This week, Knopf published Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, a re-examination of the tumultuous season that followed the murder of George Floyd. I asked Williams about that moment, the war in Gaza, the new threats to free speech, and the future prospects of the Democratic Party.
ASH CARTER: Five years ago, we spoke in these pages about the Harper’s letter in defense of free speech, which you helped organize. One of the main criticisms you received then was “Why now?” Many people might be wondering the same thing about the timing of your new book, which arrives eight months into the blitzkrieg of Donald Trump’s radical and seemingly lawless second term. So I’ll start by asking you the same question: Why now?
THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS: One of the points I hope anyone who gives this book an honest read will come away with, wherever he or she may fall politically, is that the period under consideration in Summer of Our Discontent is inextricably linked to the redemption and re-emergence of Donald Trump. The extraordinary progressive overreach within media, cultural, political, and academic institutions that reached its apotheosis in 2020 and remained dominant until around 2023 really did an astonishing amount to shift U.S. culture in a reactionary direction. Progressives outlandishly overplayed their collective hand, and we are all left dealing with the abominable but not entirely unpredictable backlash.
How can we as liberals and moderate conservatives and pragmatic progressives hope to effectively counter Trump if we do not first attempt to see clearly and without tribal bias all the various steps that got us here? Trump did not emerge out of a vacuum. What were the cultural conditions that made his rehabilitation somehow more desirable to an increasingly multi-ethnic plurality of Americans than the alternative? As Baldwin put it best, “Not everything faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
A.C.: From slavery to Jim Crow to Rodney King, the history of race in America is not a proud one. More recently, there were a number of increasingly well-publicized instances of unarmed Black men being killed at the hands of police leading up to what you describe as the “horizontal crucifixion” of George Floyd, an event that rightly shocked the conscience of people around the world. Fast-forward a few months, and the movement that began with the undeniably true statement “Black lives matter” was chanting, “Defund the police,” three words which no sane politician will ever again utter in our lifetime. Where, in your view, did things go wrong?
T.C.W.: First, I want to say up front, of course there is ongoing and stubborn racism. That is unfortunately still a fact of American life. And that means that any movement protesting the killing of unarmed Black people would not be met with universal sympathy in this country.
With that said, I do believe this particular movement would have been more lastingly effective if it had acknowledged race without allowing it to become the central focus. This would mean, as I write in the book, that the videotaped death of a white man named Tony Timpa, in Dallas in 2016, which bore a striking resemblance to the death of Floyd, would receive just as much condemnation and attention as the latter. I believe most Americans could get behind an anti-police-brutality movement like that, and it would have the benefit of not making it falsely appear as though police violence is somehow just a Black issue. It is an American problem, and we really have to treat it as such while not ignoring the fact that poor Black men are particularly vulnerable.
Unfortunately, the reality does demand nuance, which is often not the activist’s forte. The case in point here is the self-sabotaging demand to de-fund and, in some cases, even abolish the police. Among other things, such a demand alienates enormous numbers of everyday, non-activist, non-extremely-online Black people who have to figure out how to live in communities where, sadly, the possibility of violence and crime is not just theoretical. This is why, as I write in the book, it was the Black citizens of Minneapolis who most ardently resisted the quixotic plan to replace the police department with a “public-health-oriented” department of public safety. They did not see that kind of “anti-racism” as a program that would improve their real and not-just-imagined lives.
A.C.: My sense is that there are a lot of lifelong liberals who might have agreed with your basic position in 2020 and the five or so years that preceded it but felt that, with Trump’s emergence onto the political scene and subsequent takeover of the Republican Party, there was and is an urgent need to present a unified front, a strategy sometimes articulated as “No enemies to the left.” I know many people who feel that cancel culture, speech-policing, and the like might have been annoying but never constituted any kind of real threat, and that drawing too much attention to such things may have even helped Trump get re-elected. How would you respond to that?
T.C.W.: I would see it as precisely the opposite. I believe that gaslighting people and telling them what they see either doesn’t exist or, when that is no longer possible, insisting protests are “mostly peaceful” while standing in front of blazing buildings, and finally asserting that rioting and looting are “pragmatic strategies of wealth re-distribution” is not just an affront to veracity but a very counterproductive political strategy.
Yes, Trump is unequivocally worse and more threatening now, but these things were plenty bad in their own right, and the condescending dismissal of them within the mainstream media and elsewhere was understandably crazy-making for a whole lot of people. Any movement that demands one deny the evidence of one’s senses inevitably insults the intelligence of those it needs to persuade.
A.C.: Like some other prominent commentators, you argue that wokeness (a term I know you have mixed feelings about but which we will nonetheless use in the absence of an accepted alternative) effectively ended as the dominant framework for public discourse on October 7, 2023. How did Hamas’s attack that day and the ensuing war in Gaza scramble American politics?
T.C.W.: On the most noticeable level, it applied the oversimplified binaries—oppressor/oppressed, white/P.O.C., colonizer/Indigenous, etc.—that elite institutions rely on to operate their intersectional matrixes and protect and recognize the various identity groupings within them.
How could Jews be simply “white” and partake in all of the advantages membership in the majority brings if at the same time they were the targets of increasingly explicit anti-Semitism on both the far left and the far right? How could institutions, such as elite universities, that had bent over backwards to make interventions and issue statements on behalf of any number of identity groups, and for the most trivial reasons, such as Halloween costumes and menu options, all of a sudden insist on institutional neutrality when it was time to take a stance on the slaughter of Jewish civilians?
A lot of people, not all of them Jewish, either, lost faith in the mission and ideological underpinnings of D.E.I. in the wake of the hypocrisy, the inability to speak coherently and from a place of principle, the reaction to October 7 exposed.
A.C.: There were many on the right who were loudly proclaiming the importance of open inquiry when Joe Biden was in office. Now people are literally being shoved into unmarked vans by masked agents of the government for the crime of having expressed the wrong opinion in a student newspaper. At the same time, many leftists who dismissed concerns about free speech as “right-coded” a few short years ago are justifiably concerned about the very real threats to free expression on campus and elsewhere. What hope is there for the First Amendment when so few seem willing to extend the right to their political opponents?
T.C.W.: This is surprisingly the most difficult aspect of free-speech discourse—namely, getting sufficient numbers of people to genuinely believe that the defense of free expression only means something when it is applied to speech you disagree with. It is ultimately in everyone’s self-interest to defend the freedom to express views that offend them because a culture of maximal tolerance safeguards all. It is myopic to resort to censorship with the false confidence that it will be your side that is always in control.
The sword of cancellation, or whatever we might call it, is a weapon that can be used by anyone, as many on the left are finding out—even as some continue to insist it was justified when they used it. The problem is a lot of people in MAGA feel the same way, and they now have the force of the federal government behind them.
A.C.: A common argument during the period covered in your book held that political correctness is really just good manners, and anyone who complains about it is secretly seething that they can no longer use hateful slurs with impunity. This always struck me as simplistic and even a little tendentious, but it does seem to have been the case for some in the Trump camp, most infamously a few of the young men involved with Elon Musk’s DOGE project. Can you talk a little bit about what you called the new trend of “vice signaling” in a recent Atlantic article?
T.C.W.: When the pendulum swung back from the decade and change of enforced viewpoint conformity within the cultural mainstream, we can see now it did not settle within the sensible, liberal center. With the help of some very powerful anti-woke tech oligarchs, most notably Musk, it has not stopped swinging rightward. Within government, with DOGE, as you point out, but also, quite consequentially, in the so-called public square of Twitter [now X], the vilest kind of racism, rudeness, and general disrespect became a new kind of discursive currency.
We went, in the space of just a few years, from forcing people to be not just tolerant of difference but celebratory of it to now having a congresswoman from Illinois, Mary Miller, publicly refer to her colleague Sarah McBride, the first transgender woman in Congress, as “the gentleman from Delaware”—just gratuitous disrespect that was widely cheered on Musk’s platform. Is this really what cancel culture achieved? It’s astonishing—the result of all that pressure and activism has turned out to be the most unbelievable incivility. On a purely practical level, it failed spectacularly.
A.C.: Your book will almost certainly be received as a farewell and good riddance to wokeness, and it is that. But it is, almost equally, an account of your horror at the rise of Trumpism, and a lament for the vanished optimism that a super-majority of Americans felt after Barack Obama’s first election. Were there people you took to be old-school liberals like yourself who surprised you by voting for Trump in 2024? And, if so, how do you make sense of that?
T.C.W.: It is every bit a lament for that lost optimism so many Americans, certainly in my generation that came of age during Obama’s ascent, felt in 2008. When Trump first won, in 2016, that sense of interrupted but undeniable progress remained mostly intact. He represented the death pangs of a reaction that could not prevail. He was on the wrong side of history, as it were. I knew some people who supported him, but I don’t think anyone who did surprised me back then. I would say that was essentially the same in 2020.
By 2024, I was not only surprised but shocked by the kind of people who used to holler about woke excess and liberal norms who had made peace with—or, in some cases, not just made peace with but exuberantly endorsed—Donald Trump. You know the ones in Silicon Valley who fit into this category, but there have been a number of writers too. People who I don’t even think have a financial interest in this.
It’s something darker than that. It makes you question if you ever shared the same principles, or if most people are just happy to use whatever weapon is at their disposal to batter their opponents: when the weapon to beat woke progressives was liberal values, they reached for it; when that grew ineffective or, let’s be honest, too exacting, they swapped it for the sheer convenience of the MAGA cudgel. So many people have revealed themselves to be without consistent principle. That has been at least as disappointing as anything Trump has done.
A.C.: The writer Geoff Shullenberger coined the phrase “viral hegemony,” which he says “is arrived at not through a ‘long march through the institutions,’ but a rapid stampede across the algorithmically mediated public sphere, which the logic of the attention economy tends to push far more rapidly into cycles of extremist one-upmanship.” As you note, a lot of the ideas about race and gender that might be classified as woke have been around for a while, going back to Derrick Bell and even Michel Foucault. Did Twitter just help spread political memes that were already lying around, or did it actively hasten their evolution? And do you see a similar dynamic playing out on the right?
T.C.W.: Damn, that’s brilliant (as Geoff generally is), and I wish I’d coined that phrase! I do believe, and have argued for years—as others also have before me, though it has never become a widespread enough observation—that the culture of Tumblr was pivotal. When that Web site lost its juice, the social-justice activism that flourished there migrated to Twitter and metastasized through incessant contact with the exponentially more influential media and knowledge-worker class over there.
Niche ideas and arguments that made sense in more formal and contextual academic spaces enjoyed far too much reach and purchase with a broader public who often misunderstood them, misapplied them, or simply used them as a kind of cultural currency, which is to say, in a totally cynical way.
Think of “intersectionality,” which is a serious and interesting conceptual tool as Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced it. In her original text, it meant that when the plight of some auto workers was studied, anti-racist remedies did not protect Black women to the same extent as Black men, and measures to prevent sexist discrimination did not protect Black women to the same extent as white women. There was some other consideration necessary for understanding why Black women were the last to be hired and the first to be fired in that context. So far, so good. On Twitter, circa 2020, all that gets reduced to “Listen to Black women,” period. End of discussion. There are so many examples like this.
A.C.: If—a big if, admittedly—there is a silver lining to the Democrats’ loss of both the electoral and the popular vote in the 2024 election, it’s that the party has been forced to rethink what is clearly not working. Some politicians who once toed the activist line or simply kept quiet are beginning to speak up about the need to consider a wider range of viewpoints. But according to a recent survey, the Democrats’ approval rating has fallen since 2020 to a 35-year low. How can the party dig itself out of this hole?
T.C.W.: Have you taken a look over at Bluesky? Let’s just hope that the voices who dominate that platform no longer have the ear of the Democratic Party, because I’m not sure they have learned the lesson. There is that “Real Marxism has never been tried” energy over there, and they are drawing inspiration from political figures like Zohran Mamdani.
I’m just a writer, not a political strategist, but my sense is that so long as Democrats are effectively linked with people who seem to dislike America and say things about “seizing the means of production” or taxing “whiter neighborhoods” at higher rates, the lessons of 2020 will not have been internalized to a significant enough degree to make their approval ratings change.
Ash Carter is a Deputy Editor at Air Mail and a co-author of Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
