Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

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.

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Audiobook, Sociology, American History, Society

272 pages, Hardcover

Published August 5, 2025

About the author

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a Visting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a nonresident fellow at AEI. He was previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from New America, Yaddo, MacDowell, and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. His next book, Summer of Our Discontent, will be published by Knopf.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important book for our time. It covers many of the culture -war issues as they have affected The United States and France. The author pulls no punches here when expressing his opinions. Williams contends here that an illiberal, authoritarian, and strident movement has come out of the left over the last few years. This movement has taken over many of our institutions and has done harm to individuals and society. Like myself, the author does not like the word “woke” but prefers the term critical social justice. Furthermore, this left-wing anti -liberal movement has fed and encouraged an even worse, right wing authoritarian movement led by Donald Trump.

I must confess bias on my part. I am a fan of Williams. I liked his earlier two books, Losing My Cool, and Self Portrait in Black and White. I have listened to podcasts with Williams and follow him on X. I often agree with him and find that our philosophies on politics and social issues to be similar.

Williams talks a lot about Black Lives Matter, liberalism, cancel culture, DEI, identity politics. Antisemitism and many other hot button issues raging in both the United States and France, where the author lives. He chronicles how the state of race relations went from a high point during Barack Obama’s presidency to serious cultural strife during the Black Lives Matter years of ascendancy. He also covers the rise of Trump and how he malevolently played off these trends.

One strong point of this work is the way that Williams approaches most viewpoints, even ones that he disagrees, with understanding and respect. He often will try to illustrate why people support a position or argument even when he differs with them. He typically points out both sides of an issue.

This is a controversial book. Many people, on both sides of the political spectrum, will find disagreement here. But even if one disagrees with the opinions expressed in this work , they will find a thoughtful and honest approach to some of today’s most important controversies.

[Derek Ouyang · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only wish this were written less academically and more for the layperson who so desperately would benefit from reading this. Between the unnecessarily opaque lines, Williams provides the clearest connections across the last decade of illiberalism I have read this year, importantly also astutely connecting to October 7. I now believe more than ever that the extreme left and right are exactly two sides of the same coin.

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 2 out of 5]

EDIT: This is the third of three different reviews I wrote on this book. It is not a complicated book; it is a fraught time we live in.

The letter from the editor at the preface of the book disproves the contents of the book better than any line-by-line refutation could.

The book is about how the kids aren't alright, so much so that Israel had to invade Gaza.

The method that the author uses to prove it is a retelling of the history of the United States from the election of Obama to the MAGA coup attempt. In doing so, he rectifies many of the errors of conventional wisdom about many of the events, then also goes on to be extraordinarily petty.

It does raise interesting questions, specifically about the media ecology and why one story forms the way that it does, what makes one popular and one ignored. But this is a topic for media studies, which, one assumes, is too leftist a concept for the author, so instead we get some classic pearl-clutching.

This is traditional anti-free speech behavior, as much as it wants to name its opponents as such. What is described in the book is the marketplace of ideas, the process of a society finding its way through facts and beliefs. Saying it operates with bias is axiomatic: that is what opinion is.

This is a heckler's veto at book length. Periodically, the author will drop a thesis that I wish the book was about, then never come back to it. The closest it seems to come to one is a New York Times Pitchbot esque defense of the MAGA coup as justified. You know, because the lynch mob though that the left had killed cops, they could do the same with impunity, and that poor mislead MAGA was merely doing what they saw the Left do.

Which is a weird argument in the context of the book about the media lying to everyone - how would they then know? It is almost as if there is more media than is focused on here! And this is where whatever might be useful in the book dies.

The fullest disproof of the book is the actions of the media and business interests in the current administration. Basically, if this book were insufferably cynical, pointing out the constant calculations of people and powers to harvest political gain off of human suffering, it would be banal but entertaining. As it is, a lot of people showed willingness to get jawboned in any direction, right or left.

I mean, if the letter that the editor included in the ARC is included in the published version, it shows the publisher doing this, the nerd doing the bully's homework in the hope that he will get beat up less.

It is well written if argumentation as a science interests you. But, like, read the Harper’s letter and save your $30 plus tax.

My thanks to the author, Thomas Chatterton Williams, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, for making the ARC available to me.

[selin apologist · Rating 2 out of 5]

I disagreed with this book thoroughly, but it’s well-written enough to not read like total rage bait. Williams is essentially a reactionary “opp” who’s made his entire shtick bemoaning the excesses of wokeness and praising the good old values of liberalism, civility, and free speech. It’s like that metaphor about a frog sitting in a boiling pot of water, except this frog is insisting that the rest of us are overreacting and we were wrong for bullying the New York Times. The Obama era is calling — it wants its naivety back! (Or, as the Black Eyed Peas hilariously put it: “You so two thousand and late!”) This book is essentially Williams rehashing the big racial controversies and cultural moments from the Obama era until today, smugly pointing out the hypocrisies of The Anti-Racist Left, and arguing that racism isn’t actually as bad or structural as the left claims it is. If Woke had actually won — if we’d ever had a remote chance of imposing our vision on America — Williams’ critiques might have felt important. But given how much backlash every gain of marginalized people has experienced, it’s hard to take Williams’ argument that Woke People Did Too Much in good faith. If anything, the structural rot at the heart of America that 2020 pointed out has continued to be vindicated by current events, even if Williams denies it. Williams is a sore winner, burdened by a “not like other girls” complex to set him apart from losers who actually believe in racism. He spends a lot of time, almost fanboyishly, tearing down other Black intellectuals, particularly Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose career he’s obsessed with. If this book had been written from a leftist POV I would have enjoyed it. I actually think there are a lot of valid critiques to be made of 2020’s identity politics (the book Elite Capture comes to mind), and we desperately need to debrief and process the collective trauma of the first Trump presidency and pandemic. But to be defending the NYT and professing faith in American institutions in 2025 isn’t the flex Williams thinks it is. Given how few people seem to be reading this book (>20 reviews) it seems like it didn’t cause the stir it intended anyway!

[Emmet Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly smart, sober. I think it’s the type of book to you can only really write in retrospect since you need to detach yourself both personally and intellectually from a time period before you can really take stock of it. TCW does a great “post mortem” of sorts on the many intellectual perils we as a society (on both sides of the political spectrum, to be clear) fell into the in early 2020s. Politics drifted far too close to morality in many spheres of life. Pressures to adopt certain beliefs led to a lot of performative gestures and virtue signaling that in retrospect make a lot of people and institutions look really silly in ways that really do deserve a second look.

The big takeaway for me was just how damaging the overwhelming sense of urgency was to the intellectual climate in those days (and I use the past tense because I do think, to some extent, they are behind us). We have to condemn the latest news story for being racist. We have to fire the editor for “platforming” this person. Somebody shouldn’t be invited to campus. In many ways, these things were often performative, and TCW does a good job of explaining how and why they made us dumber and led to the place we find ourselves at now. Bravo. Well done. This book was needed.

[Maria Phillis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book veers wildly between sensible points and a sort of "both sides-ism" that is unequivocally disingenuous at times. I was both nodding along at certain points while also wincing that he seemed to take to an extreme an interpretation that was clearly the most fringe example rather than mainstream examples. Average overall and I wish it was less concerned with a false equivalency.

[Bill Nielsen]

Read it for the afterward if you’re like me and not too enthralled with re living a plague year. Some nice thinking in here, and I don’t think anyone will agree with the entirety of it, which for me is a feature not a bug.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard about this book following the authors’s participation on the Daily Show and figured I would give it a shot. I was skeptical and while this challenges some key assumptions. It is provocative but makes me think deeply. For me, this is the mark of great editorial nonfiction.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book to rate. It documents how segments of America lost their minds on the left and right, between the euphoria of Obama’s election and the rise of Trump, and and how that played out across significant events and in the media, etc. Williams does this from a unique perspective; both inside and outside in important ways when it comes to race, class, culture, etc. It is an important reminder that we are in danger of losing of our classical liber values thanks to extremism by both sides that seems to strengthen and reinforce each other.

But it doesn’t really have a thesis or conclusion. It doesn’t really come together to offer insights or conclusions. It has the feel of collected essays that all ask the reader not to forget these events and ideas or let them be memory holed. It argues for certain values and approaches but doesn’t really tie things together.

An important and depressing reminder but felt like it could have been something more.

[Greg Fournier · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received a review copy for my pending review at The Dispatch—hence the pre-publication review.

I wanted to love this book, but I didn’t. It was over-written and overly passionate. A simple recounting of the strange events of the summer of 2020, with perhaps an opinionated conclusion, would have been a better presentation of the central ideas in the book. Lots of insane things happened in the summer of 2020; you don’t need to append adverbs to the descriptions of them to drive home the point. As such, I don’t think this book will be convincing to those who don’t already agree with the central premise—that the identitarian turn in the summer of 2020 was bad for democracy, bad for racial justice, and bad for America as a whole.

Also, I’m not sure why it took so long for this book to come out. Williams mentions in the afterword that he began writing it in 2021, meaning theoretically the book could have come out by late 2022 or early 2023. Instead, we had to wait until five years after the events in question. A good, round number, to be sure, but a tad too late to look like anything other than a delayed release. As a matter of craft, this book is lacking, which is especially disappointing given the quality of Williams’s writing in The Atlantic and other outlets. A better use of 250-ish pages would have been a collection of his essays from various outlets.

On the substance, I think he’s almost entirely correct, which is why I give this book three stars rather than one or two. But instead of taking the time to read it, just wait for him to be on the podcast circuit, and/or read some of his writing in the Atlantic. You’ll likely be less disappointed.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. I appreciated the subtitle, acknowledging that as an American culture we have created walls that have diminished our ability to have civil discourse in our disagreement.

I did not like the writer’s style. He jumped from theme to theme which gave me content whiplash. His use of high vocabulary and allusions made it appear that his goal was to sound smart over being understood. And the footnote process was a mess.

The only chapter that was worth reading, in my opinion, was the one on cancel culture.

If this topic interests you, you would be much better off just reading “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Haidt and Lukianoff.

[Mort · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarely do I want to read a book so bad that I buy it on release instead of waiting for the library to get a copy but I had to read this as soon as it was released and it didn’t disappoint. What a year that was wow

[Jim Pomeroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

First audiobook in a while. I have always appreciated TCW’s balanced and introspective takes even if I disagree with a part of them. This is no exception. Its a very unique time capsule that fairly looks back at a divisive time (2020) and helps answer the question “how did we get here?”

[Kristofer Dubbels]

I first became aware of Thomas Chatterton Williams a decade ago, when the London Review of Books published his considered and ultimately quite restrained takedown of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blockbuster Between the World and Me. I was living in Maryland at the time the book was released; I don’t remember what compelled me to read it in the first place, but I do remember browsing at a bookstore in Frederick, MD after I’d read it and overhearing the proprietor - a white woman, of course - discussing it with another customer.

“I had to put it down for a while, because it is a difficult read. But it was worth it,” she explained. At the time, I thought this was odd - Between the World and Me is a mere 152 pages and can be read in a single sitting. Moreover, I thought it was pretty strange that a bookstore owner would make such a show of her personal distress while reading something so comparatively tepid (it isn’t Blood Meridian and moreover, surely the existence of racism could not come as a surprise to anyone in Maryland?). I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the infancy of the era of “virtue signalling.”

In any case, I read William’s review after having read Coates’ book, and it was like a breath of fresh air. What if, posits Williams, Coates’ worldview is quite easily refuted by appeal to contradictory evidence. What if Coates’ just-so stories about the nature of American society are wrong? As a good little lefty, it had never occurred to me to question that Coates’ fatalism and cynicism could not just be wrong, but profoundly and radically wrong.

For years afterward I would tell people Coates’ book was worth reading in part just to read Williams’ takedown. But I never particularly followed Williams subsequent trajectory, which periodically seems on the edge of breaking out to a much larger audience. When I picked this book up, I had no real expectations beyond the obvious, this would be a book about 2020. I figured it might be structured something like Lewis Lapham’s Age of Folly, primarily a collection of previously published material.

Just to get it out of the way now: Williams’ book is not “bad”. But it suffers from having no real strong central thesis. The early chapters illustrate how America took its first baby steps on the path to collective insanity - but why did America start to lose its collective grip on reality at this exact moment, and not sooner or later? Williams seems to want to attribute the origins of the present moment with the election of Barack Obama; but then how was it Obama came to be elected? And just why was the reaction to his presidency so negative, so quickly?

Despite the title, relatively little of the book actually deals with the summer of 2020, which instead offers an impressionistic (and incomplete) synopsis of the timeline leading up to it. Rather than a single coherent narrative, we are treated to a series of vignettes alternating between examples of left- and right-wing insanity. Williams believes the conservative response to Obama’s presidency was hysterical; he also appears to fault Obama for his own inability to capitalize on what Williams took to be the underlying promise of Obama’s election (apparently something like a “colorblind” society).

Significantly, the context for the immediate rightwing backlash to Obama’s presidency - the ‘08 financial crisis - is left unexplored. Williams does make concessions to something like a materialist understanding of the world - he emphasizes repeatedly that George Floyd was not simply a black man, but a profoundly destitute man - but these do not add up to a particularly robust or compelling theory of society and social change. Instead, the reader is left to infer just what it is that informs Williams’ judgments of particular events. Maybe it is unfair to criticize Williams - a pundit, after all - for reacting to individual events, rather elaborating a broader understanding of how it is those events came to transpire. But, to be clear, Williams’ recurring foil - Ta-Nehisi Coates - does offer a theory of society and social change. I agree with Williams that Coates’ theory is profoundly misguided; but all told, Coates has a comparatively clear understanding of the world that can be understood - and critiqued - separately from the specific discussion of any specific news item. Williams has nothing like this.

Instead, the argument of Williams’ book goes something like this, “here’s an example of the right being insane. Now, here’s an example of the left being insane. Now….” and so on and so forth. We learn the Williams does not like Trump, that he does not like the left’s broad sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and so on. Williams’ critique of the post-George Floyd wave of rioting itself is hard to parse - George Floyd was indeed murdered by the police, Williams tells us. But it was the fact of his destitution in the early days of the pandemic that ought to be emphasized alongside his race.

But here is where we don’t get anything particularly new - Williams emphasizes repeatedly that the riots of the summer of 2020 were the result of something like an alliance between a (predominantly but not exclusively) highly educated white elite and a (predominantly but not exclusively) black underclass with flimsy ideological commitments. Even supposing that this is an accurate characterization of the social makeup of the rioters, we aren’t given a particularly detailed explanation as to why such an alliance would emerge. Williams alludes to his belief that wokeism functionally reproduces inequality - its bizarre language and mechanisms for enforcing that language are the stuff of inter-elite power struggles. And yet, they truly have captured the imagination of a broader public. And, moreover, why is it that this elite ideology should be dedicated to reproducing itself in the name of the subaltern? If Williams’ understanding is correct, surely there is something novel about an elite stratum that reproduces its elite status by emphasizing its deference to an oppressed stratum profusely to other elites, often enough with open disapproval by this oppressed stratum itself? One could say the roots of this bizarre compact go back at least to the 1990s, and perhaps are the farcical descendents of the heroic years of the Civil Rights movement and New Left in the 1950s and 60s. Williams, however, does not explore this genealogy; it all starts with Obama.

I agree with Williams that a basic timeline of the woke era might very plausibly begin in 2008. But what is more significant, the financial crisis and ensuing global economic meltdown, or the simple fact of Obama’s election? Obama’s victory is significant on its own (his victory in the Democratic primary has by now been thoroughly retconned - his triumph over Hillary Clinton was narrow and in the final tally, Clinton received more votes), but it was his administration’s response to the ‘08 meltdown that was absolutely decisive for the emergence of both MAGA and wokeness alike.

As matters are increasingly commonly framed in mainstream centrist discourse, wokeness is an elite project; MAGA is a populist one. But it is clear that both MAGA and “wokeness” broadly construed are pan-class alliances; that is, both are material politics without being class politics. If one has significantly captured blue collar workers while the other has significantly captured white collar workers, it is important to note that both categories are internally striated and complex. And, moreover, a not insignificant number of adherents to wokeism are downwardly mobile, college educated workers in precarious service sector employment (the proverbial jazz studies or art history grad employed as a sous chef or bartender).

As Williams has it, however, wokeness appears to be the more clear and present danger than right-wing populism; but it would seem to me both are, ultimately, malformed reactions to the 08 financial crisis. And, moreover, wokeness as we now know it is itself the product of an intense power struggle within the left (broadly construed to encompass everyone from Nancy Pelosi to anarchocommunist squatters). The same, of course, can be said for MAGA: although there is no figure even slightly comparable to Trump on the left in terms of personal influence, the current configuration of MAGA was determined by the nature of the coalition Trump was forced to build in order to secure his 2024 victory.

I am myself simplifying matters greatly but the significant point here is that Williams doesn’t appear interested in any of this stuff; indeed, he appears especially unaware of the massive upheavals within the Republican rank-and-file that led to Trump’s first - and even more dramatically, his second - ascendency. It may be cynical bullshit, but in the run up to election day 2024, Paul Manafort asserted with a straight face that the Republican Party is a “working class party.” Now, whatever led him to assert such a thing aside, it is significant on its own that he’d say such a thing at all. You won’t find any discussion of this in Williams, who seems to think that it is culture driving social change, at near complete - but not quite complete - neglect of the material factors of human affairs.

By now there is a mini-industry of books on “wokeness” that rivals the woke book industrial complex itself (Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi). Williams is one foot in this realm, but decidedly one foot out - he certainly is in a different world entirely from Christopher Rufo, to put it mildly. But so far, I haven’t yet encountered an account that grapples with the material basis either for wokeness or the reaction against it. Williams adds a few interesting arguments to the discussion, but his account ultimately can never rise above a description of concurrent discrete events without any deeper causal story as to why the long march of woke continues.

[Ot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reminded me of my own politics (which are complicated and I won’t get into it for your sake), but it is a short book that anyone tapped into the current political and cultural zeitgeist can read—regardless of their own politics. I get its thesis, but I didn’t agree with its proofs. I also wish it wasn’t written so academically. Much prefer Baldwin’s and Coates’ writing on these topics.

[Madison · Rating 1 out of 5]

Most sentences are incoherent and have forced metaphors. This is pretty much unreadable. Also none of his points are supported by evidence.

Don’t waste your time on this.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Egregious abuse of footnotes. Thematically excellent.

[Sheldon · Rating 3 out of 5]

eloquent observations that lack insight

While I found elements of Williams personal experience interesting, the book left me struggling to define an overall point. Arguing for the dissolution of identity as a political dynamic, while at the same time basing your credibility in your unique identity makes it hard to see the author as genuine. I wish the author had proved his experiences a bit more as I think this would have added more to the book than the bland generalizations of identity politics. While the tone and style is smooth and eloquent, the overall argument is thin and excessively anecdotal and so I would not recommend broadly.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought I would give Thomas Chatterton Williams another intellectual chance and read this book.

Beyond the fact that it loses most if not all of a star for no index?

In the Afterword, and in the chapter before that about "Cancel Culture" he’s still a douche about Palestinian issues and the original cancel culture of Zionism.

Williams was one of the organizers of the project to write the infamous 2020 “Harper’s letter” in Harper’s magazine. Many of the “Karens” — male, female, intersex, white, black, multiracial — there’s some petard-hoisting for you, TCW — who whined about allegedly being “cancelled” were Zionists who have for decades heavy-handedly cancelled antt-Zionist voices. (Don't cite Chomsky to prove me wrong, as he's anti-BDS among other things, and in addition, I think his second wife puppeteers him on issues like this.)

I wrote about it.

And later updated with this link.

From which:

About a week later, even more writers and media professionals — most of whom were far less renowned than Chomsky or Brooks or Rowling, including myself — presented "A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate," that addressed the specific instances alluded to in the original The Letter, while also pointing out the plainly transparent irony that, if you're a marquee name publishing a letter about a censorship in Harper's fucking Magazine, you are, by definition, not actually being censored or cancelled. If you're a famous intellectual or writer, and people get pissed at you for, say, repeatedly spewing transphobic bullshit, and they stop buying your books because we live in a capitalist society and they do not want to financially support rhetoric that they consider to be hateful or harmful, then that's not censorship. It is, quite literally, free speech, and using good free speech to drown out bad free speech, which is exactly how all of the idealist platitudes about free speech say that it's supposed to work.

Per my piece, TCW played the “martyr card” and I don’t think ever stopped playing it.

And, when the fraud Greenwald calls you a fraud, you’re a fraud indeed.

Side note: Kamel Daoud, a Harper’s signatory? I deplore the fatwa on his head. That said, “The Mersault Investigation” is as much a so-so postmodernist ripoff of Camu’s “The Stranger” as it is “brilliant and deeply humanizing.”

As for other specifics in the Afterword? Refusing to identify someone like Zionist thug Simon Sebag Montefiore as exactly that shows you where he is.

Or calling out the pro-Zionist New York Times for writing “both sides” stories (when it really hasn’t, nor has it apologizes for running fake stories about alleged mass rapes and other things), shows you where he’s at.

Or, per the Harper’s letter, on page 225 of the book, again claiming that Zionists are being cancelled, shows you where he’s at.

Or, not telling how anti-Zionism is conflated with antisemitism, 226. (And, dood, this is where having no index backfires on you.) And, he continues to do this later in the afterword. Living in Tex-ass, and also reading Mondoweiss, I know the reality of UT-Austin protests vs the BS of TCW and Gov. Strangeabbott.

Later on in the Afterword, TCW, who decries “flattening” elsewhere, does it here in spades. In reality, beyond knowing that Israel started ethnic cleansing even before the Nakba. I mean, TCW flattens pre-2023 history as much as an Israeli bulldozer flattening a Palestinian village. There’s ZERO description of all of the grievances leading up to Oct. 7, 2023

As for his aside on the Dobbs ruling in the afterward? Yes, the Roe decision did not have the best jurisprudence. That said, it did not argue women’s privacy rights or related Tenth Amendment rights as well as it could have. Sadly, Arthur Goldberg was no longer on the court, or that might have happened. That said, even crystalline jurisprudence would not have prevented Dobbs. The fact that Ruth Bader Ginsberg, cited by TCW, didn’t recognize that, is yet another reason to know that she’s overrated and he’s again wrong.

And, going back to the opening? As far as him saying issues of race almost always reduce to class, and citing Adolph Reed? They don’t, and I’ve argued that with Reed’s white flunky, Doug Henwood. Reason I mention that is, other than trying to score points off identitarian librulz, does TCW have any real class-based personally actionable concerns?

Otherwise, this is an “in-group” book. If you’re not an A-list media or social media influencer, whether of the identitarian “librul” but not really left, or the TCW/Andrew Sullivan “classical liberal” world, or maybe A-list wingnuts, or maybe a few A-list actual leftists, this book isn’t for you. Or me.

The rest of the book? Maybe 2.5 stars after accounting for it having no index.

Even there, though, TCW shoots himself in the foot. He calls out antiracist activists for calling out the Poetry Foundation and its magazine, and defends Eli Lilly his own self, whose foundation funds it. Beyond that, the real correct answer, missed by TCW, missed by both defenders and critics of the Poetry Foundation? “Scholls Ferry Rd” as a poem is a big steaming pile of shit. Beyond that, the Lilly Foundation has

The chapter on “new new journalism”? So-so. Plenty of other people for plenty of other reasons have called out “both sides” journalism for years. Repeatedly citing Adam Rubenstein? That’s the same guy now at Bari Weiss’ cancel-culture Free Press, so presumably lying here, too.

There are bits of the book, about identitarian politics, that would rise to 4 stars, setting aside no index. But, they're only small parts of the book.

But, with the Afterward? A 1-star book.

(One other low-star reviewer may be right that TCW has some sort of butt-hurt envy-fascination with Ta-Nehesi Coates. That said, I think Coates is overrated.)

[Brady · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I have an extensive vocabulary that I have been told is intimidating, this book is just dense with ten dollar words. Guessing someone didn't listen to their editor.

I attempted and skipped the forward and the prologue and delved into chapter one. Got tired of having to reread each sentence multiple times to fully understand what the author was trying to convey. I thought I was being a bit harsh but then my friend said the exact same thing and she's a lawyer whose intelligence I hold in high regard. So it's not just me. Shame as the reason I bought the book was because the premise was intriguing.

Mainly leaving this so others don't feel so defeated if they came to the same conclusion.

[Aubrey Nekvinda · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was so pedantic and hard to read

[Phillip Seeberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never been a friend of our 47th president. But I’ve never been able to become a Democrat. This book gives the reason so well. I took the following notes:

Obama commenting on Henry Louis Gates
Obama commenting on Florida killing by George Zimmerman. These hurt his stated desire to have a color blind government.

Indiana teen from Covington and Native American in DC
Jussie Smollett
And Democrats against the Covington teen and supporting Smollett did damage to those against real violence.
Trumps opponents were open to any story that could affirm what they already decided to believe.
Trump’s politicizing Covid restrictions caused an opposite reaction from the Left which went all in on every restriction. Including the closure of outdoor spaces
After the murder of George Floyd the same people who fought to keep people social distancing were pushing people to protest in dense groups
Off again on again mask wearing policies hurt faith in medical experts.
Guidelines to distribute scarce resources like Paxlovid during COVID did not treat everyone equally, but should prioritize ethnic minorities, even though models showed that this would lead to a higher number of deaths.
Nancy Pelosi called speculation of a lab leak or restricting travel from China xenophobic.
When Trump had Operation Warp Speed to come up with a mRNA vaccine Biden and Harris said not to trust it.
The concept in 2018-2020 that all white people participate in racism and white supremacy simply by being white. An interesting example of the president of Princeton writing that his school had institutional racism, and was surprised when the Department of Education launched an investigation, at which time, the school denied they were racist.
Land acknowledgments before meetings
Any disparity between racial groups is evidence of racism. Standardized tests for example.
Defund the police movement after George Floyd.
BLM protests that burned entire blocks to the ground were described on national TV as “fiery but mostly peaceful “ because the word “violence” would have been racist to use in the context.
The takeover of Portland by white adherents of BLM. (Performative display of anti racism)
The mutiny at the New York Times over a Tom Cotton op-ed that some workers protested on Twitter. It led to the abandoning of the ideal of neutrality.
“The definition of [racism] had been expanded so far beyond any layperson’s understanding as to be virtually unrecognizable.”
“The story of the breakdown in social order [from the 2020 protests] … was not only suppressed; it was deemed functionally unspeakable to catastrophic and lasting consequence.”
“What was only recently a non controversial … position- that academic institutions should remain neutral on debatable issues … was seen the the post-Floyd era of moral clarity as a conservative stance or, worse, one that was complicit with oppression.”
Such statements (about the Rittenhouse verdict) were boosted by journalists as though conveying uncontested truths that were self-evident.
The author says that after a French teacher was beheaded by an Islamic extremist for showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in class for instructional purposes, the New York Times described the victim as having ‘incited anger’. This excusing of the perpetrator differed from the US reaction just 5 years earlier after the Charlie Hebdo killings.
The Republican Party has become more attractive to working class Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, many of whom feel alienated from ever shifting , frequently counterintuitive elite manners and etiquette.
For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.
People who advocate for diversity want different groups represented, but they don’t want different ideas represented. There is still (to them) the right view and the wrong view.
Colleges like Harvard had condemned the George Floyd killing and had issues strong statements in other cases. But was very silent with regards to the Hamas slaughter of Jews in Israel and the subsequent antisemitism on campus.

[Jeff Francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Knopf must’ve really had a time figuring out how to market Thomas Chatterton Williams’s “Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.” Is it current affairs? Is it philosophy? Is it racial studies? Is it a memoir (an early part briefly sounds like it might be a Black “Hillbilly Elegy”)?... Given that it’s a bit of all these things, it’s probably best merely to categorize SoOD as ‘social sciences.’

It’s like, even the title is misleading, as Williams’s narrative focuses not only on the events of 2020, but as far back as the killing of Trayvon Martin, and as recently as the anti-Israel protests on American campuses.

So what’s Williams’s conclusion?... well, I’m still trying to figure that out. There’s not so much an overriding thesis as each of these events being viewed through the author’s personal lens, e.g., how he spent the COVID lockdowns, where he was when he heard about Jan. 6—oh, and by the time you finish SoUD, you’ll have lost track of how many times Williams reminded you he lived in France.

What’s most interesting about SoOD is how the firmly left Williams is regarded by his own side as a ‘dissenter.’ Best I can tell, this means he simply takes the radical step of looking at the facts of an issue before deciding his reaction to it. A good example from the book is pointing out how sweepingly misreported the Kyle Rittenhouse case was in major media.

He also takes a similarly balanced approach to the infamous 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation (to refresh: when it was reported that White, MAGA-bedecked teens from a Catholic school in Kentucky had verbally harangued Native-American demonstrators, the national anger was so frenzied the school closed and the boys and their families went into hiding… when it was later reported that the Native American demonstrators were indeed verbally harangued—though not by the students but rather a Black religious sect—the demonstrators' mistreatment was instantly and willfully forgotten by the online mob).

As I stated, it’s hard to suss out Williams’ exact message with SoOD, but he does show that no one side owns the social-justice narrative, or are innocent of spreading misinformation.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating: DNF—abandoned in search of a more balanced view

"Summer of Our Discontent” is an ambitious examination of the cultural and political turmoil that emerged from the year 2020 and its aftermath, especially around issues of speech, liberalism, and identity.

DNF (Did Not Finish), however, the book’s approach and tone made it difficult to remain engaged, particularly for someone seeking a more balanced interpretive lens on an increasingly polarized world.

Williams’s work aims to dissect the shift in social mores and taboos following pivotal events like the George Floyd protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing heavily on the erosion of open discourse and the rise of “cancel culture.”

The arguments are well-cited and, at times, incisive.

Yet, the narrative occasionally slips into an ivory tower rhetorical mode and can feel overwrought, with a tendency towards professorial hyperbole that distances rather than clarifies. The result is a book that seems to demand either full agreement with the author’s liberal critique of both left and right—or significant patience with his often bleak assessment.

A recurring critique, and a reason for my disengagement, is the book’s overall bleakness.

While tracing the casualties of social justice orthodoxy and cultural monoculture, Williams struggles to offer substantive hope or actionable ideas for change, making the final stretch feel less like a roadmap and more like a requiem for a lost era of discourse. This approach left me wanting a broader range of voices and a greater generosity toward differing perspectives.

Who Is This Book For?
Those who share Williams’s classical liberal sensibilities—or who are already skeptical of dominant cultural narratives—may find “Summer of Our Discontent” validating and, at times, bracingly sharp.

But if you are seeking a truly balanced, open exploration of the era’s complexities and paradoxes, the book may prove frustratingly one-sided, more a lament than a dialogue-starter. For readers interested in the causes and consequences of America’s cultural crises but hoping for a nuanced, pluralistic conversation, the book’s tenor and narrow focus may prompt an early exit.

[Susan D'Entremont · Rating 4 out of 5]

When someone is denigrated by the right as being too woke and by the left as being too right-leaning, the way Thomas Chatterton Williams is, I am always curious, so I picked up this book.

The author doesn't necessarily break any new ground with this book, but he brings together many recent events and ways of thinking in an interesting way that may lead readers to look at them from a new angle. He outlines how some of the aggression and lack of openness to free speech is mirrored on the left and the right, steadily building on one another to the point where we are today, not even attempting to talk to each other. For instance, the downplaying of the violence and destruction of property during protests after George Floyd's killing because the greater ideals of racial equality and protest of police violence were so important, has a mirror image in the January 6 protests, where those protesting felt that they were also upholding an ideal.

It was odd and uncomfortable to read this book in mid-October 2025 as a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel is, fingers crossed, being negotiated. After all the destruction in Gaza, I had forgotten how horrendous and disgusting the initial October 7 attacks and subsequent torture and killing of civilians were. Was it downplayed by the media at the time, or did I push it out of my mind as Israel continued to attack Gaza? In any case, limiting conversation on the topic in the US certainly didn't help either side of this conflict.

I found the footnotes to be as interesting, if not more so,) than the main text (e.g. the voting in the 2024 presidential election was less racially polarized than any election since 1972). However, they are lengthy, and some readers may find them intrusive. They likely also mean that the audio version of the book is cumbersome.

The author uses more academic sentence construction and language than is necessary in a book meant for a general audience, but it is mostly easy to follow and engaging. Do I agree with all he has written in this book? I do not. But he states his arguments compellingly, and I will likely read this book again to better absorb his thoughts.

[Kem Barfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Chatterton Williams position is interesting. It appears to acknowledge that many of the current prevalent positions are bombastic, extreme, and wrongheaded. However, he also feels movements such as Black Lives Matter, Wokeism, and antiracism either have no value, are preposterous in scope, or possibly even have a negative effect on the harmony of the country. He misses that disruption was the point of all these. While I acknowledge that many of his rich examples demonstrate positions that were too extreme, we have been presented multiple visions. The various movements contained those speaking of excessive corrections, those merely interested in having us admit to a societal structure which is hurtful to a significant proportion of our citizenry, and more middling notions. I believe it is similar to the models we had during the civil rights movement, violent and nonviolent in particular. We advanced not by dismissing the movement because of its most extreme positions, e.g. Malcolm X, but rather by working in the areas which made sense.

The movements Chatterton Williams appears to decry have generated an amazing amount of scholarship and information. Further research and study is warranted and rational leaders are needed but to dismiss it whole cloth alienates too many and reinforces what they see as unfair.

Additionally I found Chatterton Williams personally interesting and some of his position more understandable given his background. He is a biracial person, raised in New Jersey, but who lived in France for many years, is an author, and a visiting professor. Although I am sure he has worked hard to become the man he is, his life I suspect has been exceptional in several ways. Those forces have shaped how he sees the world.

Still, I enjoyed the book. so many now are trying in their own ways to comprehend how we got here, to know how we could have done better, and to map better strategies on the future. This book by Chatterton Williams is more information to contribute to that effort.

[Serge · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this rather short book does a few things well. Williams makes a case for vigorous return to the norms of liberalism that "antiracist" bluster and cancellation eroded. He offers a detailed analysis of the pivot from outrage over streamed racialized violence to the performative and unjust elite capture of this outrage. I did not find the book particularly controversial (I thought his interview with Margaret Hoover on Firing Line was more provocative). I appreciated his skilled use of the arguments advanced by Raymond Aron two generations ago when the Western imagination was forced to confront the excesses of cultural Maoism. Wiliams deliverson his promise of charting a course between Scylla and Charybdis: "Our liberal Western democracies, run through the supercollider of identity, risk collapsing on themselves. The temptation of coercive, illiberal solutions from the left and the right has never been greater in my lifetime. We find ourselves now overwhelmed by paralyzing, highly subjective notions of grievance and the toxic reactionary backlash they are said to validate. Escaping both traps means consciously de-emphasizing zero-sum tribal oppositions and keeping faithwith the objective democratic values of the liberal society..." While I learned llittle about the Garner, Castile, Ahmery, or Taylor tragedies, Williams offers valuable context for the Rittenhouse tragedy and the dystopian Portland experiment in anarchy. I will use this book in my AP Government and Politics class and invite my students to hear Mr. Williams speak if his book tour brings him to our area

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really was looking forward to this book because I'd read a few of his articles and was curious. I also share a lot in common with him as an American living abroad and seeing the changes through a different lens from those in the country.

I really loved the book. It starts as a kind of modern history lesson, reminding us of what life was life during one particular extreme summer (2020). I had forgotten things and certainly didn't remember how they all fit together.

He then goes a lot more in depth on some of the theories and things that have happened since. It is part memoir, part philosophy, part history lesson,... I loved this going back and forth and putting everything into context together.


I expected the book to be all about race, but in fact it is much more broadly about identity and culture, the things we value and what we are willing to do to get there.

I felt like he has clarified a lot of the things I have been thinking and put it all into a framework. It's been hard to be a middle road between the extremists on both sides recently and it helped a lot have him think through the ideas.

My only real complaint is that I think he wrote a book that is too ambitious and I feel a bit like he got lost in the middle. Perhaps it's impossible to sum it all up in a lesson for all of us. And perhaps he wouldn't want to simplify into a call to action. He is calling for nuance! But even if I'm not sure if it is right, I still missed that and wanted a bit more structure and purpose. Perhaps I should reread it some time so I can understand more....

[Tim Schillinger · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pros
- Documents the inconsistencies and contradictions on the political left over the past decade, highlighting patterns that deserve study and discussion

Cons
- Unbalanced, focusing almost exclusively on the left as the source of America’s political gridlock, often using language and dog whistles that appeal to the right
- Ignores the structural reasons behind political contradictions, treating “the left” as a monolithic entity and creating an easy strawman
- Fails to consider the broader context behind the decline of American politics, including corporate greed and lobbying, social media-driven identity politics, and the erosion of human voices in governance leading to corruption and grifting
- Minimally addresses issues on the right, overlooking the religious and cold-war meme motivations that prevents them from engaging in constructive political discourse that while casting the left as the sole antagonist, which oversimplifies the realities of political conflict

Favorite part
Gained a clearer understanding of the strawman arguments portraying the left as solely responsible for political dysfunction in America today. The examples are useful, but they present only part of the story, helping to clarify the incomplete narratives some people operate from.

[Daniel Mala · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like to see people try to answer tough question and this is at least an attempt and at looking at a more equal social justice across all populations. However, there are several places where the arguments fail. Thomas runs into a few problem areas that are common. First is that he accurately identifies his audience. Basically, people that read books that have anything to do with social justice are more apt to be educated and often younger on average and more liberal. Now the point he is trying to make is that his audience is making mistakes with things like cancel culture and monoculture ideology. The problem is that he is wrong that this is singularly a young, educated, liberal error. There are egregious examples of people of all backgrounds trying to tell others how they should be. But he is trying to tell his audience that they are wrong about some things and by bringing in flawed examples of misunderstanding like Kyle Rittenhouse is not a very good example. He does touch on a bigger problem divide between the poor and the wealthy. And that the way to defeat an opposing argument is to successfully debate it on the merits. There are plenty of clear examples of that, but he chose to go with the you and them argument with sometimes them being right. It would have been more powerful to detail multiple examples of say cancel culture and undemocratic practices that puts some of the young educated liberals (his readers) in the same camp as uneducated, racist, conservatives to show them (his readers) there folly. But he choses to use bad examples to make a poorly relayed point. I think I'd agree with him on several of his points, but wish he did a better job articulating them instead of trying to be edgy about it all. Cheers!