Thomas Chatterton Williams's Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse is a persuasive work by a liberal about liberalism, and it will likely upset some liberals. Despite and because of this, it's an important book.
Williams (Losing My Cool; Self-Portrait in Black and White), born in 1981 to a Black father and a white mother, travels in "progressive circles" but has noted what he considers the deleterious effects of social justice orthodoxy. Summer of Our Discontent is, according to its preface, "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,' " to quote a portion of one of the long but finespun sentences Williams favors. He expands on his thinking in chapters covering racially and culturally charged events, among them the staged assault on actor Jussie Smollett in 2019 and George Floyd's 2020 murder. Williams sees the liberal cause cheapened by white people's "performative allegiance" to fighting racism, and he believes that cancel culture helps explain the Republican Party's appeal to working-class Americans, "many of whom feel alienated from ever-shifting, frequently counterintuitive elite manners and etiquette."
Williams isn't the first to articulate these ideas, but it would be hard to find someone who lays them out better. Liberal readers who assume a defensive crouch going into Summer of Our Discontent would do well to understand that the book isn't a scold: it's a cri de coeur from a left-leaning ally. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer