- In the summer of 2020, the country was racked by disease, violence, and social disruption, as generations of racial injustice seemed to fall in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

Today's guest warns, however, that extreme views on the left ascendant in that summer heat are just as dangerous to Western liberalism as extreme views on the right.

He's Thomas Chatterton Williams, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music slows) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Thomas Chatterton Williams, a staff writer for "The Atlantic," whose new book is the "Summer of Our Discontent."

It's out now.

Thomas, thank you so much for joining us today.

- It's a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

- You know, we were chatting a little bit before, before the taping began, and I was telling you just how dazzled I was by the "Summer of Our Discontent."

Do you wanna give us a quick overview of it, and then we'll dive in a little deeper?

- Sure, I don't know if some of the viewers have noticed, but the summer of 2020 was a bit of a trip.

I really see this moment as a kind of hinge year.

Summer of 2020 really extends.

I think that it's not just three months.

It's not a calendar summer.

But it was really a moment that extended, really, I guess, through 2021, even into 2022, this long summer of racial reckoning and pandemic.

To me, it's one of those years, like 2020 is like 1968 or 2001.

There's really a delineated before and after.

It's not just more of the same.

And so this book really comes out of trying to reflect on what happened at that time.

Why did some ideas that had been floating around the culture for years in niche ways suddenly break through and have large-scale purchase on the national psyche?

What were some of the ramifications that we're still dealing with now in the aftermath of this era?

And what were the ideas and events that led up to it?

So I begin in the Obama era, and I try to trace the ideas and events that led to 2020 and broke through then, until the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024.

- And I'm gonna jump right to the chase here, but ultimately you wind up being critical not just of extremist views on the right but also extremist views on the left.

Can you sketch out what some of those, I guess, anxiety-inducing sentiments on the left are that you're worried about?

- Well, one of the defining features of 2020 and the impact that this moment had on our culture, one of the defining features of it was a kind of illiberalism from the left that resulted in a kind of censoriousness and a kind of narrowing of the space for good faith disagreement in the public discourse.

There was a kind of impulse to punish and to purge viewpoints that made us uncomfortable or that disagreed with orthodoxy on newfangled ideas of antiracism and social justice.

So there was a kind of a left authoritarianism that didn't come through the government necessarily but that really impacted institutional life in academia, in the media, in cultural spaces like museums.

And so this book is critical of the ways in which people who purport to be on the left were also engaging in some of the very behaviors that now we see are so deleterious to the national fabric when they come from the illiberal right, that's exemplified by Donald Trump and the reactionary populist movement that he returned to power in 2024.

- So specifically, you lament, and I'm gonna quote here from the book, quote, "The very cultural, media, and academic institutions that were meant to safeguard the best of our birthright, our consistently improving liberal democracy, from precisely such threats, and to fortify bedrock norms of tolerance, freedom of expression, search for objective truth, and the open exchange of ideas."

How are those institutions failing?

- Are they failing?

Or how have they failed?

- [Jim] How?

- How?

- (chuckles) How much time do y'all have?

- [Jim] 21 minutes.

(all laughing) - There was this widespread sense at the time, and it goes back to the beginning of the Trump era in 2016, that we are now in a state of emergency and that, you know, the normal way of doing business is a kind of luxury that we cannot afford to indulge in.

So things like freedom of expression can be curtailed because this emergency, this political emergency of stopping Trump takes precedence over due process or allowing every viewpoint to be aired.

There was a kind of desire to take shortcuts in achieving ends that could justify any means.

This was a kind abdication of institutional authority and responsibility.

And I think it actually inspired a backlash that made possible the return of Trump.

So it really wasn't even pragmatically effective.

The only way to counter the kind of illiberal impulses active on the right is to invest deeply in the liberal principles that safeguard everybody's freedom.

This was the mission of "The New York Times," for example, or of Harvard University.

And that was what was not lived up to.

- So in "Summer of Discontent," you draw specific attention to moments where media narratives fell into one camp's orthodoxy, regardless of the facts.

One of those incidents you report on is young men from Covington Catholic, a private Catholic high school in Kentucky, who were part of a viral moment that underscores your point.

Can you elaborate on that for us?

What happened there?

- Well, this is what I mean is that, you know, it was a state of emergency.

There was a clearly delineated right and wrong.

And it really didn't matter how sloppily you got to the conclusion that was already agreed upon as right.

You needed to get to that conclusion.

So we were in a racist country.

White supremacy was the defining feature of American collective life.

And things like wearing a Make America Great Again hat were unambiguous symbols of white supremacy and racism.

So you had a situation on the mall where, some audience members might remember, you had a class trip of students from Covington Catholic in Kentucky who were standing on the mall, and there was a Native American man and a group of Native Americans celebrating Indigenous People's Day, I believe, on the mall as well.

And there were also some Black Hebrew Israelite preachers who, that's too long to get into, but it's a kind of sect.

They have a lot of presence in Harlem and some other places.

They were preaching race politics on the mall as well.

These different kind of elements of American identity interacted briefly on the mall, and an image circulated in the media.

That's the important point to latch onto now.

An image circulated of what looked like one of the Covington Catholic white boys in a MAGA hat confronting and maybe even castigating the Native American man who was playing the drums.

That became an unambiguous symbol of Trump's America, in which nobody is safe or respectable in public other than white males.

The problem with this narrative is that it collapsed any kind of meaning into a ready-made story of white supremacy, but it didn't actually grapple with the reality of what was happening, which was that there was no such racist interaction.

It was simply a picture that was used to make a point that was already agreed upon.

And then when the actual story came out, and it was the fact that the actual thing that happened was that the Black Hebrew Israelites were, in fact, racializing the interaction and were castigating the white kids in the Covington Catholic cohort, that actually never got...

The media never corrected itself once that story came out.

The story was one of white supremacy, and then the actual interaction, which made this kid into an emblem of racism, that never got cleared up.

- So talk about the role in the media in that incident and everything that you talk about in the book.

And the media, of course, is very broadly defined in today's era, the social media, there are legacy newspapers, and other media.

But talk about that, because clearly they have played a role.

- Well, yeah, I mean, the clip of the confrontation went viral.

And everybody already had the interpretation of what these images mean.

And social media, you know, part of the project of this book is to show the ways in which there's a technological component to all of this, and the viral-making process of disseminating context-less images on Twitter and other social media websites so that these memes can be used to reaffirm points of view that people already bring to the interaction.

So you see a picture of a white kid in a MAGA hat, and you already have the interpretation of what that image means.

It goes viral.

There's no space for ambiguity or nuance.

And that kind of like, that all exacerbates the idea that this country is fundamentally polarized.

It increases the polarization.

I think you can also make... You know, and I try to.

You can make the case that the ability for us to disseminate images of police brutality and of Black people, of Black death through social media, actually heightened people's sense of what was called at the time a pandemic of racial violence.

People felt like there was more violence happening than there was because of the kind of viral-making ability of everybody walking around with a camera phone and sharing videos on social media and distorting the nuance and the reality that actually we live in.

- You know, I told you that this book stretched my mind in ways that I didn't entirely expect when I picked it up.

But the point that you're making about the sort of the role of media, and particularly viral media in this environment, context is hard, right?

And it's really hard to put context into, you know, whether it's a 180- or 260-word message.

How do we move forward in a way that actually... You talk about the institutions like Harvard and "The New York Times."

Implicit in that is something has happened to those traditional bellwethers of context and sort of preservers of that order.

Do they still play that, can they still play that role in American society now?

- Well, I think they have to.

I think one of the scariest aspects of the current reality is the kind of war on institutional authority, that, you know, the Trump administration has really made examples out of Columbia and Harvard, certain media organizations.

And I think that's not a world that any of us really will benefit from living in.

And we need to have institutions, and we need to have expertise and authority.

The problem that the book tries to delve into is that during this moment, these institutions also squandered and hemorrhaged their own authority, and did lasting damage to the American people's ability to trust them.

Some of this had to do with the pandemic.

Some of it had to do with the kind of ways in which they gaslit the public, or you know, they bought into and promulgated very overly simplistic narratives about how the country works that contradicted people's own sense of reality and the experience of their own senses.

So these organizations damaged themselves, and now we're living in a reactionary moment where the Trump administration is further weakening them.

But we can't really live in a society without institutions.

How do we put that back together?

It's gonna be very difficult.

And I think social media, it really, it polarizes everything and heightens the division in ways that I'm not sure we're gonna be able to adequately deal with unless we have a way to limit the power of social media to dominate the national conversation.

- And is there something that we as individuals...

I mean, ultimately we're talking about broad sort of patterns of behavior, but is there something that, as individuals, we can do to help, you know, I guess, restore the value of context in some of these discussions?

- One of the things individuals are empowered to do is to try to actually leave the social media, put the phone down, get offline, and actually speak to people, people from different backgrounds than you, face to face, to actually reinvest in lived community, to go out into your neighborhoods and to actually talk to people who don't necessarily see things culturally or politically from the exact same vantage point.

This is difficult.

I think social media has made it much too easy to actually talk to more people than we've ever talked to before but to also reduce them to caricatures of what they actually are and to not actually interact with people in their full humanity.

That's one of the gross perversions of the era stretching back from, you know, the early 2010s.

And this is one of the things that happened so extremely during the summer of 2020.

We were all locked down.

We were not actually engaging in interactions in person because of the pandemic.

And we were all just staring at our screens and being polarized through the mediated images of our society that we were interacting with.

- So practically speaking, how could you make social media companies more accountable?

We're talking with gigantic corporations.

We're talking Meta.

We're talking Google.

We're talking TikTok, and others as well.

These are organizations that have incredibly deep pockets.

They've got lawyers.

I don't need to go on and on.

How, practically speaking, could they be held more accountable?

- Yeah, I mean, I'm really not sure, and I'm not extraordinarily optimistic on that front.

If you look at what's happened on Twitter since Elon Musk bought it, you know, anybody who cares about fact checking or truth, or also just limiting the distribution of really repugnant anti-Semitic and racist and other kinds of toxic, you know, ideas that really poison the public discourse, I don't know how you actually do that without some form of government intervention that we might also not be comfortable with.

In some ways, I don't know that you get the toothpaste back in the container, the toothpaste of social media that's been spilled all over the countertop.

I don't know how that gets back in.

I think actually it's gonna require individuals limiting their own reliance on social media.

And, you know, I guess, in some ways, it's gonna require reinvestment in education.

On this front, it's kind of, it's really dystopian, especially as we move into an era where AI is also in the mix, and you don't even know if the kind of arguments you're encountering are coming from good faith, human interlocutors or something more nefarious.

- Right, so you mentioned education, and I wanna ask about that.

You have two young children.

Do you think media literacy should be taught in schools starting at a relatively young age?

And I'm not saying, you know, high school.

Earlier than that, middle school, maybe even earlier.

Is that something that might help?

- That's a great question and point, and yes, I do.

I think that that's actually a kind of life skill along the lines of knowing how to swim so you don't drown or learning to drive so you can get yourself to the hospital.

Knowing how to interact with information and look with a kind of shrewd eye at all of the propaganda that we're bombarded with is a life skill we actually do need to teach our children.

My daughter almost 12 years old, and she's got an iPad.

She's starting to go on sites like Pinterest.

And sometimes she says like, "Wow, Papa, did you know x?"

And she's a very smart girl, but some of the things that she just repeats to me, statistics and arguments that I happen to know are either oversimplified or actually straight-up false, she hasn't yet realized that everything you read that looks like it's published in an official manner isn't necessarily based on any reality or true.

And, you know, that's scary.

That really is terrifying.

People just see people talking on YouTube and, you know, believe that that's actually a credible source of information.

And I think it's really going to get a lot worse with the intervention of bots and interlocutors that you don't know are actually human beings on the other end of the conversation.

- You know, Thomas, coming back to the "Summer of Our Discontent," it is a rich recent history of those incredible events in the summer of 2020, from the pandemic to the murder of George Floyd.

And one of the consequences that you trace is the rise of what I guess would be a DEI orthodoxy, which has come under some sustained assault by the second Trump administration.

You've been a critic of that orthodoxy.

Do you wanna just share some of that criticism with us, then maybe we'll talk a little bit more about it?

- Well, yeah, I mean, I don't want to...

I actually don't wanna say that there's no use for diversity, equity and inclusion and that, you know, some of these spaces, like elite universities, don't need to be more aware of the ways in which people from disadvantaged backgrounds have previously been excluded.

I really don't mean to come across as saying that there's nothing to see here.

But I do think that there can be a kind of obsession with abstract identity categories, checking boxes.

There can be a kind of obliviousness to the ways in which simple racial designations don't tell you the whole story.

You end up in situations where we kind of fetishize identity.

So not to keep beating up on Harvard, but it's an example that comes to mind.

You have a situation where, you know, the son or daughter of Nigerian immigrants who are both, you know, doctors and lawyers, that applicant can check a box, and they can, that applicant can check the Black box on the application, and that satisfies a kind of DEI requirement of having a diverse incoming class that ignores the social reality that this is not a person that actually needs any kind of racial redress in the application process.

So there's a kind of flattening of nuance and reality that happens when the end goal is diversity for its own sake as opposed to actual justice, actual inclusion.

And I think we just have to have more intelligent conversations about what the end of diversity, equity, and inclusion actually is and not use it as an end in its own right.

- Well, you, in fact, ultimately argue that there's a crisis in American liberalism, and we probably oughta define what liberalism means.

But when you're talking about it, what does it mean in the context of American politics and American society?

- Well, I think, you know, American politics and culture have become so polarized and balkanized, you know.

We're in this zero-sum moment where anything that the other side is able to get is seen as coming directly from the prosperity of one's own side.

So there's no give and take.

There's no...

It's what I was saying before.

Everything has become a state of emergency.

So the norms of decency and of tolerance are cast aside because victory must be achieved at any cost.

Liberalism is about, you know, is about respect for due process, for freedom of expression, for tolerance of difference.

These things get short shrift when it's an outright emergency.

And so liberalism is not a very sexy concept these days.

It's not very attractive to progressives on the left who believe that, you know, we live in a white supremacist system.

And it's not attractive to the kind of reactionary populists who believe that, you know, the left has destroyed the country and is destroying Western civilization, and they have to do anything they can to right the ship.

So it's a very dangerous place to be.

But I think it's the only thing that works.

If you look at the civil rights movements and movements for greater equality, like the movement for gay marriage, they always couched their demands in a respect for norms and for tolerance, and they didn't weaponize their identity and cast their demands as something that would come at the cost of the prosperity of those who were not part of their group.

- So you take a critical look at wokeness.

On balance, where do you come out on that?

- Well, I mean, I guess we'd have to define wokeness to begin with.

And, you know, that's a kind of controversial term.

It's not even a term that I necessarily like to use, but it's kind of what we've got when we talk about the idea that, you know, first and foremost, you know, there are power disparities.

Society can be separated into oppressors and oppressed, right, and that everything becomes a matter of correcting to equalize the balance of power between the oppressed and the oppressor.

And so wokeness is a kind of redistribution of power access recognition.

And it's the idea that everywhere you look, there are instances of oppression that have to be corrected.

So I think, you know, anytime you have a kind of single lens for dealing with the kind of complexity of human interaction, it's gonna be problematic.

To give you a more concrete example, a scholar called Ibram X. Kendi wrote a book called "How to Be Antiracist."

It came out in 2019, and it really gained traction in 2020 after the death of George Floyd.

It became like an enormous bestseller that sat atop the lists for that whole year and beyond.

But it reduced all of our political and cultural life to a binary of things being either racist or antiracist.

And so then it looked everywhere for these discrepancies and then saw the correction of these discrepancies as justifying anything.

So, you know, this was...

This paved the way for a kind of backlash where, you know, you're throwing the baby out with the bath water.

And we no longer even have the capacity to talk about real instances of racism, because we overdid... Do you see what I'm saying?

We overextended the conversation into domains where it really didn't belong.

- You know, we've got literally about a minute left here.

And ultimately, I read this book, the "Summer of Our Discontent," as a defense of liberalism.

And so in the minute that we have left, what's really at stake?

- Well, I mean, in the minute we have left, I think our democracy is at stake now.

Because, you know, this book is critical of the kind of excesses that happened on the left that made attractive a reactionary backlash that brought Trump back into power.

But now we're in a situation where I think, you know, you have to be very clear about the fact that our liberal democracy is itself at stake.

Democracy itself is at stake.

The president and his allies are talking openly about him running for a third term.

So whatever woke excess has preceded this and maybe helped allow Trump back into power, they don't compare to the fact that we are talking about a kind of authoritarianism that's looking at, you know, throwing out the Constitution to secure power for itself.

So what's at stake is that we have to get our country back, our democracy back.

And I don't think we can do that unless, from the left, we come up with a counter vision that is more attractive than what we had in the preceding decade and a half that made plausible Trump's return.

- Thomas Chatterton Williams.

The book is the "Summer of Our Discontent."

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about the show, you can visit us at salve.edu/pell-center, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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