‘Now is the winter of our discontent / made glorious summer by this son of York,” says Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to open William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Richard the Third. Thomas Chatterton Williams’s book Summer of Our Discontent covers instead a season unredeemed: the mid-2020 confluence of early-Covid anxiety and policies and the cross-country race riots that followed the death of George Floyd and often led to looting, arson, and violence. It’s not clear exactly what would satisfy Williams, who sees both good and bad in nearly every contemporary perspective in American politics. This ambivalence, which can be frustrating for a reader trying to extract a broad takeaway or main point, charges Williams’s analysis of specific events and situations in the woke era — what he prettily calls a “season of manners and assumptions in American society” — with a kind of nervous, eye-flickering electricity.
One of Williams’s major claims is that the American story of race is actually one of real though incomplete progress that goes unrecognized by succeeding generations. He illustrates what he calls “the paradox of rising expectations” with data on improving circumstances, for instance: “Poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics reached historic lows in 2019.” His philosophical touchstone here is Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America he quotes: “The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable” and “When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity.” The better things get, the worse a small infraction seems. Much of wokeness and the social justice movement can be understood on these terms. Williams quotes a student activist discussing the 2024 campus protests against Israel: “The only thing missing was the dogs and the water.” He interprets this as meaning that “the only thing missing in her struggle is the oppression.” In America, demand for the experience of oppression outstrips the supply.
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