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

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

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.