New(ish) Books

Thomas Chatterton Williams' Summer of Our Discontent

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS’ Summer of Our Discontent (2025)

This book, to be honest, arrives five years too late. Its highest purpose would have been as a reality check and voice-of-reason against the swirling fanaticisms of 2020 and the Woke era. Now that the storm has broken, it feels like a light, if elegant, recap.

What there is to be grateful for is the way that the battle for the memory of this time is starting to land on something like a moderate center. The progressive activists of the 2010s were sure, above all else, that history would bail them out — that they would be seen as acting in the direction of social justice even if the specific means were sometimes wildly out-of-whack with the purported ends — and a book like Williams’, together with Nellie Bowles’ Morning After the Revolution and Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s The Big Fail, help to disabuse progressives of that faint hope. What really happened of course was the country was really in a pretty good place in the early 2010s. Obama was a perfect consensus figure between the liberal and progressive wings of the Democratic Party. Instead of being broadly accepting of the direction the country was headed in, the progressives decided to go on a suicide mission — not only to attack Obama from the left but to question the entire legitimacy of the American political project, which led inevitably to clashes with the right and at a moment when the right was looking for excuses to go into its own delusional spiral and vacate any kind of centrist consensus as well. It’s very important to tell this story much in the way that Williams tells it, with his head on his shoulders and an acute understanding of the insanity of this time unaccompanied by any self-vindicating ideology.

Williams zeroes in on a handful of different episodes, all reflective of the same underlying dynamics. There’s Obama’s intervention in the Trayvon Martin killing and with that the collapse of the vision of the post-racial presidency. There’s the pernicious demagoguery of Ta-Nehisi Coates. The chaotic story of Kyle Rittenhouse’s shooting of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber in Kenosha. And then the ever-unfolding spiral of insanity, including the new-to-me story of how the heads of the Poetry Foundation were forced to resign for a statement of support for the “Black community” that was deemed insufficiently sincere. (Their call for poetry that “has the strength and power to uplift in terms of despair” apparently downplayed the ongoing “genocide against Black people.”)

Coates is, in a way, the heart of Williams’ narrative. In the mid-2010s, Coates was in an extraordinarily privileged position — “the first blue-chip black writer so throughly ensconced in the establishment,” as Williams puts it — and he used that position to profoundly undercut what Obama was doing and to generate an ideological rupture with liberalism. “Coates’ message put to rest the heroic idealism of Obama‘s grand vision,” Williams writes. “His message was brutal, irresponsible, and decisively victorious.” Against the vision of the bridge to the “post-racial future,” in which America’s focus would be on the sorts of technocratic questions that seemed to preoccupy the Obama administration, Coates and co succeeded in imposing a different narrative — “a sense of futility that was both derivative and utterly infectious” and that viewed racism as “permeating every facet of American life.”

Once that “irresponsible” turn had been taken, there was virtually no stopping it. Williams comes down very hard on Obama in a way that I think is excessive — I don’t actually recall Obama’s statement on the Trayvon Martin shooting as being “catastrophic,” as Williams describes it — but he probably is right that ambivalences Obama had towards the notion of ‘post-racialism’ played out across the body politic as a whole. And from there on, absurdity started to pile on absurdity. By the time we get to Kenosha, racism became the left’s single all-encompassing narrative. “What had happened among four white men could not be understood as unfortunate or tragic or even simply illegal; it had to be understood as racist,” Williams writes of the way in which the two white men killed by Rittenhouse were “elevated posthumously to the status of Black Lives Matter activists.”

And that pretty much is where Williams leaves things — there’s the “comedown” from the euphoria of Obama’s election, the period of irresponsibility by progressive activists and critics during Obama’s second term, and then conformity and trendiness doing the rest. “There is something deeply wrong in our society, and there has been for some time now,” Williams concludes, which is unfortunately just the kind of airy fatalism that he decries in a figure like Coates. A deeper study of the “foundational ideas and actions that produced 2020,” which is how Williams advertises this book, would likely have spent a great deal more time on communications theory and the way that the rise of social media changed the discourse. The really decisive factor seems not to be a few utterances of Obama’s, or the stance of a single influential Atlantic writer, but the way in which social media virality became the critical currency in political exchange. In his interventions in the Henry Louis Gates and then Trayvon Martin episodes, Obama clearly was expecting things to play out the way they do in a TV-driven landscape. Obama would find the right soundbite — as he very effectively had during the 2008 Jeremiah Wright controversy — and then the story would be dropped, with the “beer summit” that Obama called for during the Gates incident giving all the appearances of doing the trick. But as political discourse moved online throughout the Obama presidency, and with zealots rather than professionals at the helm, certain stories just never seemed to die out — and stories that were in any way connected to race had the longest tail of all. Black Lives Matter was, of course, far more of a phenomenon of social media than anything having to do with The Atlantic, but the establishment media was used to having a monopoly of the public conversation and faced with this change in political discourse, they reacted … badly. They tended to assume that the progressives, even if they weren’t making a great deal of sense at the moment, must be on the right side of history and platformed progressive voices often at the expense of their own institutional values, as was clearly the case with the Floyd protests and Kenosha and CNN’s “mostly peaceful protests” chyron.

It’s a salutary exercise to wrest the narrative back, for books like this to appear that are grounded in common sense and thoughtful reportage, but I do wish that Williams had gone a layer deeper and tried to work out what the communicative and ideological structures were that so drastically altered the discourse, as opposed to staying in the domain of their surface symptoms.