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

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

free speech is the bedrock for all subsequent rights and assurances, particularly those of ethnic, numerical, ideological, and other minorities.

It is undeniable that our current technological reality in which even the president can cross unthinkable boundaries[*1] poses new and distinct challenges to such values and to liberalism itself. We must revisit, reassess, and ultimately learn to reaffirm our core beliefs—which have been so gravely tested since the comparative normalcy of the Obama years, but which have always formed the basis of any enduring social progress—so that we may achieve our noblest ideals. Summer of Our Discontent is ultimately an argument for why we must resist the mutually assured destruction of identitarianism—even when it comes dressed up in the seductive guise of “antiracism”—and really believe in the process of liberalism again, if we are ever to make our multiethnic societies hospitable to ourselves and to the future generations we hope will surpass us. We must, in a sense, reopen—or finally open—the liberal mind, which has been pressed perilously closed by furious, radical, and sophistic forces on both sides of the political and cultural spectrum.

So many of our seemingly most intractable problems arise in no small part from having learned to see and understand ourselves as part of overwhelming, monolithic abstractions (enormous categorizations of color, sex, gender, race, religion), mistaking our own interests for the purported ends of the identity bloc we’ve been arbitrarily assigned to. This is true across the culture, whether the ill-conceived identity politics of the left or the spiteful populism of the right.

Reparations, health care, child care, high-quality public school options—these are valuable goods not in themselves but only insofar as they are useful tools for real flesh-and-blood families to flourish. This is why it will never be sufficient to dismantle police departments if we wish to make our most vulnerable communities safer, or to abolish entrance examinations if we wish to bolster authentic equality, any more than it would make sense—as President Trump so foolishly recommended—to do away with COVID-19 testing if we wish to lower the rate of coronavirus infection.[*5]

Reinvestment in lived community as opposed to virtual, national, and global pseudo-communities (connected through shared and often imagined grievances) will be paramount. As will genuine integration—not as stereotypes or avatars of broad social categories, but as living individuals, in all our fullness and contradiction.

The progressive development of the collective consciousness of the West will not be attained through the negative forces of guilt and resentment. It will not be spelled out by means of a fatally subjective, self-styled “moral clarity” that is forever backward-facing—a national storytelling project that both guarantees division and verges on embittered determinism. We need objective goals again, both grander and, paradoxically, far more modest than “antiracism” could ever be. “Antiracism,” “social justice”—these are worthy values, certainly, but there are also others that demand our attention and that we have damningly neglected. Truth, excellence, plain-old unqualified justice—these deserve our utmost interest. To pursue them will require all people of goodwill to collaboratively articulate something far more difficult than reflexive recrimination; we will also need positive visions, practices, and stories about ourselves and one another that do not shy away from past injustices but do not mire us in them either. We will have to find convincing ways for all of us to contribute and move forward, beyond a paralyzed state of permanent anger or contrition. This will require new political strategies, as Francis Fukuyama has argued, in which “identity is seen as a mobilizational tool to demand inclusion in a broader liberal order,” and nothing like an end in its own right. These strategies will honor and engage with people as individuals with rich and varied backgrounds, not as ...

This in turn made it necessary to suppress dispassionate scientific probability and the aspiration to objective truth in favor of emotional, bitterly partisan team politics. And so what had started understandably and even nobly as regard for specific communities with racially correlated but variegated vulnerabilities—dense living conditions, high rates of comorbidities, disproportionate representation in fields designated “essential work,” lack of quality health care, and, not insignificantly, distrust of medical institutions—would soon give way to something intensely different: a full-blown moral panic that, in retrospect, it is possible to say with no exaggeration, touched on every facet of our collective, mediated existence and spawned a vicious counterreaction from the authoritarian right that further erodes our liberal democracy.

This was a decisive rhetorical flourish.

Some revelations or events are so unprecedented, they so violate our sense of reality and so defy our usual heuristics and laws of experience, that they cannot immediately be integrated either emotionally or intellectually into our broader sense of how the world operates.

What all of these instances and more have amounted to is, of course, a crucial, still unfolding disagreement about liberal ends and even liberalism itself, the central function of which has been for three centuries the balancing of order and equality through commitment to neutral procedure—a function that was already severely sabotaged by the populist right.

To frame the complicated and necessarily contested story of unrest that was sparked from the confluence of the pandemic, the racial reckoning, and the presidential campaign that engulfed virtually all of our mainstream and left-leaning knowledge-producing and knowledge-curating institutions in 2020 and beyond as a single story of oppressors and the oppressed was therefore to attempt to eradicate by fiat the natural stress within an open society that arose from the basic reality that enormous numbers of Americans—particularly those outside the institutional and educational elite—understood it first and foremost as a story of order and chaos. That story of a breakdown in social order—if not definitive, then broadly compelling outside progressive orthodoxy—was not only suppressed; it was deemed functionally unspeakable to catastrophic and lasting consequence.