Summer of Our Discontent:
The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse
by Thomas Chatterton Williams (Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor)
EDIT: This post has a commentary track with additional reviews that I wrote.
There is a saying, and I do not know who coined it but it is not novel, that starts that Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man and goes on from there to express the seeming contradictions in his actions. This book is the uneducated man’s idea of God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, making, one must suppose, the author the MAGA idea of William F. Buckley, Jr..
Like Buckley, this is moral panic built within heterodox intellectualism.
Unlike Buckley, the moral panic has no temerity and only a Churchillian martini of an ethos; the contrarianism is at the level of the New York Times Pitchbot, and the intellectual quality is curtailed to the language.
It is the last that is the most offensive. Buckley was a complex writer, writing about complex things, in a complex way. His was poetry, and (despite the actual fiction) he could have been a writer who would have been today in the literary canon, even if there was some three-card monte going on. This book is only the con; is all fig leaf and no cock.
The book is written by a U.S. Black1 centrist intellectual and author, who lives in France2. The thesis is…well, that is the problem. The thesis is that humanism, specifically around race, overreached itself in a way that provoked a backlash. Shorthand this as wokeness run amok.
I am sympathetic to this as a claim. I don’t know about you, but I still feel like a center-right Republican, now looking at drywall where the Overton Window used to be. I feel like this argument is right, and I feel like I can point to instances where this argument is right. So I want it to be proven.
The author goes about the proof by recapitulating the years from Obama’s election to the attack on the Capitol. This is not an argument; it is a description. From the beginning chapters, strangely fixated on Ta-Nehisi Coates in what feels like an attempt to shame him, to the closing chapters, where the author gives the aborted coup an “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”, there is no reasoning. It is someone telling you a series of major news events from then to now.
The idea, I think, is that if you explain the major ways in which the consensus view at the time was incorrect, it provides a justification for people’s anger. And this is interesting. But I think here that the conclusion is get your news from slow media. The author’s own point is not proved or disproved. Cultural trends, and culture includes politics, affect what is being reported, but how do I know that this is not post hoc, propter hoc? And the point, for instance, of the marketplace of ideas and a free media in a democratic society is meant to be self-correcting. I assume the counter-argument is that the woke are uniquely censorious, yet we are having this conversation, so surely that cannot be the end.
Let us assume that the facts as described here, which suggest that the media and the public made a sow’s ear of the various events. I am not going to try to engage in that, as this is a highly detailed sort of analysis unfit for a review by a non-expert.3 How does any level of looting that arose out of what happened with George Floyd make it okay to kill law enforcement due to a lie specifically propagated to stop a free election? That whataboutism was codified in the U.S.S.R. as “and yet you are lynching Negros” has never been as apropos.
And let us close this circle with the contemporary hour. A principled version of this book is conceivable. It would take looking at both of the failed media ecosystems. It would take skewering what is going on now with media companies. It would be less interested in some celebrities Xitter and more interested that the U.S. government does not need to jawbone in order to jawbone, because the degree to which companies and institutions comply in advance in the interest of self-gain is not tragic but pathetic.
And yet, and yet, I do not think that the book is bad.
It is polemic, and much of what I thrilled about here is the function of the polemic. I envy the author’s mastery of the sneering aside, and the non-argument is unassailable, making it perfect: since there is no argument, only the implication of one, all that is there to argue with is the facts. It looks strong, since facts are facts, but facts are not evidence. They are what evidence is made of. And neither is a result.
Again, the sort of potential in a coherent version of this book is huge. One of the repeated tricks in the book is to point to similar events to one that got major traction, then let the implication that the Illuminati is cherry-picking, but that question is pretty interesting. Different events pick up different frames of meaning, that include some facts and exclude others. It is interesting to think about why that is. It is equally interesting to think about whether the tail is wagging the dog: does the frame create the story or does the story create the frame.
I am particularly irritated here in that there is a sort of grand architecture offered in the opening chapter arguing for a return to an idea of Americanism. Cynically though it seems present only to afford something to point at as a thesis, or at least is a one-off comment, and only returned to through implication. You can read where the argument might have been made at some point, though it is not. Instead the argument is that Matt Bors cartoon, except in the third person.
So the book is not outright harmful, though it will be used for harm. It is well written if argumentation as a science interests you. But, like, read the Harper’s letter and save your $30 plus tax.
My thanks to the author, Thomas Chatterton Williams, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, for making the ARC available to me.
- I, generally, make a point to follow the use of language of the author. The politics of naming groups is complex and non-obvious, but I feel like I am in their house so I abide by their rules. Here I do not. This is not because I disagree with the author over the capitalization of black, but to make a point in this footnote about the author’s use of footnotes. In the body of the text the author will make a guarded but inoffensive statement, so you think you have read a measured and center-right argument, then use the footnotes for mean-spirited attacks. It is burlesque: you see what you think you saw. ↩︎
- Again, I would not feel compelled to mention this, except for how often the author reminds you that he lives in France. Usually without relevance, though there is one chapter that is about contemporary French intellectual discourse and how it has been poisoned by the U.S. discourse. Which the author raises in the inverse of the way the story is usually told what with the dogwhistle that is Cultural Marxism, but, like the rest of the book, having mentioned the fact, the author feels no need to prove that his assertion is correct.
Of course, there is a major point of relevance to the fact that the author lives in France, which is that he is not in the U.S.. So, like a tech magnate with a climate-proof enclave in New Zealand, he got his. He has no skin in the game. He and his will be better off if the rest of us are fucked, and he then gets to go on whatever future European talking circuit as a phony Cassandra.
↩︎ - Which, one might argue, is the point. ↩︎
CITATION HEEDED 