Summer of Our Discontent

The United States has slid into an “age of certainty” where institutions and individuals increasingly traded liberal norms (open inquiry, pluralism, persuasion) for moralized tribal narratives—and that this shift accelerated dramatically around COVID-19 and the summer of 2020.

That big idea comes from Thomas Chatterton Williams’s 2025 book Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, which argues that this new moral certainty—amplified by social media—helped corrode discourse across politics, media, education and culture.  

The title is an allusion to William Shakespeare’s Richard III, specifically the opening line of the play: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York” Below I have my notes for future reference.

My notes:

• “ideas have people,” not the other way around (This would be called Jung/Peterson-esque): “People seldom have ideas… ideas… very certainly have people.”
• George Floyd was a poor man, the most “salient fact”
• “It is no victory at all simply to lose together in a more equitable fashion”
• Hegel: the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk (wisdom comes late)
• Why George Floyd? Videos and slogans and chants before, but lockdown and the build up of energy sparked into something visually bigger
• Trump as a “state of exception” that suspends normal rules. Trump-era discourse becomes emergency politics; outrage incentives harden, and “winning” starts to outrank truth-seeking.  “Basic liberal norms came to be jettisoned, first by the right… then… by the left.”  
• The May 1854 arrest of freedom seeker Anthony Burns in Boston intensely electrified the abolitionist movement, transforming local outrage into widespread national resistance against the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The case spurred violent protest, a failed rescue attempt, and massive demonstrations against slavery in Boston (“god made me a man, not a slave”)
• Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” posits that society produces more highly educated, ambitious individuals than it can offer top-tier positions, leading to instability. Millennials, burdened by debt and stalled by the 2008 financial crisis, exemplify this, creating “angry losers” or counter-elites who challenge the power structure.
• Trump coalition adopted a rigid COVID “counter-allegiance” that sometimes outran evidence
• Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels in Trouble with Disparity (fall 2020): most of the racial wealth gap is between the wealthiest 10% of black and wealthiest 10% of white people — because the wealthiest hold so much wealth. Authors argue that the racial wealth gap is primarily driven by extreme wealth concentration within the top 10% of both Black and white populations, rather than simply a disparity between average white and Black households. They contend that focusing solely on racial disparity overlooks that 75% of white wealth is held by the top 10%, making class inequality the dominant issue.
• The “revolution of rising expectations” is a sociological theory stating that social unrest or revolutions occur when living conditions improve, raising expectations that subsequently outpace actual progress. Often linked to the Tocqueville effect, it posits that as life gets better, people become less tolerant of remaining inequalities, causing frustration.
• On Nov. 5, 2008, only 3% of Americans polled by Gallup said they expected race relations to get “a lot worse.” 7 in 10 expected them to get better. More than half of even McCain voters described Obama’s election as one of the most important advances in a century.
• In 2011, Gerald Early argued that the 2009 Obama commenting on Henry Louis Gates was a turning point – he wasn’t post racial after all. (This followed Obama’s March 2008 ‘race’ speech I reported myself)
• “Fiery but mostly peaceful”: narrative overrides lived reality. He criticizes the insistence on a single politically convenient story about 2020 unrest, arguing that media language trained audiences to distrust direct observation (“don’t believe your lying eyes”).  “If rioting is the language of the unheard… it can… be… gibberish…”  
• In Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992), Derrick Bell argues that racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of American society, not a passing phase. Bell contends that black people must abandon a misplaced faith in inevitable progress and embrace “racial realism”—accepting that racial subordination is a constant feature of the American system. Racism isn’t fleeting, “it is a fundamental, deeply rooted, and deeply felt constant in our society.” Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X also argued this whiteness is feature not bug of American system
• In his 1952 National Book Award-winning novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison addresses the profound invisibility of Black identity within American society, which commentators later described as masking “[the great American racial leviathan]”.
• Afro-pessimism
• Ta Nehisi Coates had a “blue period” shaping so much of American thought . Coates credited his turn to Nell Irvin Painter in 2010: “blackness, that is poor dark-skinned people”
• In March 2012, New York Times called George Zimmerman “a white Hispanic”
• “Perhaps there were any number of people who were open to — even desiring of — the idea of a black president, but could not tolerate the reality.”
• “The forces for order, good, justice and progress must always be perfect – and we interpret this as normalcy, the bare minimum – whereas the agents of destruction need to succeed just one time, and we feel our entire condition to be precarious.”
• Coates’s 2015 book Between the World and Me was rushed to print in a Dylan Roof news cycle, and author calls the book “brutal, irresponsible and decisively victorious” as anti Obama Hope
• Author was one of the signees of the summer 2020 “Harper’s letter” on open debate: Author says the controversy was not only what the letter said but who said it
• Ross Douthat in his 2020 NYT op-ed 10 theses of cancel culture: “Under the rule of the Internet there’s no leaving the village: everywhere is the same place, and so is every time” the point isn’t the star but to keep the future star from saying what they think
• Why did Coates’s fall 2024 book The Message book not mention Oct 7? [[My note: I’d assume Coates would say it’s because lots was already said about the Hamas attack of Israeli civilians]]
• Albert Camus made this statement during the 1950s Algerian crisis, often cited as, “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice”.