The Goldilocks of Bothsidesism

Robert N. Watson investigates Thomas Chatterton Williams’s “Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.”

By Robert N. WatsonSeptember 22, 2025

• Cultural Studies

• Politics

IN HIS NEW BOOK Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, Thomas Chatterton Williams proposes a unified field theory—of elections, not electrons—in our wildly disunified society. He argues that leftist politics and culture went astray and even insane over the past five years—especially in the George Floyd era of the Black Lives Matter movement and the DEI era among institutional elites that followed, but also in COVID-19 management. That pair of originating sins squandered what Williams often seems to assume had been a fair and amicable 21st-century American Eden. The wily serpent he accuses of feeding us the fatal apple was identitarianism, and once we swallowed that, our national soul became forfeit to the demonic Donald Trump.

So, BLM + DEI ⟶ MAGA, after COVID-19 weakened the the sociopolitical system’s immunity. Tribalizing categories of identity then became the vector of transmission of that system’s sickness. The main flaw in Williams’s articulation of this formula is the way the arrow sometimes morphs into an equals sign. Defending highly vulnerable people is not equivalent to attacking them, yet Williams convicts both actions for conspiring in “the demise of discourse.” Marching in anti-racist solidarity can’t justly be put in parallel with voting to reelect Donald Trump because you heard that somebody born with a penis has been allowed to play on a women’s college volleyball team somewhere.

Well-behaved, hardworking, taxpaying, law-abiding longtime US residents being grabbed off the street by armed thugs in masks, handcuffed and thrown into the backs of vans, then shipped off irretrievably, with no due process of law, to hellish prisons in foreign countries is hardly comparable to middle managers forced to endure a few pietistic corporate training events. For the latter misdeed, Williams rounds up the usual suspects, but Ibram X. Kendi–inspired struggle sessions have not been crushing the lives of millions of white Americans for centuries. Robin DiAngelo was briefly deified in some circles despite being (here’s my “white fragility” talking) insufferable, but Williams characteristically exaggerates in claiming that “DiAngelo’s viral assertion that all white people participate in racism and white supremacy […] became a matter of conventional wisdom, repeated without pushback or skepticism on virtually every major platform the country had to offer.”

At moments, Williams admirably pulls back from bothsidesism, but he is mostly a political Goldilocks who keeps gesturing toward some just-right golden mean that would restore social harmony. He never specifies, however, what that would look like, except perhaps a Barack Obama “Hope” poster. It’s worth remembering that Goldilocks ends up having to flee from some angry bears (who could easily have been roaring, like the Charlottesville Nazis, “You will not replace us!”). He seems to think that an equitable nation will become real if we act as if that were already our reality. Yet it does seem noteworthy that this urgent mainstream clamor to cease sorting people by race arises at the exact moment when people of color might be gaining some partial compensation for the inherited and continuing disadvantages of being people of color. He even scoffs at the idea that people of color in white-dominated societies “have knowledge of race and racism that is superior to the knowledge that white people have”; but, as the visionary Romantic poet William Blake wrote, “He who has suffer’d you to impose on him knows you.”

Williams’s books Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd (2010) and Self-Portrait in Black and White (2019), and his own mixed-race heritage that they analyzed, give him good credentials for evenhandedly exploring the discomforts of racial binarisms in the United States and (thanks to his lengthy residence in France) elsewhere. He has published in prestigious journals and won a Guggenheim Fellowship. But the conversion of his journalistic modes and topics into this thesis-driven book may summon some discontents in his readers.

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The title of the book reflects its blurry focus. Summer of Our Discontent adapts Martin Luther King Jr.’s acknowledgment of the “sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent” in his renowned “I Have a Dream” speech, though the book is not about one summer. The subtitle—The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse—spins off into grand abstractions: seemingly an effort to throw a king-size, Dr. King–themed blanket over various sociopolitical observations Williams has accumulated over the past five years.

The resulting lumpiness is reinforced by many pages with footnotes longer than the text, several of them spilling over to the following page, often without a clear sense of why some parts of the evidence and argument are in the main text and others in the footnotes. Sometimes chunks of the main text are repeated in the footnote right below. Other notes are the kind of brief query or addition (sometimes a sentence fragment) that the author or editor might have scribbled on a draft or galley proof, but this book leaves them undigested.

The quality of the prose is also uneven: mostly graceful and efficient, but sometimes meandering or mixing metaphors. For example:

a movement for social justice, which starts from a fertile vision of the world in which no one is diminished yet falters in its attempts to arrive at such an arrangement by means of calamitous shortcuts—ultimately distorting the centuries-long arc of moral progress as it advances. In ways both obvious and subtle, it is in that warp that fresh injustices fester.

Physician of discourse, heal thyself!

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The book rightly laments the way “Americans’ response to the unprecedented challenge of the coronavirus became dangerously and competitively entangled with one’s very sense of personal and group identity—the very opposite of what was needed.” But there is no valid equivalency between the way MAGA “freedom fighters shamelessly confronted, attacked, and even coughed and spat on cashiers and other low-wage workers for daring to enforce their companies’ hygienic policies” and the way “many to the left of Trump embraced a kind of pandemic orthodoxy and ideological counter-allegiance to lockdowns, masking, and distancing that could itself be extremely irrational and contradictory to the swiftly evolving science.” Was a respect for COVID-19 precautions really compelled by devotion to a “group identity,” or was it instead compelled by science and a prudent recognition that it is better to be uncomfortably safe than sorry when a deadly enemy (maybe as bad as the Spanish flu that killed tens of millions) runs out of control?

Williams singles out, for special shaming, an attorney who walked the tourist-crowded beaches of Florida costumed as the Grim Reaper: “There couldn’t be a more apt distillation of the squalid condition of ignorance and impotence—mixed with proselytizing self-righteousness—we’d all been thrust in.” However, what he quotes the Reaper-man saying seems ignorant in only the most benign sense of the word: ­“We aren’t at the point now where we have enough testing, enough data, enough preparation for what’s going to be coming to our state from all over the world from this pandemic.” Wasn’t that just prudent, when horrific tales from hospitals in Italy and elsewhere were filling the news? Cassandra got bad press too—she seemed kind of hysterical—but she was right. For a book whose subtitle makes “certainty” a supervillain, this seems awfully dismissive of the struggle to keep up with the emerging science of the pandemic. I notice that Williams himself published a piece in The Atlantic in mid-2020 celebrating the success of severe COVID restrictions in France (where he was living) and warning that, because of carelessness in Florida and other red states, “American tourists would pose a dire threat to the hard-won stability our [France’s] lockdown has earned us.”

In a long footnote in the book, Williams ridicules the US government’s advice on face masks, pointing out that, early in the pandemic, the surgeon general tweeted, “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!”; yet, only two months later, the CDC was telling people, “Now’s the time to wear a mask.” What he fails to mention is that the surgeon general (according to the New York Times report on that very tweet) was “warning that a run on the masks could risk a shortage harmful to public health professionals.” Hoarding by panicked members of the general public was leaving the people most exposed to COVID-19, and the people most needed to help COVID-19 patients, without protection. To make this an instance of the liberal establishment’s idiotic “self-inflicted moral and intellectual incoherence” is typical of Williams’s determination to make professional elites look stupid enough to justify the stupidity of MAGA in reaction, leaving himself as the sole voice of sanity.

Carelessness is the best ally of confirmation bias. Williams indignantly quotes an extended passage from Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which discusses (without identifying the source) a report that the CDC “urged states to give essential workers access to the vaccine ahead of the elderly on the grounds that older Americans are disproportionately white.” Williams characterizes the report as “ultimately malicious” because elderly patients were disproportionately vulnerable, and so this policy “would also imply a higher number of gross black and non-white deaths.” Would it, though, considering that the workers such a policy would protect were disproportionately poor and nonwhite, and disproportionately exposed, and that vaccinating those workers first would reduce the overall spread of the virus? Anyway, the CDC never recommended that policy; they rejected it when an advisory panel proposed it. Williams then equates that supposed CDC recommendation with Trump’s televised suggestion that people could inject commercial cleaning fluids into their bodies, which of course led to an upsurge in poisonings.

Williams claims that, after all the sacrifice entailed by the early lockdowns, people “were told with a straight face that this had all been done in vain. ‘The risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn’t keep people from protesting racism,’ NPR announced with eyebrow-raising certitude.” But we weren’t being told that it was all in vain; those early lockdowns were needed to keep cases down while hospitals built up their expertise and capacity to treat the direly ill. And NPR didn’t “announce” that; they specified that they were quoting a letter from a group of public health experts. Refusing to recognize that distinction has now, five summers later, cost us most of public broadcasting.

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Like Williams, I rolled my eyes at the righteous justifications (or rationalizations) of massive crowds packed together for hours in the demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd. If the rallies would end racism and police brutality in the United States, a surge in COVID cases would be a small price to pay, but that outcome was hardly in prospect. And yes, the COVID crisis fostered distrust and resentment of authorities (though which non-“elites” should have been in charge of creating and evaluating vaccines and treatment protocols puzzles me; RFK Jr. is providing a terrifying test of that).

Seeking to explain subsequent Trumpist violence and distrust of the so-called liberal media as a reaction to BLM excesses and enablers, Williams remarks that “watching a news anchor mansplain to you that the violent riot you are regarding is ‘mostly peaceful’ […] could be maddening.” True enough, I suspect, for a while in Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon. But it is also maddening to participate in overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations and then be told—actually, mansplained—that the media’s predictable focus on the moments of violence and destruction by a few bad actors is the hidden overarching truth about the event. He badly underrates both the attention-craving bias in video coverage and the likelihood that instigators of fires and fights are immature outliers, opportunistic looters, or even (as I recall painfully from late-1960s peace-and-racial-justice demonstrations) agents provocateurs from the government or right-wing organizations conniving to discredit the protesters in the eyes of the public.

Williams’s critique of racial-justice protests is especially odd given that he takes an opposite angle on the Trumpist insurrection, worrying about “the 99.9999 percent of Americans who also never glimpsed what happened on January 6 but were now submerged in the day’s fragmentary images and forced to develop a meaningful political response” to the event “exponentially amplified through the pseudo-event on our devices.” So, it is a relief when Williams finally brings himself to say that the blame for Trump’s current monstrous reign “lies at the feet of his supporters and enablers alone as well as those in power who failed to thwart his improbable rehabilitation.”

Still, simply blaming cruel and foolish individuals for shoving our country, and other democracies recently, down such an ugly and vertiginous path seems inadequate. As any of the perhaps half dozen people who have read my book on cultural evolution know, I think the recovery of our communities and natural environment requires recognizing something Williams asserts in passing. People certainly have ideas, but—less obviously but no less consequentially—“ideas […] have people.” Beliefs “are contagious, ripping though populations that are sometimes asymptomatic until there is a further crucial mutation. […] They simply inhabit us.” They are non-biological parasites.

Mass movements that come bearing slogans often prove counterproductive because (to adapt this book’s Manichaean pairing) they encourage certainty at the cost of discursive complexity. It does, however, seem crucial (as many left-leaning pundits now assert) for Democrats—or some party that prefers democracy to tyranny—to win back working-class voters who have been triggered by identity politics of various kinds. But it’s wrong to suppose that the current fake-populist neo-feudal kleptocracy, which harnesses American anti-intellectualism for its power, bears any resemblance to the Marx-Engels egalitarian interim goal of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” when it’s really just a dictatorship of some bro illiterates.

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It’s not surprising that many people have come to scorn what Robert Frost, in his late-life sardonic and conservative phase, dismissively called “The guild of social planners / With the intention blazoned on their banners / Of getting one more chance to change our manners.”

The admirable Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” that Williams helped organize in 2020 “was framed as anti-black and white supremacist,” he notes in his book, and “the presence of black and other non-white signatories—including myself—was dismissed as an irony, evidence of further racism (internalized and otherwise), not its reverse.” Some prominent people then withdrew their names from the letter, not because they discovered something wrong with it but because other people with opinions (on other topics) unpopular among progressives had also signed it. That liberal intellectuals would let guilt by association compel them to disavow an endorsement of free speech seems revealingly illogical.

Summer of Our Discontent argues convincingly that “basic words, such as ‘harm’ and ‘safety,’” have been overdeployed to make policies preferred by progressives seem like obvious and urgent necessities. “Unsafe” is now used to bring ideological discomfort under the protections formerly applied to immediate physical endangerment. Williams traces a garish instance: the leftist backlash among New York Times staffers who chased James Bennet out of his job there for approving a senator’s op-ed column. Williams’s narration of the farcical level of self-flagellation on issues of race by the Poetry Foundation and its distinguished journal makes his case even more compellingly (especially if you read the innocuous poem that set off the crisis).

Universities have become the Gettysburg of these uncivil wars, as Trump’s recent extortions make clear. Williams worries that “diversity—a value it would be exceedingly difficult to find a prestigious institution not openly pledging allegiance to”—might actually “mean, effectively, that the same slate of views ought to be expressed by increasingly phenotypically varied” speakers. The hiring pattern in recent years in humanities and social science fields at many excellent institutions of higher learning might seem, at first glance, to validate his concern. But his hyperbole underrates the complexity of the scholarly work in those fields and the intelligent disagreements within them. In the words of the recently literally canceled Stephen Colbert, “reality has a well-known liberal bias”—at least compared to the median political views of the US electorate. And Trumpism has a fanatical anti-truth bias, which I believe is a feature for its adherents, rather than a bug as commonly assumed.

Williams condemns Harvard president Claudine Gay’s initial response to the October 7 Hamas attacks and her misguidedly bland, evasive, legal-boilerplate responses to Representative Elise Stefanik’s interrogation, but he ignores Gay’s even more baffling failure to challenge Stefanik’s premise that “the definition of intifada” is “the genocide of Jews.” Still, Williams is not wrong to lament the refusal of many campus activists to acknowledge that “antisemitism remains core to both Islamism and white supremacist ideology; the far right in America as well as numerous European countries never received the memo that Jews had been inducted into whiteness.” He’s also correct in doubting that Jews will “be allowed into the tent of DEI protection alongside the rest of the vulnerable and marginalized.” Yet subsequent events have made it clear that Israel and Jews do have protections in the US power structures that Palestinians do not. Or, at least, they have protections for now: it would be dangerous to assume that Trump and his fanatical followers won’t soon decide to agree with their Charlottesville compatriots about the Jewish race.

Williams may be right, too, that the abandonment of standardized testing in college admissions is a counterproductive response to racial discrepancies in test scores, which largely reflect the extra burdens Black, Latin American, and Native American students disproportionately face. Those discrepancies can be understood in local context, as my university’s admissions office did scrupulously for many years, until our Regents banned considering even optional standardized test scores (over my objections as chair of our Committee on Undergraduate Admissions). Often those scores are the only chance for brilliant high schoolers from disadvantaged communities to be noticed, and the few other elements in college applications (extracurriculars, GPA-boosting AP courses, application essays, and letters of recommendation) are no less biased against students from those communities, just not as mathematically obviously. That simplistic reflex—the deduction that, if the scores differ by race, the test itself must be racially biased, and therefore must be banned—actually implies that there is no such thing as systemic racism.

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While Williams is admirably unafraid to call out posturing and groupthink when he believes he sees it, the book doesn’t quite hold together as a compelling argument. It does, however, contain valuable encouragement for the growing belief that Democrats—and progressives in general—may need to pay a little less performative attention to categories of racial and gender identity and more to social class and communities struggling with unemployment and opioid addiction.

Despite this admonition, Williams never manages to confront the stratospheric and still fast-rising maldistribution of wealth, aside from half a paragraph in the prologue about anxieties among “white millennials” and a few passing mentions of the struggling working class. His announced topic may be culture rather than economics, but the book tackles many political issues, just not that one. He laments opioid addiction without including the Sacklers among the villains of his story; urges liberal elites to sympathize with those in hard but underpaid jobs, yet takes no notice of the inexcusably long-stalled minimum wage and the pitfalls of a gig economy; and mistrusts any deliberate tilting of opportunity toward people of historically disadvantaged groups without acknowledging that they are stuck trying to climb an ice cliff atop which a few are luxuriating.

It seems increasingly (indeed, unbearably) clear that a neoliberal capitalistic system of maximum extraction—from workers and from the earth, to keep corporations well fed—is what conscientious citizens should be urged to notice and uniting to resist. That system is one of those parasitic entities that “have people.” Williams wants comity, but (perhaps because his stated enemy is certainty, perhaps also because his allies tend to be patrician) he doesn’t seem quite ready to commit to any such common cause.

Goldilocks liked her porridge lukewarm, but that recipe may not suit the appetites of thoughtful and passionate readers of political analysis during this hideously discontenting summer.