Dear readers,
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a writer and a cultural critic whose work you've probably read in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, or The New Yorker. He’s a writer who doesn't fit neatly into any political box, though much of his work focuses on race, identity, and belonging.
Williams is also the author of three books, the newest of which is Summer of Our Discontent, published in August 2025. The book is his attempt to take stock of the last 15 years in the United States, from the election of President Obama in 2008 through the upheavals we experienced in the summer of 2020.
The book raises timely questions about moral certainty, institutional behavior, and how liberal societies should handle disagreement. Although its lens is trained on the past, its arguments center on the future and what kind of society we should strive for.
Below is a transcript of my conversation with Williams in February 2026. If you prefer to listen, the interview is available as a podcast here.
I hope you find the interview as thought provoking as I did.
Best,
Will Kaback, Senior Editor
Editor’s note: This interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Will Kaback: Thomas, thanks so much for joining us.
Thomas Chatterton Williams: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Will Kaback: I'm looking forward to talking about your new book, Summer of Our Discontent. To start off, I want to set the scene about how this book came to be. To paint in very broad strokes, your first book is a coming-of-age memoir. Your second book discusses how your conception of your identity has evolved over time, especially in adulthood.
But this third book looks more explicitly outward. You're writing about deep-seated social issues, political issues, and cultural issues from our very recent past. So my first question is: Why this topic now? And when you started this book, what were the goals that you set out to achieve with it?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: “Why now?” is such an interesting question. The book came out in August [of 2025] and, at the time, August was already a very different period than the summer of 2020 and its aftermath that I was dealing with. But it feels like now that we're talking at the beginning of 2026, we live in a different world, a different country — so much has happened. It's kind of tricky to talk about the recent past.
So why now? [The summer of 2020] just felt like something that needed to be examined a bit. The pacing of a book means that you can't guarantee that you're in sync with the current events when it is released. But I did think that something really important and very polarizing and very emotionally taxing and intellectually maddening happened in the summer of 2020, and I wanted to bear witness to some of the absurdities that we lived through and to also make a kind of case — which I think is the thing that links a lot of my work — for a kind of a moderation, a way of reconciling extremes that tries to get to a greater shared truth. So that's what I thought the book's contribution could be, and that's why I started working on it in the spring of 2021.
Will Kaback: I want to read a little bit from the preface where you lay out the book's central argument:
Summer of Our Discontent is ultimately an argument for why we must resist the mutually assured destruction of identitarianism — even when it comes dressed up in the seductive guise of “antiracism” — and really believe in the process of liberalism again, if we are ever to make our multiethnic societies hospitable to ourselves and to the future generations we hope will surpass us. We must, in a sense, reopen — or finally open — the liberal mind, which has been pressed perilously closed by furious, radical, and sophistic forces on both sides of the political and cultural spectrum.
I want to drill down on the way you outline this idea of identitarianism. Can you describe what that means, particularly in this context?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: This is something that you see from both the left and the right. Identitarianism doesn't belong to one side of the political spectrum, but it's this idea that our racial and ethnic and religious and sexual categories are the thing that matters most and the thing that can't be transcended. And so we have this kind of zero sum way of engaging in society in which my interests as a black man, as a Jew, as a white man, as a white woman must be put forth over any attempt to compromise or negotiate a common good.
This is something that we're seeing really terribly implemented on the right now. There's a surprisingly reactionary identitarian backlash on the right that even starts to talk about a kind of “blood and soil” relation between “heritage whites” and this country.
But this book is also very concerned with the progressive anti-racist identitarianism that took the idea of arguing against racism — which is real — and turning it into an essential difference between people of color and whites that made an unbridgeable gap, that led to a — Glenn Loury termed it best — “identity epistemology” where you can't even understand the same knowledge that I possess intrinsically by being non-white. And so the most you can do, if you want to not oppose me, is to listen to me and be silent. That became very toxic for our political culture, and I think it participated in the kind of backlash against white identity politics that we're experiencing now.
Will Kaback: Do you think that the backlash that you're describing — sometimes I hear it described as the “woke right” — is the right taking its cues from the left from the summer of 2020? Or do you think it speaks to more of an innate human trait?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: It’s both. It certainly is very human, and I don't think that it would be fair at all to say that identity politics was invented by the left or invented any time in recent memory. A version of identity politics has probably been going on since Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden.
But I do think that in recent years, from the left, a kind of permission structure was created — that this is how politics is going to go. This is how culture within institutions will operate now. And I think that opened a Pandora's box that it's very difficult to close now. Advocating for yourself as part of a group became — and it was never perfect — but it became disreputable for some years. There was this sense that we should be moving towards a kind of post-racial, colorblind, multi-ethnic ideal. That was considered, if not possible, at least the horizon towards which we should be aiming. And then came this progressive fixation on reinvesting in racial difference and identity difference and the identitarianism that we're talking about.
I think that was an extraordinary mistake. We gave up the idea that advocating as an identity block was disreputable. From that moment on, it was inevitable that more and more whites would start to advocate for themselves politically as a block as whites.
Will Kaback: Tangle’s Editor-at-Large Kmele Foster has written about that idea a bit in Tangle, too. I know for some people it can almost feel heretical to talk about the idea of a post-racial society or moving past seeing someone as what their identity is or what their racial category is. To close the loop on this thought, why do you say that it's mutually assured destruction, this identitarianism?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: Well, I think you can see that this society is coming apart at its seams when people split into groups and then go into a battle royale, all-against-all struggle for what's considered to be a limited pie. This country isn't working well when we divide this way.
You could say that we have never achieved the post-racial society, but the liberal society — where we come together and we share or negotiate universal principles that everybody can buy into and benefit from regardless of ethnic background — that fundamentally works better than the low-simmering civil war that is happening under Trump now, when some Americans fit more in the society than others and some relish the punishment or expulsion of others.
I think it's a very dangerous place to be, and even two years ago, when I wrote that line [about mutually assured destruction], it was a claim that people could say, “You're exaggerating.” But actually, I think we have moved well into the realm of mutually assured destruction.
Will Kaback: In the book, you talk about elite institutions becoming dominated by a “moralized anti-racist consensus” focused on suppressing dissent and imposing ideological conformity. You say those goals undermine the reason that those institutions are supposed to exist and lead to backlash against those institutions.
In the past year, since Trump was reelected, I do think we've seen some changes in those institutions, some of them brought on by the president seeking retribution, but also, I think, in response to his election and a sense that they need to course correct. Do you see those changes happening?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: It's a really hard question to answer because in the fields where these kinds of progressive orthodoxies took strongest hold — they're so deeply entrenched in academia, in the media, in the art world — it's certainly the case that there is more awareness of excesses and that people are more careful. But I don't think that there's been fundamental buy-in that these ideas were wrong or that in the future they wouldn't be implemented again in these spaces. I really don't see this change among faculty and universities, specifically. But there is a sense that you can't do what was happening before in quite the same way. Do you spend time on Bluesky?
Will Kaback: I don't actually, I'm still a Twitter user.
Thomas Chatterton Williams: It's an interesting window into the world because those voices, of course, all or mostly left Twitter. And it's an insulated world in which you hear plenty of people who are quite prominent in the media who don't disagree with the progressive worldview at all. And you see that there's no reconsideration, no assessment that, “Perhaps we went too far,” or, “These ideas were wrong.” They’re just kind of biding their time until they're politically and culturally ascendant again.
Will Kaback: So you see it as dormant?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: Yeah, it's more like, what does Camus say about the plague? “It never actually is eradicated. It lies quietly in old furniture and waits for the city’s unsuspecting rodent population to reinfect.”
Will Kaback: I do wonder the degree to which people [on the left] have been vindicated in some form — not their embrace of illiberal elements or the ideological demands, but in how we've seen the first year of the second Trump administration play out. I think they can point to many of saying in years past and say, “This played out exactly how we said it was going to, and we were called overreactive, and we were pushed out of — or attempted to be pushed out of — the Democratic coalition or the left coalition.” Do you think they have accurately diagnosed what we've seen in the Trump administration well in advance?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: Well, I would separate those two things. I think that we can really say that the worst, craziest Trump Derangement Syndrome fears have been fully validated in the second term, but I don't think that that was the exclusive property of the woke left. I think quite a lot of very reasonable centrists and even center-right conservatives also had that level of Trump Derangement Syndrome that's been borne out.
So, yes, they have been proven correct on a number of issues, but that is not exactly what wokeness is about. It wasn't synonymous with anti-Trump. I would actually say that there were too many similarities between the kind of illiberal left and illiberal right for them to be able to claim that as the moral high ground.
Will Kaback: We're having the conversation in the aftermath of the events in Minneapolis: two killings of U.S. citizens by DHS agents. I grew up in Minnesota in a suburb of Minneapolis. This is all very close to home to me. I was in Minneapolis when George Floyd was killed. I was in Minneapolis when Renee Good was killed last month.
From my perspective, there's a lot of similar feelings coming up now among the people in Minneapolis, and it's spreading across the country. We're seeing that protest movement [from the summer of 2020] resurface again. At the same time, I think there are also some very interesting differences. This is happening at the start of Trump's term, versus George Floyd, which was at the end of his term. I also think there appears to be broader public backing for the core goals of the protest movement — based on some recent surveys of the U.S. populace, abolishing ICE is now a majority view.
Do you see parallels to this time period and the period that you cover in the book? Do you see that illiberal sentiment rising back up in response to immigration enforcement? Do you see differences?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: I think that it's very different. It is striking that it's Minneapolis again. But I think they’re very different issues. What happened with George Floyd, I don't think that can ever be disentangled from the fact that we were experiencing a pandemic. I think we really were in a kind of strange national — and even international — state of suspension of norms where everybody could be on the same page with this one story. I was in France at the time, and the entire world was watching and reacting to the death of George Floyd in a way that — as big as this [ICE] story is now — it is not the single story.
Events are moving so fast that it feels like Nicolás Maduro was captured in Venezuela a lifetime ago. It even feels like Renee Good happened quite some time ago because we've been dealing with the fallout from the shooting of Alex Pretti. Events seem even more fleeting than they did in the summer of 2020. It feels difficult for anything with ICE to get to the unanimity of viewpoint that happened briefly when everybody in every institution posted the black square on Instagram.
I also think there's some interesting distinctions. A police officer arresting a man who had committed a crime — however petty — and what subsequently happened when George Floyd died is different than the debate we have to have about whether a country can enforce its borders. I think that debate is highly nuanced and that the Trump administration is taking advantage of a legitimate position to take it to the furthest provocative extent. A nation must be able to enforce its borders, so some of this stuff that's happening around blocking ICE from doing its job is less clear cut to many Americans, even if the feeling is that ICE should be abolished or some type of reform should happen.
I think most Americans do actually want border enforcement, but they don't want every brown person at Home Depot to be swept up by men in balaclavas who can potentially shoot civilians who are standing nearby. These are just fundamentally different issues.
Will Kaback: I struggle with it. I'll give one example: There’s a yoga studio in Minneapolis where a teacher quit because the corporate yoga company wouldn't allow her to post an anti-ICE poster in front of the studio. After she quit, a video surfaced of people who were going to be attending a class by that teacher attacking the workers who were at the front desk of the studio, accusing them of being complicit with ICE, complicit with the Trump administration. To me, it felt like a video that could have come from the summer of 2020, just swapping “abolish ICE” for “defund the police.”
I totally agree with you that the pandemic is a unique factor, and that the news cycle is moving so quickly that there isn’t a singular event to latch onto. But I also think these kind of incidents underscore what we were just talking about — this sense that this ideology has been suppressed but not gone away.
Thomas Chatterton Williams: That's very interesting. I hadn't heard of that yoga studio example, but that does sound exactly like the sense that you are so righteous in your cause that it supersedes any other kind of concern.
We haven't learned, or the lesson hasn't fully sunken in, that when people are forced to choose between chaos and order, most people will side with order. So taking your moral case to the street is always a risky endeavor. It doesn’t end well to resolve political disputes in the street through destruction and violence.
I think the ICE issue is potentially unifying and a good cause for the left, but it has to be a nonviolent protest movement. Whenever it skirts into justifying destruction of property or violence, it opens the pathway to the kind of critiques that landed on the excesses of 2020 — that stuff just isn't what most Americans want.
Will Kaback: That segues nicely into another section of the book that I wanted to talk about. You write:
Debates over policy wins and losses often distract from the deeper philosophical error at the heart of the reckoning: the assumption that race is a meaningful and explanatory feature of human identity. This assumption didn’t just shape individual programs or campaigns — it reshaped our moral compass. It encouraged us to treat racial categories as real, causal forces rather than as social fictions. In doing so, it deepened divisions, warped our understanding of justice, and provoked a growing ideological backlash.
I've thought a lot about this idea, and why it hasn't resonated with the people it applies to. One thought is that the ideological extremes on both sides see themselves as in a war, and they feel they have no choice but to engage in ideological warfare because if they don't, the other side will just take advantage of that weakness. They don’t see themselves as “legitimizing” anything, but just countering something that already exists. What do you think?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: A lot of people delude themselves and think that there could one day be a total victory for their side. We've lost this liberal understanding that no total victory can ever be achieved. You actually have to live and coexist and make this society work with your opponents. We've lost the sense that when our side loses, our opponents will extend any kind of grace to us. And so everything takes on an existential, zero-sum dynamic that is really poisonous. It's rooted in the idea that one side possesses the total moral truth. That’s the problem with ideas or terms like “moral clarity,” which I spend a lot of time in the book discussing. It's not that we need to do away with morality, but it's that when you get convinced that your position is the morally lucid position and the only one at that, then you can't actually compromise.
When your moral position becomes synonymous with your identity — that idea of identity epistemology: “I know the moral truth, it's rooted in who I am” — a refutation of your argument becomes a refutation of your person, and the stakes feel so high. But the problem with moral clarity is that those people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 were operating — in their own twisted perspective — from a position of moral clarity. They believed that they were doing the morally correct thing.
A demand for moral clarity can never be the groundwork for a democracy. Democracy can't flourish with every side believing they possess the sole claim to moral clarity. In that way, the rhetoric has ratcheted up so much in the social media era, where suddenly we're all exposed to each other's views and talking to each other.
Compromise and agreeing to disagree were more feasible when we weren't constantly thrown into this enormous room together, screaming at each other over politics all day, with the president of the United States often being the loudest voice. All of those things lead to this sense that every battle is the only battle, the most important battle, and victory is the only option.
Will Kaback: What is the media's role here? You talk in the book about a demand on the media — reporters, not just commentators or analysts — to speak truth to power, to frame these events in a very specific way. You write that ideological pressure being applied to the media manifested in serious damage to their credibility and trust. Can you expand on that thought?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: Something went incredibly wrong when activism became the stated and assumed end of all journalistic endeavors. There became this sense that — at The New York Times specifically, but at many institutions — there was an aspect of white supremacy or racism in every story. Whether it's a science story, whether it's a climate story — there's a way of reducing all of reality to whether it's racist or anti-racist. This was the pitch that made Ibram X. Kendi extraordinarily wealthy: that everything in society was black or white, was on a binary.
People working in media quite earnestly bought into this. They realized they had platforms and it was incumbent on them to not trust audiences to make their own assessments when provided information, but to hold the hand of audiences and lead them to the correct moral conclusion on any given story. That was an enormous abdication of responsibility, a hemorrhaging of authority, and I think that's going to be a generational problem getting it back together. Trust plummeted for a reason.
Again, what was happening with the social justice moment was coinciding with a hemorrhaging of authority among epidemiological experts, where they were showing themselves to be biased and trying to lead audiences to conclusions about public health. Those things intermingled, and there was just a profound loss of trust.
The media is in a much better place now, but many people aren't even open to realizing it. The New York Times is a much different organization in 2026 than it was in peak 2020 and 2021, but many people are closed off to the possibility that they can trust mainstream news outlets.
Will Kaback: Where do you see this headed? I share your view that this is a generational challenge to earn back that trust and credibility with the public. What is lost in the absence of that trust in the time being?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: I'm sure you're thinking about this a lot yourself as part of a new media startup.
The loss is the idea that there are any shared stories, any shared facts, any shared realities. Everybody has their own alternate facts, alternate realities — we have a splintered sense of what's happening. The Renee Good shooting was emblematic of this: People were watching the same highly televised, highly mediated event at the same time, and we didn’t see the same reality.
A lot of that relates to how the information is presented. You can see anything you want in any kind of shared set of facts now, depending on what bubble you're ensconced in. This is where I'm the most pessimistic of all. No matter what happens on TV, social media, or at The New York Times, we’re never going to all be on the same page again. It doesn't seem possible. Throw into that the trolling, the foreign accounts that try to stoke division, and the increasing use of AI to just disrupt our sense of reality — I really think this area is where we're going to have the biggest problem in getting past this stuff.
Will Kaback: Is that an idea you want to focus on in your future work?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: I try to always bring that into whatever critique I'm making of the current political crisis. But I'm embedded in the problem even as I try to identify it. I write for mainstream publications. I speak in certain spaces where you're already presuming an audience, and it's very difficult to speak to people who don't preselect themselves into that audience. It's very difficult to gain traction. It's harder now, I think, than it was in the past.
I've always used Twitter, and it used to be that you would talk to people you genuinely disagreed with. Now it's more and more difficult to genuinely engage with good-faith people with whom you disagree. You might encounter them, but it's almost automatic that you're shut down by them. There's no negotiation, there's no dialogue anymore. So I try to speak about these things, but this is a long way of saying that I fear I'm already preaching to the choir.
Will Kaback: Returning to the book, it presents a lot of big ideas, some of them provocative to both the right and the left. Have any criticisms impacted the way that you thought about your arguments?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: The main criticism from the left was that whatever happened in 2020 or 2021, whoever experienced “authoritarianism” in the workplace, or whatever legitimate grievances might have been worth talking about in the space of free speech or whatever — all of that becomes moot when you're living under [Trump] and when we're living in a country that's become exponentially more authoritarian from the right. I take that argument seriously. I don't just glibly dismiss that. There is always the need for a sense of balance and proportion — that something might be really wrong, but it might be comparatively far less wrong than something else. I've thought quite a lot about how to hold two truths at once, how to talk about something that mattered, but is not the thing that matters most right now.
From the right, there was a sense that it's impossible for Trump to get credit for anything, that he becomes this kind of explanation for everything wrong. I heard frustration that I was unable to overcome my “Trump derangement syndrome.” It's an interesting situation where the left was criticizing me for being too easy on Trump, and the right was criticizing me for being obsessed with Trump. I've thought a lot about how one can actually hold a centrist position in a time of such polarization. It’s difficult to do.
Will Kaback: Do you think of yourself as a centrist?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: I think of myself as a centrist, but not in the sense that on any given issue, I’m looking for the two extremes and finding a middle point. I think that no one side possesses all the truth and that reality is usually gray and nuanced. Conservatives have some essential insights into human nature, and progressives do as well, and ultimately, you want to be moderating and open to other points of view. You want to actually not have a prefixed ideological menu of beliefs, but you want to make up your mind independently on certain issues.
What I think about tax policy shouldn’t inform what I think about abortion or what I think about immigration. All of those things have to be thought through [independently]. So I’m centrist in the sense that I believe some wisdom exists between the center left and the center right, and you can find compromise there. Also, when you get out on the illiberal extremes in either direction, it becomes difficult to have any good-faith dialogue.
No one likes centrists for that very reason. [The philosopher] Sam Harris has articulated this so well over the years: you get screamed at on both sides because when people think that you're making a point that backs them up, they go and discover that you've said something that they disagree with [on another issue]. And so they feel that you're not properly on the team.
In 2020, there were all kinds of allies you would have when you were speaking up for free speech against the people who were doing the canceling — people at The New York Times or in universities. Someone like Chris Rufo would come and be your ally. All of these people thought you were making points, and they wanted to uplift your voice. But as soon as the times changed, and you're critiquing Donald Trump, they feel a sense of betrayal. You invite anger from the person who agrees with me on some things but disagrees on this other idea, which is not even directed at the outright opponent.
Will Kaback: We were talking about Bluesky earlier; do you know who Will Stancil is?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: Yeah, I do. He’s a Minnesota legend, right?
Will Kaback: He’s a Minnesota legend. He’s gaining some notoriety now. He had a series of posts that I saw recently in which he was expressing frustration with something similar to what you just said. He said that, within ideological groups, you can all believe X and Y, but if you also believe Z — which might be in the same realm as what the group says Z should be, but not exactly the same — you will be exiled. You can share 90% of the same views, but all of the focus goes to the point where you differ.
Thomas Chatterton Williams: Heresy is the worst crime. Somebody who's part of the faith but isn't fully dogmatic with it is worse than somebody who's of an entirely different faith altogether.
Will Kaback: I'm also interested in your perspective because you split time between the United States and France. You write in the book that you were in France during the start of the pandemic and when George Floyd was killed. You also wrote about being on a flight from New York to France on the night of the 2016 election, describing the shock of turning on your phone when you landed and realizing the world had changed.
How has living in France impacted the way you think about these issues?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: It’s always valuable for a writer to engage his or her country from afar. Fish are not aware they're swimming in water, right? It's interesting to think of American racial dynamics from outside of them.
My second book was about the transformation of my own thinking about how we approach race in America by virtue of having lived in a society that doesn't accept those same premises. I write in the book about how being in France helped me see some of the truth in some parts of social justice activism — some of the things that wokeness gets right. In France, you're in a society that really isn't very woke at all. Even liberals in France reject a lot of the claims that ethnic identity or religious identity gives you any insight into experience, any insight into social injustice that members of the mainstream might overlook.
I think that goes too far, actually. What happened in America is we began to fetishize racial difference and the experience of being black or the experience of being Latinx, or trans, etc. We took it too far, but it doesn't mean that there's no insight to be gained from those identities.
There's a kind of compromise between the two cultures [of the United States and France] that I don't think I would have intuited without living in a society that actually flat-out rejects some of the assumptions that were taken for granted in the U.S. So it was very interesting to see how France went about thinking of structural racism when that was a huge conversation in America. It also made me see that there were tweaks to the French way of thinking about universalism — there were things they get more correct than we do back here.
Will Kaback: What is one of the things that you think France gets right that we don't?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: For one, that the ultimate goal is to create a kind of colorblind society. The French don't officially recognize race as a category. Everybody's a French citizen. They haven't solved racism, so that creates its own problems. You don't know how many Algerians or people of Algerian descent are in a French prison, but it doesn't mean that the police are completely enlightened when they arrest people.
We don't have a society that is colorblind, but that should always be the aspiration. In America, we have gone quite far away from that aspiration. Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me in 2015 (published at the beginning of this kind of “great awokening” prefiguring the conversations that would happen in 2020) spent some time saying that he really never liked Martin Luther King Jr.'s approach and that early Malcolm X was always the one that he thought got things correct — that colorblindness actually shouldn’t be the aspiration. I think the American left just gets this fundamentally wrong, and that the French, including many minorities, get it quite right.
The French want a universal humanism. They want universal citizenship based on shared principles and values. They believe that, privately, everybody has the right to be a Jew or Muslim or anything else at home, but in the public space, one is simply a French citizen. And those identities don't trump any other. That's something they do get right, and I think oftentimes the fact that we in the U.S. don't know how to fully make that work. When we’re talking about “is there bias in the criminal justice system?” or things like that, the fact that we haven't fully figured out how to implement that yet doesn't mean that the ideal ought to be jettisoned.
Will Kaback: Do you think immigration challenges that in France, or in Europe more broadly?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: They are fundamentally a more multi-ethnic, multicultural society than they ever had been, that’s for sure. Like many societies in the West, they are demographically changing. I think it certainly challenges people's ability to apply that desire for universal humanism, but I don't think that it invalidates it.
These conversations began far prior to the presence of significant numbers of Muslims in France. These were conversations that were happening around Jewish identity in France when that was the “other.” There's always an “other” of some sort or another. But fundamentally, I think that the impulse and the desire to transcend those divisions is noble. And the French have a great respect for that. I think that in America, we kind of pay lip service to that ideal, but often have a great reverence for identity differences that just isn't there in France.
Will Kaback: As we wrap up, I want to look to the moment that we're in. Is your fear now that we’re going to have a “snapback effect” in response to the second Trump administration? To put it another way, a pendulum effect where the response to Trump is electing President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Or a figure like Gavin Newsom, who I think is building his political brand and identity on the trollish behavior that has galvanized Trump? What is the prospect of a mature, sensible leader emerging on either side from this second Trump administration?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: I still hold out hope for that. That's the only thing that can possibly move us forward. We spoke in the beginning about mutually assured destruction. We can talk about the pendulum swinging, but the weapons that are so expedient in our political debates now are weapons that anybody can pick up and use.
It's hard for me to understand why the woke right or the MAGA fanatics seem to believe they can achieve this permanent victory, this permanent submission of the left. Of course it creates the conditions for a left-wing pendulum swing. If we're talking about this, we have to talk honestly, and I think some of [the right] genuinely believe in subverting democracy. They believe that permanent victory is possible because many of them would be okay with making it functionally impossible for Democrats to ever get elected again. That threat has to be taken seriously, but in normal conditions, I think it's very short-sighted to believe that the pendulum doesn't swing. It would be unwise for whoever on the left next wins [the presidency] to pick that sword up and use it.
We desperately need a moderating, unifying figure who can win grandly and be magnanimous in victory. That is so sorely lacking from our politics. Trump is by far the worst example of this, but in many ways, Biden's administration exacerbated many of the tensions that had to be diffused when he was brought back in 2020 to normalize American politics. I think they dropped the ball on it. And that's an enormous part of why many people felt justified in giving power back to Trump.
Today, many people are probably regretting having done so, and so they're winnable again. I think Gavin Newsom is making huge mistakes by using the language and rhetoric and meme signaling of the right. That's actually what sensible Americans are tired of, and we need to figure out who's going to be able to speak to adults again.
Will Kaback: Thomas, thanks for a great conversation. For our listeners who want to follow along with your work, where is the best place for them to do that?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: I'm ashamed to say I'm still active on X. I’m also on Instagram. My editors would encourage me to say you can catch me in The Atlantic, where my writing has been fact-checked and edited and moderated.
Will Kaback: It’s fine if you're not able to answer, but is there another book project in the works?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: I still believe books are the greatest technology we've ever devised for putting forth an idea, for taking the time to think through how to say something as clearly as you possibly can with the help of editors and others who help clarify your thoughts. But it's very difficult to know what the idea or the topic is that's going to be able to hit at this hyper-fast moment that we live in, where people's attention spans are such that they can't watch something on Netflix without looking at their phones. So I'm really trying to think through what it is that I can spend the next three to five years thinking about, and that will be able to be received well. So I don't have something at the moment, but I'm looking for one. If you or any of your audience have suggestions, I'm open.
Will Kaback: Well, in the meantime, the newest book is Summer of Our Discontent. Thanks, Thomas.
Thomas Chatterton Williams: Thanks a lot, Will.
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