The Decay of American Public Discourse

Review of "Summer of Our Discontent" by Thomas Chatterton Williams

THE DECAY OF AMERICAN PUBLIC DISCOURSE

Review of “Summer of Our Discontent” by Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas St. Thomas

Editors’ note: The review below is an abridged version of a much longer, serialized, chapter-by-chapter review that appeared on Thomas St. Thomas’s Substack. Links to those posts: Preface, Prologue, and Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; Chapter 4; Chapter 5; Chapter 6; Chapter 7; Chapter 8; Chapter 9.

Summary: Summer of Our Discontent

Thomas Chatterton Williams came into my life through his first book, Losing My Cool, published in 2010. Likely because we are both of mixed race—he was born and raised in the era of hip hop, although a few years behind me—and we both have children who aren’t obviously Black, it felt like we were best friends. I devoured that book unlike any I had ever read before. I remember being pissed off at Amazon for not delivering his next book, Self-Portrait in Black and White, in time for a trip where I planned to devour it too.

This new book, Summer of Our Discontent, is quite a bit different from his previous two. It is much less about him and his experiences growing up in New York and then living in France as a biracial American, watching how different societies react to his and his children’s racial ambiguity in such different ways. This time he turns his attention outward, still sharing his personal experiences, but more so in an effort to understand a societal movement where he is on the outside without a tribe to join. As I write that last sentence, I realize that is likely the common thread with his first two books: on the outside without a tribe to join.

And that is likely why I feel like Williams and I would be besties. I have never felt the need to join a tribe and recoil at the idea that I ought to. I have a personality that pushes me in certain directions culturally and politically, but I have never wanted to be associated with groups.

To summarize this book, Williams traces the decay of American public discourse over the last two decades, arguing that a convergence of political, social, and technological forces has led to an era of rigid certainty and tribalism.

Preface & Prologue

The introduction sets the stage, framing the book as a personal and intellectual journey through a period of profound social change. Williams outlines his core thesis: that the principles of liberal humanism are under threat from ideological extremes on both the left and the right.

One passage particularly resonated with me, seeming to echo the ideas of my friend Jordan Peterson (JBP): “The truth is that people seldom have ideas, but ideas—and the intimations of such, their prerational moods, assumptions, and gestures—very certainly have people.” JBP has often used this concept, crediting it to Carl Jung, to explain how ideas can control individuals and entire societies. Jung’s actual quote, “Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us,” is a simpler version of the same sentiment. Williams reinforces this point on the next page, writing that ideas “simply inhabit us…like personalities.” This is a classic JBP (via Jung) analysis of human behavior.

Two other passages from the prologue particularly spoke to me, encapsulating Williams’s views on our racial and ethnic problems:

• “We are never going to transcend the racism this historical oppression conjured by reinforcing those same categories it both establishes and continues to feed on.”

• “The progressive development of…the West will not be attained through the negative forces of guilt and resentment.”

Many people, I believe, don’t realize how much current discourse on racial issues—including the Black Lives Matter movement and “antiracism”—is designed to enhance our differences based on race, functioning more like a tribal system of revenge. This approach moves us backward, away from the successes of the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. Even when critics point this out and their supporters tacitly agree, the rhetoric is often dismissed as an extreme version of a good intention. But it’s not. The literature and language of these movements explicitly reject the liberal ideal of equality. This isn’t a different intention; it’s a different understanding of humanity that is fundamentally at odds with the American/MLK/Civil Rights vision of human equality. This is Williams’s core point and why his message resonates with people across the political spectrum.

Chapter 1. The First “Black” President and the Failure (or Fear) of Post-Racialism

This chapter revisits the optimism of the Obama era and the promise of a “post-racial” society. Williams argues that this promise was never realized, exploring how and why America failed to move beyond race. He suggests there was a collective fear or unwillingness to relinquish these powerful identity categories.

Williams describes the widespread hope he felt walking the streets of Brooklyn in 2008, a feeling he compares to the celebrations he witnessed in France during the 2018 World Cup. But what we hoped would be a new era, one that left racial tribalism behind, instead turned into something more like the distorted celebrations that followed the O.J. Simpson verdict. The superficial and shallow categories of race were reified and clung to as the only possible form of identity, as if people were too afraid to abandon them for something deeper and more universal. Like the O.J. celebrations, which were divided along racial lines, we fell right back into “team black” and “team white.”

The media shared this widespread hope, with headlines like the New York Times’s “Obama Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls,” which declared that Obama’s election “amounted to a national catharsis” and that “the American Civil War ended.” However, Williams argues that this hope began to fade when the president himself framed key events with potential racial overtones within the very framework we were trying to escape. This may have been the moment people realized that the promise of moving beyond racial divides was not yet fulfilled. It felt like climbing a slide as a child—difficult to get to the top, and any misstep could send you all the way back down.

Chapter 2. Donald Trump and the State of Exception

Williams analyzes the Trump presidency as a period that shattered political norms and created a “state of exception,” where the normal rules of discourse were suspended. This chapter explores how Trump’s rise exacerbated polarization and pushed his opponents into a state of reactive, and often equally rigid, opposition.

Williams uses the Nietzsche quote “God is dead” to describe the feeling many people had on the morning of the 2016 election. The result was a massive surprise for most, and it fundamentally changed how people saw the country. Most of the people in my social circle in San Diego, who are largely secular, certainly felt their “god” had died.

When I woke up that morning, I received a text from a friend saying, “I guess you were right.” This was a reference to a conversation we’d had in a public health program at San Diego’s National University. The discussion of Trump’s candidacy was inescapable, even in our classes. One day, a fiery young white woman with a working-class background, in a room of immigrants and American minorities, voiced her support for Trump. The class was in disbelief. Having lived in different places, including rural Tennessee, I understood her perspective and casually told my friend that I thought Trump would win. I was pleasantly surprised when my prediction came true, even though I was a Libertarian voter. My friends, however, were traumatized. The world was shockingly different from the narrative they had constructed, and it felt like the rug had been pulled out from under them.

This kind of “reset” is what Williams describes. So many in the U.S. now faced a world they didn’t understand. The new world, which had just recently elected a Black president twice, was suddenly viewed as being consumed by white supremacy and in need of “resistance.” This resistance would eventually take precedence over all else, creating a mindset on both sides that led people to sacrifice truth for the sake of winning.

Chapter 3. The Plague

This chapter uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a lens to view societal fragmentation. Williams examines how the isolation, fear, and shift to an almost exclusively online existence during the pandemic accelerated misinformation, tribalism, and the breakdown of social trust.

He writes:

Reactively, many to the left of Trump embraced a kind of pandemic orthodoxy and ideological counter-allegiance to lockdown, masking, and distancing that could itself be extremely irrational and contradictory to the swiftly evolving science.

In fact, much of the science wasn’t “evolving”; it had already been established for decades. Epidemic response plans, including those developed under President G.W. Bush, advised identifying and protecting those at risk while allowing others to continue with their lives. This consensus was widely known but ignored. To this day, I know people who are still “infected” not by COVID, but by what I see as a mind virus that treats COVID differently from any other illness. They continue to get booster shots, take special medications, or test themselves whenever they feel sick. Why would you even know you have COVID? The people who supposedly fear COVID still curiously neglect the very things that actually protect them from severe illness, such as exercising and building healthy habits. I even see some in grocery stores wearing masks incorrectly—below their noses, on their chins, or with wide gaps—showing a form of performative virtue signaling.

Williams takes a balanced look at these unscientific behaviors, showing how the new stresses, combined with the summer of the Black Lives Matter movement, gave society’s free-floating anxiety a new focus. It wasn’t just uneducated people spreading conspiracy theories. Often, those with the highest levels of education and privilege led the charge down the path of falsehoods, all while cloaked in virtue.

Williams highlights the curious collision of COVID and BLM, which exposed a sudden shift in what was considered an acceptable risk. One day, a virus was deadly and on the verge of collapsing society; the next, when thousands gathered to protest police violence, it was an acceptable risk. As he writes, “Those of us who moved in progressive circles found ourselves under significant moral pressure to understand that social distancing was now an issue of merely secondary importance.” Gathering in a place of worship, on a beach, or in a park was derided as selfish and irresponsible, but cramming into the streets for a BLM march made perfect sense. Williams is careful not to preach about which was more or less important, but simply to point out that people on both sides of the issue were obviously and proudly biased, abandoning logic and reason and sacrificing the truth for the sake of “winning.” Dying of a new virus took a back seat to something more important: fighting white supremacy through “antiracism.”

Chapter 4. The Death of George Floyd and the Cult of “Antiracism”

This is a central chapter of the book, focusing on the social upheaval following George Floyd’s death. Williams critiques the specific brand of “antiracism” that became dominant, arguing that it functions like a dogmatic religion or “cult” with its own heresies and orthodoxies, ultimately hindering rather than helping the cause of racial justice.

This chapter reminded me how frustrating it was to see people suddenly interested in and preaching about issues I had been studying for two decades. Within two weeks, people who had never read a book on race were preaching about white supremacy and using it as a tool to display their virtue on social media. I think this is what religious dogma does for people. To this day, I guarantee the vast majority of people who clung to these ideas have never read or even heard of the extensive social science work done by people like Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, or Shelby Steele. Without knowing their work, it’s hard to be confident in this discussion.

As we see with established religions, it’s easy to pick up a few key ideas and display them as a signal to your tribe. Whether it’s a cross, a Star of David, a black square on Instagram, a trans flag, or a BLM hashtag, they all serve a similar purpose. While Judaism and Christianity are highly developed religions with centuries of thought behind them, modern secular religions have only had a few decades of popularity. Still, all of these displays communicate a set of moral principles endorsed by the person displaying them. In a deeply tribal human environment, it’s always better to have the support of a group than to be alone. People naturally join a “tribal train” to avoid being ostracized. Even if that train collides with another, at least you have the support of your peers and can be a martyr for the cause—which is still better than being shunned.

Williams describes how this new “cult of antiracism” swept through progressive circles almost without challenge, quickly propping up its own priests. He writes, “Any serious attempt to make sense of the staggering excesses and incongruities of the cult of ‘antiracism’ therefore demands a sober and clear-eyed meditation on just what, precisely, so many white Americans…suddenly became so eager to, at the very least, be seen to be breaking away from. This in turn would necessitate an honest acknowledgment of the very real distance we have traveled away from it.” As Shelby Steele might say, white guilt ruled the day.

We went from very few people having heard of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi to their names, faces, and books being everywhere as they guided us to a new way of understanding society and race. I say “new way” on purpose because I don’t think most of us realized that their ideas were a major shift away from what we had traditionally sought: equality. The version of progress preached by MLK and the Civil Rights movement, which sought to treat people without regard to their race, was replaced with a new philosophy that reifies communities based on immutable characteristics. This new view sees society as a permanent battleground for power between races that can only be managed, never resolved. The colorblindness explicitly endorsed by the Civil Rights movement was now purported to be a white supremacist power move.

How did this happen? Why would we go backward? And how is it that almost nobody realized this? Because our institutions, especially media and journalism, did not question this new initiative; instead, they actively supported it and maligned anyone who did not.

Chapter 5. The New New Journalism: Media in the Age of “Moral Clarity”

In this chapter Williams targets the transformation of the media landscape. He argues that major journalistic institutions abandoned the ideal of objectivity in favor of “moral clarity,” becoming active participants in the culture war and thereby losing their credibility as neutral arbiters of truth.

A lengthy quotation from Williams frames his view well:

The late French critic and philosopher René Girard’s mimetic theory, and his notion of the scapegoat as an enduring mechanism of social control, has found much renewed interest in recent years among writers, scholars, and cultural observers attempting to make sense of the sheer energy and viciousness that have been unleashed on uncountable targets in the era of social media. Though he died in 2015, Girard’s ideas continue to provide a durable framework for analyzing the brave new collision of human nature and technology...which we all must now contend with.

Mattias Desmet points this out in The Psychology of Totalitarianism in reference to what happened with COVID, and Williams explains how it applies to journalism. When people have a sense of anxiety, they seek an explanation. Knowing the “why” is liberating because you can then isolate the cause—the scapegoat—and deal with it. When a group of people identify the same scapegoat, the power of a group dynamic is satisfied. The combination of diagnosis and group cohesion forms an unstoppable force. If you point out any flaw in that diagnosis, you will unleash the wrath of someone clinging to it for dear life. If the scapegoat is no longer the problem, they are back in the desert of the unknown, wandering for answers in a world they no longer understand.

Williams quotes Girard, noting that a social order is only possible “if the excluding parties unanimously believe that the person or group expelled is truly dangerous.” The scapegoat’s guilt is proven by the peace that comes from the group’s unity against them. Desmet pointed out that COVID was a scapegoat for the free-floating anxiety felt by many in Western nations, who were rapidly moving toward secularism and losing their sense of purpose. The same thing happened with BLM, as police brutality and white supremacy became the next scapegoat. Journalism turned to scapegoating instead of pursuing truth. “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests,” assuming Jussie Smollett’s story was true before any investigation, the rewriting of American history by The 1619 Project, and the ostracization of anyone who questioned the new orthodoxy became the norm. The media now had a moral framework to support and narratives to construct.

Chapter 6. “Fiery but Mostly Peaceful Protests”

This chapter deconstructs the media and political narratives surrounding the protests and riots of summer 2020. Using the ironic title, Williams critiques the downplaying of violence and the enforcement of a single, politically convenient narrative, highlighting the disconnect between reality and its media representation.

To be clear, it’s estimated that at least one billion dollars in damage was done in the summer of 2020; some estimates are closer to two billion dollars. At least nineteen people were killed. It was the most expensive civil unrest in the nation’s history. There is no doubt that it was incredibly damaging, and I question what came of it, as no real shift in the number of people killed by police has occurred. But the riots and looting were, almost comically, presented as a much-needed and overdue catharsis. NPR even interviewed a trans author named Vicky Osterweil on her book, In Defense of Looting, which argued that “stealing goods and destroying property are direct, pragmatic strategies of wealth distribution and improving life for the working class.” NPR never asked how a concept like property rights, which existed long before America, could be “built on the history of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous oppression.”

Williams writes: “‘So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.’ This was the discourse being promoted in even our most vanilla of mainstream media outlets at the very moment that small, frequently minority-owned businesses in cities around the country were being reduced to ashes, their proprietors beaten to the brink of death…for having the gall to attempt to safeguard their livelihoods.” This is why so many were upset with the coverage: we were told not to believe our lying eyes, and then to celebrate what we were always told was immoral.

I remember people posting Martin Luther King Jr.’s words to justify the violence. Williams points this out: “If rioting is the language of the unheard, as Martin Luther King is often cynically invoked to have said…it must also be acknowledged that it can easily amount to the gibberish of the debilitatingly bored and disengaged…It is the idiom that functions as a Band-Aid applied to the existential wound of non-meaning in a society that is frankly more democratic, multiethnic, and egalitarian than any other in recorded history.” The irony was not lost on Dostoevsky, who, in Notes from the Underground, made the philosophical point that humanity, without suffering, would break something just to see what would happen.

Chapter 7. We Are All Americans Now: “Antiracism” Goes Global in the Age of Social Media

Williams examines how American-centric social justice discourse, particularly around “antiracism,” was exported globally through social media. He critiques the universal application of these ideas, which often ignores different national and cultural contexts, leading to a flattening of global conversations.

I remember watching BLM marches in other countries, especially England, and thinking, “Wait, they don’t even have guns.” How did people across an ocean, with different laws and racial dynamics, adopt this ideology so quickly that they would march in the streets for it? It’s not because of personal experience; police shootings of any color in London are not a widespread issue. Why did their posters say “I can’t breathe!”? This is the power of both legacy and social media. Williams is pointing out how overly connected we are, but not necessarily in a good way. A specifically American framework for dealing with racism shouldn’t be effective outside its borders. American “antiracism” would make no sense in Japan, Mexico, or South Africa, which is another reason to be highly skeptical of it. Adopting a view of human society that disappears once you cross an imaginary line should make you question how valid it is.

What’s really going on is scapegoating: finding a place to put the blame and explain the general anxiety in a society that has lost its way. A great example of the U.S. exporting this brand of antiracism is the narrative from the New York Times about the beheading of a French teacher for showing a Charlie Hebdo cartoon. The headline, which was quickly removed, read, “French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street.” The victim was described “as having ‘incited anger’ among his Muslim students.” It was as if the paper was rationalizing why a person would behead another human being, suggesting that the victim was to blame for the environment he created, not the killer for the wicked ideology he had adopted. This ideology always reminds me of an abusive husband who blames his wife for making him hit her: “See what you made me do?!”

This is how “antiracism” fits into this description. It sees the world through racial power dynamics, a hierarchy where some races have more power than others. It is our job to point out and destroy those power dynamics, which is why everything these days is deemed racist. Our main job is to dismantle these hierarchies. When a Muslim man in France beheads someone, we are expected to talk about it in terms of who is part of what group and how those groups and their power dynamics fit into the narrative. We won’t disparage someone lower on the hierarchy for something we would disparage someone higher on that hierarchy, because we need to lift those below us and bring those above us down. American “antiracism” was seeping into the world and distorting the very thing that made Western nations great: individual sovereignty and equality.

Chapter 8. “Cancel Culture” and Its Discontents

In Chapter 8, Williams provides a direct analysis of the phenomenon of “cancel culture.” Playing on Freud’s famous title, Williams argues that it is a real and dangerous force that stifles free expression, intellectual risk-taking, and viewpoint diversity, enforcing ideological conformity through social and professional punishment.

Williams’s diagnosis is unfortunately timely, as numerous people are currently getting “canceled” for their comments on the death of Charlie Kirk. A website called Charlie Kirk Data Foundation (now defunct) reportedly gathered as many as 60,000 examples of people allegedly celebrating his death, and many people have already been fired for their public comments.

Shortly after the debate on police violence heated up, Williams reminds us that five writers including himself drafted a public letter titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” More than 150 artists and public intellectuals signed it, including J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, and Margaret Atwood—hardly a right-wing cabal. Still, they and anyone who supported it were publicly attacked for their tone and timing. The letter, published in Harper’s Magazine, quickly went viral.

The letter identified “‘an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.’” It stressed that “the restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.’”

Despite these incredibly basic points—”truly the bare minimum for a liberal, open society”—the letter became a lightning rod. It was hotly debated, almost never for its content, but usually for its timing. Working off the tenets of “antiracism,” those who critiqued the letter argued, as summarized by Williams, that “reality itself is biased; therefore, debate must be restricted, and we should be the arbiters of what is permissible.” The letter was framed as anti-Black and white supremacist, even though it was signed by several non-white people, including Williams himself (who had also had a leading role in writing it). The critics argued that this was simply evidence of their internalized racism.

A surprising number of critics argued in a counter-letter that the current silencing of new voices isn’t a significant problem, “given how ‘marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing.’” This suggests that an equality achieved by rendering everyone as insecure as oppressed minorities once were is a desirable vision for the future. The phrase “rendering everyone as insecure as oppressed minorities” is key. That’s where “antiracism” ideas seep into everything else. In practice, it’s never about getting everyone to the table on equal grounds; it’s a type of revenge based on resentment. But now the shoe is on the other foot. Resentment for the misguided cancellation of people is fueling revenge against people who are now saying horrible things about a person murdered for expressing opinions that many find controversial. It’s important to remember that the shoe always ends up on the other foot. It’s vital to be careful and principled in the political tools one chooses to use.

Chapter 9. The Spectacle of January 6

Williams’s final chapter analyzes the January 6th Capitol riot. He frames it not as an isolated event, but as the spectacular and inevitable culmination of the trends detailed throughout the book: post-truth politics, extreme polarization, and the performative nature of modern ideology.

I distinctly remember that day. It was a normal workday for me, and since I don’t have cable television, I was unaware of what was happening until my phone started beeping with text messages from two friends. I think they were a bit disappointed with my reaction. I was embarrassed but not surprised. I checked social media to see what was happening, but didn’t expect much more. What I noticed was that neither of them had messaged me during the riots of summer 2020—not when Seattle lost control of a section of the city, leading to lawlessness, murder, and sexual assault; not when a police building was abandoned and burned down; and not when cities were burning and business owners, many of them minorities, were beaten for begging rioters not to destroy their livelihoods. Why now?

I believe this is likely the same double standard that leads people to obsess over Israel while ignoring the millions killed in Yemen, Sudan, and Syria in the last decade alone—the oppressor/oppressed narrative. Unless there’s a perceived power disparity between two groups, it’s just another tragedy and warrants no comment. If there’s a perceived power disparity—”white Jews” (they’re not “white” of course) against oppressed brown Arabs, or white cops against Black Americans—it gets attention. It’s the same reason the murder of a Ukrainian immigrant is ignored: she was killed by the “oppressed.”

Williams writes:

The pathetic insurrection, whipped up by the cheapest internet conspiracy and the most outlandish lies and innuendo about a ‘stolen’ election—all originating in the mouth of the entertainer-president—was but a physical manifestation of the social media era’s much larger and more serious and sustained assault on Truth. Donald Trump might have personified this subversion, but it has been for many years now atmospheric, ‘a pervasive air of unreality,’ as Christopher Lasch already noted, extending far beyond his person or the movement he represents and very much implicating large and influential swaths of the progressive left as well.

Williams points out two major ideas that influenced the lawlessness of some of the BLM protests: “events themselves—even when clearly unethical or explicitly against the law—are not to be considered strictly on their own terms, within an intellectual vacuum.” The intellectual class expected that whenever the law was broken, property destroyed, or people attacked, these actions would be seen in the historical context of a “resistance” against tyranny, which justifies them.

Rationalizing the events of 2020, the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests,” as politically justifiable, spilled into the American psyche of anyone who feels that political action is necessary. During the 2020 riots, I remember people posting pictures of MLK with his quote, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Interestingly, I did not see these people post the same on January 6th.

Summer of Our Discontent is a chronological and thematic critique of the forces that have shattered the American consensus and degraded public discourse over the past two decades. Williams charts a course from the unfulfilled promise of the Obama years to the political spectacle of January 6th, arguing that the key events in between—the Trump presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the social upheaval of 2020—have entrenched a dangerous culture of moral certainty. He contends that this new orthodoxy, enforced by a partisan media and the dynamics of social media, has crippled our ability to reason together, making this book a powerful and urgent call to restore the foundational values of liberalism.

---

Thomas St. Thomas is a husband, father, and veteran of the Afghan war. He writes on topics inspired by his reading, largely focused on the history of Western Civilization, Thomas Sowell’s library, and Dr. Jordan Peterson’s great book list.

His video reviews are on his YouTube channel and he writes his own Substack at Mr. Mulatto. Follow him on X here.