The Eternal Social Justice Summer 

In a moment when the President of the United States is trying to use the power of the state to intimidate critics in academia and the media (not to mention his political opponents),  some may think that a new book like Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Summer of Our Discontent, which focuses mainly on the illiberalism of the left, is terribly timed. They will fault the author for not “meeting the moment,” or worse, for “enabling” an autocrat by articulating “right-wing talking points.” Liberal critics have already panned the volume in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and New York magazine.  

In fact, the book by Williams, an iconoclastic writer for The Atlantic, could not have come at a better moment. It is precisely because Donald Trump is wreaking havoc daily that it’s crucial to comprehend why so many of our fellow Americans came to dislike the Democrats even more than the unlikable and chaotic man they elected president. How is it that a November 2024 survey of working-class Americans found that 58 percent believed Democrats have moved “too far left,”  a share that is 11 points higher than the share that believed Republicans have moved “too far right” (47 percent)? 

As Williams writes: “If the purpose is to understand the political and moral disaster in which we now find ourselves—and not merely to signal our enlightenment in relation to it—an unsentimental assessment of the social justice left, and the agenda-setting institutions that repeatedly caved and pandered to its excesses, is not only reasonable but obligatory.” Although Williams does not provide a complete explanation of our current predicament, he supplies a number of powerful clues about what went wrong. 

It is important to note at the outset that Williams supports many liberal goals. He believes the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements were initially animated by a healthy desire to extend “dignity and recognition” to more Americans. He favors police reform and “a floor of universal dignity that expands access to health care, day care, and quality public education.” The son of a Black father and a white mother, Williams says “the story of American racism is not merely an abstraction to me.” And Williams labels Trump “a pathologically dissembling and race-baiting con man lacking basic curiosity and qualifications.” 

But just as socialists hated Communists for ruining their egalitarian dream, Williams’s dismay with rising left-wing illiberalism is acutely felt. The book, which examines the period between the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012 and of Trump in 2024, abounds with examples of betrayals, especially after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. 

A healthy concern about racial equality, particularly among white elites, morphed into an unbalanced focus that many Americans, including many Americans of color, found alienating on a host of issues. 

Most Americans believe in the rule of law, but in August 2020, NPR published what Williams calls “a wildly credulous interview” with a white author whose book was entitled In Defense of Looting. The publisher’s blurb claimed, “Our beliefs in the innate righteousness of property and ownership … are built on the history of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous oppression.” At a time when minority-owned businesses burned to the ground,  the book’s author explained to NPR, “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” The mindset had disastrous results in the real world. After a majority of Minneapolis’s city council pledged to “dismantle” the police department, homicides increased 50 percent amid an overall police staffing shortage. To his credit, Joe Biden denounced the “defund the police” slogan and pushed for more cops on the streets. But left-leaning social activists left a powerful impression with voters. According to a November 2024 Blueprint survey, 68 percent of swing voters who chose Trump said the Democrats were “not doing enough to address crime.” 

In 2019, a Pew survey showed that the vast majority of Americans—74 percent—believed that people of all races should be treated equally in employment and education. Yet, among progressive activists, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist became all the rage.  Kendi famously argued, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” 

Surveys found that many Americans—including 84 percent of Black Americans—worried about not being able to speak their minds. Yet, when Williams and other leading authors and artists organized a July 2020 letter in Harper’s magazine, making what Williams called a “frankly anodyne”  statement about free speech, they received an enormous backlash among progressive activists. The critics, Williams says, failed to understand a fundamental lesson: “Free speech is the bedrock for all subsequent rights and assurances, particularly those of ethnic, numerical, ideological, and other minorities.” 

In the summer of 2020, average Americans were bewildered by the conflicting advice provided by progressive experts about whether or not it was safe to congregate in large numbers outdoors with a pandemic in full swing. Progressives chastised Florida sunbathers for their reckless behavior. Still, shortly thereafter, when thousands  of protesters gathered in response to George Floyd’s murder, a number of public health officials approved of the gatherings. Williams observed, “In the space of two weeks and without really thinking it through, we went from shaming people for being in the street to shaming them for not being in the street.” 

Finally, average Americans were flummoxed by the reaction on elite college campuses to the massacre of peaceful Jewish Israelis on October 7, 2023. “The surprise slaughter of twelve hundred men, women, and children in Israel, as well as the abduction of 250 more,” Williams notes, was not something Hamas tried to hide. “There were no attempts to cover up the revolting evidence or to blame it on rogue ‘bad apples.’” Instead, Hamas videotaped it all and disseminated it proudly. Astonishingly, some students at Harvard, Columbia and elsewhere lay the blame of the massacre entirely at the feet of Israel itself. A group of 34 Harvard student organizations, for example, published a statement days after the attack in which they held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence … the apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” 

To its credit, the Biden administration wholeheartedly rejected the view of these progressive activists who blamed the pogrom on Israel, but Williams is correct that the issue revealed a troubling class divide in which the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was aligned with the well-heeled. As the Washington Monthly’s careful analysis showed, students in predominately working-class colleges, perhaps because many of them were more likely to be focused on trying to get ahead, did not often partake in the 2024 left-wing Gaza protests to the same extent as the students in more privileged elite campuses. 

To be clear, as the war dragged on and civilian casualties in Gaza mounted, most Americans came to recognize that Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war became deeply disturbing. Williams himself notes the “ferocity of Israel’s reaction, which frequently amounted to collective punishment.” Those later developments, however, do not excuse the initial reaction of many progressive activists to Hamas’s attack. 

Some will say activists are always prone to excess. But Williams relentlessly cites examples of how the attitudes of left-wing demonstrators, particularly during the summer of 2020, bled into mainstream institutions—the media, museums, and corporations. 

CNN, for example, seemed to excuse violent protests. Most famously, Williams notes, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “in front of a large building blanketed by leaping flames,” the CNN chyron read, “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING.” The New York Times, which had published op-eds by Muammar Qaddafi, Vladimir Putin, and a leader of the Taliban, pushed an editor to resign for publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s column suggesting that the military should stop the rioting and looting. Cotton’s position is not one I agree with, but it was not beyond the pale. It was a policy supported by “58 percent of registered voters, including nearly half of Democrats and 37 percent of African-Americans,” Williams writes. 

Surprisingly, race essentialist ideas were circulated not just by white nationalists but by mainstream institutions. The venerable Smithsonian Institution published a poster that identified hard work and “the nuclear family” as aspects of “white culture.” Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, gave $10 million to an antiracist center at Boston University launched by Kendi, the scholar who called for “discrimination” to counteract racism. Meanwhile, the Academy Awards, Williams notes, required qualifying films “to meet racial quotas in order to be considered during awards season.” 

Biden and Harris were much more reasonable than progressive activists on a host of these issues, but too often, they fell into the same trap. For example, Biden claimed during the 2020 campaign that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”—a statement Williams calls “insulting” and “counterproductive.”   

The decision by many progressives and Democratic politicians to make identity “the single most potent prism through which all matters of discussion and dispute … are now unceasingly filtered” had damaging electoral ramifications, Williams writes, because it didn’t comport with the daily lives of voters. Research from Harvard’s Raj Chetty made clear that parental income, rather than their race, is increasingly dictating the fundamental issue of social mobility. While George Floyd’s murder was seen almost exclusively through a racial lens, says Williams, the fact that he was poor was “the most salient fact about his life.” After all, Williams notes, Floyd “died over a counterfeit banknote the vast majority of black people would never come to possess.”   

When the issue of racial preferences came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 in a case involving Harvard University, the Biden administration arguably prioritized the interests of upper-middle-class Black and Hispanic families over working Americans of all races.  Harvard’s system of large racial preferences and legacy preferences worked well for economically advantaged students of all races. More than 70 percent of Black and Hispanic students came from the richest 20 percent of the Black and Hispanic families nationally, and the white and Asian students were even richer. Rather than backing a system of affirmative action for economically disadvantaged students of all races, however, Biden backed Harvard. 

After the 2024 election, liberals, who were fixated on race, puzzled over how on earth Trump could appeal to an increasing share of nonwhite voters, yielding what Williams calls “the least racially polarized election since 1972.” But to Williams, the result is not surprising. For nonwhite working-class voters, issues of racial reckoning didn’t touch their most pressing concerns, which centered around economic well-being. The “racial reckoning” of 2020, he writes, became “a professional-class affair, existing on another plane entirely from working-class reality.” 

Although Williams focuses mostly on the shortcomings of the left, he is unsparing about Trump as well. He devotes a chilling chapter to “The Spectacle of January 6,” in which he recounts the horrific day: “the cartoonish shaman; the even-keeled man with ominous-looking zip ties on his waistband; the unshaven fool with his feet up on Speaker Pelosi’s desk” as well as the mob “threatening to exact vengeance on the Vice-President.”   

Why were working-class voters more willing to forgive the extremists on the right? In one of the book’s most glaring shortcomings, Williams doesn’t really advance a theory about this important question. It seems possible that because mainstream establishment institutions were more willing to embrace radical views on the left, voters felt more exposed to them—a phenomenon that Fox News then amplified with glee. It is also possible that the extremism on the right is less difficult for working-class voters to stomach because it doesn’t come with the same strong sense of moral condescension that progressive activists (many of them economically well off) exude. 

Going forward, if Democrats want to win back America’s working class, they need to frame the necessary work of addressing race as a subset of the larger set of challenges facing working people across racial lines. They should emphasize race-neutral policies that serve all Americans who struggle, including working-class whites and underprivileged minorities alike. Such policies could include, for example, boosting funding for regional public and community colleges, as the Monthly’s Paul Glastris has argued.  

Likewise, Democrats need to explicitly and loudly distance themselves from deeply unpopular progressive activist ideas of the type Williams describes. The two most successful Democratic presidents of the last four decades—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—both did so: Clinton when he denounced Sister Souljah and Obama when he criticized the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Biden and Harris, by contrast, did nothing so dramatic. 

Pundits have pointed to many factors that contributed to Trump’s 2024 election—with inflation and immigration looming large—but cultural disconnect also played an important role. As Democrats take a look in the mirror about what went wrong, Summer of Our Discontent should be high on their reading lists. In America’s continuing discussions of race, liberals can take pride in holding the high moral ground over Donald Trump, but they should also heed the warning from Camus that Williams cites in the book’s epigraph: “I have seen people behave badly with great morality.” 

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