Summer of Our Discontent
The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse
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An incisive, culturally observant analysis of the evolving mores, manners and taboos of social justice (“anti-racist”) orthodoxy, which has profoundly influenced how we think about diversity and freedom of expression, often with complex or paradoxical consequences.
"Summer of our Discontent [is] a gift: a way of understanding what happened to us that preserves the humanity of all parties and points the way forward toward renewal.” —Jonathan Haidt, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Anxious Generation
In this provocative book, Thomas Chatterton Williams, one of the most revered and reviled social commentators of our time, paints a clear and detailed picture of the ideas and events that have paved the way for the dramatic paradigm shift in social justice that has taken place over the past few years. Taking aim at the ideology of critical race theory, the rise of an oppressive social media, the fall from Obama to Trump, and the twinned crises of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, Williams documents the extent to which this transition has altered media, artistic creativity, education, employment, policing, and, most profoundly, the ambient language and culture we use to make sense of our lives.
Williams also decries how liberalism—the very foundation of an open and vibrant society—is in existential crisis, under assault from both the right and the left, especially in our predominantly networked, Internet-driven monoculture.
Sure to be highly controversial, Summer of Our Discontent is a compelling look at our place in a radically changing world.
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Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White) offers an unsatisfying assessment of how the U.S. abandoned its liberal ideals in favor of identity politics and right-wing populism. Endeavoring to discover why "furious, radical, and sophistic forces" have flourished "on both sides of the political and cultural spectrum"—a rupture which he says became insurmountable in the explosive summer of 2020, when the two sides of the culture wars split into alternate universes that can no longer communicate—Williams looks for answers in the "honeymoon phase of the Obama era" with its "squandered" post-racial promise, and in the subsequent turn toward identity politics through writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates. There are some insights to be had here vis-à-vis how the Obama era inculcated its own blowback in the form of a populist Donald Trump, but Williams's analysis is most effective when he takes unexpected angles, like discussing how in France (where he currently resides) "le wokeisme" is rejected as antithetical to the country's "key principles of secularism." However, such keen insights are too often set aside in favor of revisiting notorious examples of cancel culture run amuck that have already been exhaustively hashed out by anti-woke critics. The result is a serious effort to take stock of the illiberalism besetting contemporary American culture that too often gets bogged down in its own anti-wokeism.
