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

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

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.