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

Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White) offers an unsatisfying assessment of how the U.S. abandoned its liberal ideals in favor of identity politics and right-wing populism. Endeavoring to discover why “furious, radical, and sophistic forces” have flourished “on both sides of the political and cultural spectrum”—a rupture which he says became insurmountable in the explosive summer of 2020, when the two sides of the culture wars split into alternate universes that can no longer communicate—Williams looks for answers in the “honeymoon phase of the Obama era” with its “squandered” post-racial promise, and in the subsequent turn toward identity politics through writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates. There are some insights to be had here vis-à-vis how the Obama era inculcated its own blowback in the form of a populist Donald Trump, but Williams’s analysis is most effective when he takes unexpected angles, like discussing how in France (where he currently resides) “le wokeisme” is rejected as antithetical to the country’s “key principles of secularism.” However, such keen insights are too often set aside in favor of revisiting notorious examples of cancel culture run amuck that have already been exhaustively hashed out by anti-woke critics. The result is a serious effort to take stock of the illiberalism besetting contemporary American culture that too often gets bogged down in its own anti-wokeism. (Aug.)