, all of the pathologies that led, by Coates’s account, to the rejection of Obamaism, were as present in 2012 as in 2016. And in 2012 voters were even presented with an alternative to Obamaism in Mitt Romney, a man white in all ways, who, as his opponents would have it, even hated women and minorities if you applied enough brute hermeneutic force to his rhetoric. If white America’s original sin remains uncleansed, if Obama were really such an aberrance, how strange it is that America rejected him only when he stopped appearing on the ballot?