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The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Summer of Our Discontent by Thomas Chatterton Williams review – the liberal who hates leftists
Thomas Chatterton Williams, a public intellectual of some standing in the US, dislikes the Trumpian right for its erratic authoritarianism. But he dislikes its hysterical leftwing critics too – arguably with more vehemence. He takes great pride in having no truck with tribes, but he does belong to one: like halitosis, as Terry Eagleton quipped, ideology appears to be only what the other person has. Williams may think he is a freethinker above the fray, but he has a creed – and it is liberal complacency. His 2010 debut memoir Losing My Cool was the story of – as the subtitle had it – Love, Literature and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd. Rap, he declared, was not so much a genre as a subculture, seducing young black men into a world of crime. That, apparently, would have been Williams's fate (when he physically attacks his girlfriend, for instance, hip-hop lyrics shoulder the blame) had it not been for Pappy, his disciplinarian father, who foisted 15,000 books on him. The classics beat crime in the end, and we leave Williams on his happy road to intellectualdom, absorbing Sartre in Parisian cafes. But it wasn't enough for him to merely present his own story; Williams elected to hold up his life as an example for black Americans. 'See, you can be just like me' is the breathless gist of Losing My Cool. It never struck him that he might have had certain class advantages – a father with a PhD in sociology; a mixed-race heritage; an upbringing in white, bourgeois, suburban New Jersey – that make him somewhat unrepresentative as a role model. Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Williams's second memoir, published just before the pandemic, served up more hyper-agentic advice. The springboard for these post-racial reflections was the birth of his daughter. Bearing, as babies tend to do, a resemblance to her mother, who is white and French, Williams's child is blond. It follows that there is an arbitrariness to the whole business of race, from which Williams swiftly emancipates himself. Then comes the counsel: black Americans would do well to follow in his footsteps by 'transcending' race themselves. Conceding that this may be an easier proposition for him and his white-passing daughter, he exhorts mixed-race people to 'form an avant garde when it comes to rejecting race'. Williams's grand subject being himself, now we have a third memoir. Summer of Our Discontent takes a caustic look at Black Lives Matter from the lofty vantage point of his Parisian garret. At the outset, he tells us that the self-preening, race-mad identity politics of left-leaning liberals has fostered atomisation and precluded solidarity. As a consequence, the illiberal, unhinged right, now united behind Trump, has stolen a march on them. But from this not unreasonable edifice, Williams throws up a enormous scaffolding of enemies, which comes to encompass anyone and everyone engaging in some form or another of collective action. Ultimately, by the end, it appears that Williams's beef is not so much with Trump as with his leftwing critics. This is a strange, muddled book. On the one hand, Williams emphasises the primacy of class over race in the US. George Floyd, he says, was not your average African American: he was poor, unemployed, and had a criminal record. Horrific as his killing by a white policeman was, it was unduly racialised by BLM. Fewer than 25 unarmed black civilians are killed by police annually. Most black people will never find themselves in Floyd's shoes, Williams contends. While class is important for Williams, class politics isn't. There is only so much that initiatives to lift the poor from poverty can achieve, we are told, because 'the fundamental political unit, going back to Aristotle, remains the family'. The left has got it all wrong, obsessing over the 'macro level' when real change apparently happens at the individual level. Williams's strategy is to cherrypick the most ludicrous examples of 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' to smear the entire left. Sympathy from a few celebrities for the actor Jussie Smollett – who was accused of faking a hate-crime against himself, which he denied – is taken as evidence of the left's crumbling 'moral authority and credibility'. BLM, he claims, was driven by 'an ascendant raider class' of middle-class and not always black activists seizing institutional power – such as when a 'multi-ethnic mob of junior employees' ousted New York Times opinion editor James Bennet for publishing Senator Tom Cotton's call to deploy troops against BLM protests. Williams's other objections appear to be mostly aesthetic. He expends much energy pillorying the performative activism of such BLM 'allies' as 'the official Twitter account of the wildly popular British children's cartoon Peppa Pig', which tweeted a black square in solidarity. Later, visiting BLM-ravaged Portland, he mourns that 'a beloved statue of an elk has been toppled'. This in a town with a 'well-deserved reputation' for 'exquisite gastronomy'. Quelle horreur. He concludes by suggesting that the left and right are just as odious as one another. The storming of the Capitol in 2021, he says, had a mimetic quality, the populist right 'aping' the 'flamboyant reflex' of the unruly left. With such invidious comparisons, and with such a dim view of collective action, Williams is unable to make the case as to how precisely his homeland is to move towards a post-racial utopia. Excelling in sending up bien-pensant opinion, he has no answers. Fixated on slagging off the left, he has marooned himself on an island of vacuity. So when he articulates a positive vision of the future, all he offers are new age nostrums such as 'reinvestment in lived community' and 'truth, excellence, plain-old unqualified justice'. His plea for perspective is similarly misplaced. Young black Americans, Williams whinges, have been seduced by the race pessimism of the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, his more popular nemesis. He enjoins us to look on the bright side: the racial wage gap is closing; black school attainment rates are nearing white levels. Williams's Panglossian outlook is, I suspect, a form of American parochialism. His homeland, he says, is a 'society that is frankly more democratic, multi-ethnic, and egalitarian than any other in recorded history'. The Gini coefficient and Democracy Index beg to differ. There are eminently sensible reasons for race pessimism in America. Segregation and ghettoisation are facts of life. The wage gap between black and white people is still a staggering 21% (in Britain, it's under 6%). White Americans live three-and-a-half years longer than black Americans on average (black Britons outlive white Britons). Collectively, it was not the complacent optimists (who declared we had never had it so good) but rather the do-gooding pessimists (that demanded change at the dreaded 'macro level') who overthrew slavery and fought for civil rights. Individually, too, pessimism pays. For someone who sets great store by personal agency, Williams will no doubt appreciate Billy Wilder's melancholy observation – occasioned by losing three relatives at Auschwitz – that 'the optimists died in the gas chambers; the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills'. Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse by Thomas Chatterton Williams is published by Constable (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Summer of Our Discontent by Thomas Chatterton Williams reivew – a muddled take on US race, politics and class
Thomas Chatterton Williams, a public intellectual of some standing in the US, dislikes the Trumpian right for its erratic authoritarianism. But he dislikes its hysterical leftwing critics too – arguably with more vehemence. He takes great pride in having no truck with tribes, but he does belong to one: like halitosis, as Terry Eagleton quipped, ideology appears to be only what the other person has. Williams may think he is a freethinker above the fray, but he has a creed – and it is liberal complacency. His 2010 debut memoir Losing My Cool was the story of – as the subtitle had it – Love, Literature and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd. Rap, he declared, was not so much a genre as a subculture, seducing young black men into a world of crime. That, apparently, would have been Williams's fate (when he physically attacks his girlfriend, for instance, hip-hop lyrics shoulder the blame) had it not been for Pappy, his disciplinarian father, who foisted 15,000 books on him. The classics beat crime in the end, and we leave Williams on his happy road to intellectualdom, absorbing Sartre in Parisian cafes. But it wasn't enough for him to merely present his own story; Williams elected to hold up his life as an example for black Americans. 'See, you can be just like me' is the breathless gist of Losing My Cool. It never struck him that he might have had certain class advantages – a father with a PhD in sociology; a mixed-race heritage; an upbringing in white, bourgeois, suburban New Jersey – that make him somewhat unrepresentative as a role model. Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Williams's second memoir, published just before the pandemic, served up more hyper-agentic advice. The springboard for these post-racial reflections was the birth of his daughter. Bearing, as babies tend to do, a resemblance to her mother, who is white and French, Williams's child is blond. It follows that there is an arbitrariness to the whole business of race, from which Williams swiftly emancipates himself. Then comes the counsel: black Americans would do well to follow in his footsteps by 'transcending' race themselves. Conceding that this may be an easier proposition for him and his white-passing daughter, he exhorts mixed-race people to 'form an avant garde when it comes to rejecting race'. Williams's grand subject being himself, now we have a third memoir. Summer of Our Discontent takes a caustic look at Black Lives Matter from the lofty vantage point of his Parisian garret. At the outset, he tells us that the self-preening, race-mad identity politics of left-leaning liberals has fostered atomisation and precluded solidarity. As a consequence, the illiberal, unhinged right, now united behind Trump, has stolen a march on them. But from this not unreasonable edifice, Williams throws up a enormous scaffolding of enemies, which comes to encompass anyone and everyone engaging in some form or another of collective action. Ultimately, by the end, it appears that Williams's beef is not so much with Trump as with his leftwing critics. This is a strange, muddled book. On the one hand, Williams emphasises the primacy of class over race in the US. George Floyd, he says, was not your average African American: he was poor, unemployed, and had a criminal record. Horrific as his killing by a white policeman was, it was unduly racialised by BLM. Fewer than 25 unarmed black civilians are killed by police annually. Most black people will never find themselves in Floyd's shoes, Williams contends. While class is important for Williams, class politics isn't. There is only so much that initiatives to lift the poor from poverty can achieve, we are told, because 'the fundamental political unit, going back to Aristotle, remains the family'. The left has got it all wrong, obsessing over the 'macro level' when real change apparently happens at the individual level. Williams's strategy is to cherrypick the most ludicrous examples of 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' to smear the entire left. Sympathy from a few celebrities for the actor Jussie Smollett – who was accused of faking a hate-crime against himself, which he denied – is taken as evidence of the left's crumbling 'moral authority and credibility'. BLM, he claims, was driven by 'an ascendant raider class' of middle-class and not always black activists seizing institutional power – such as when a 'multi-ethnic mob of junior employees' ousted New York Times opinion editor James Bennet for publishing Senator Tom Cotton's call to deploy troops against BLM protests. Williams's other objections appear to be mostly aesthetic. He expends much energy pillorying the performative activism of such BLM 'allies' as 'the official Twitter account of the wildly popular British children's cartoon Peppa Pig', which tweeted a black square in solidarity. Later, visiting BLM-ravaged Portland, he mourns that 'a beloved statue of an elk has been toppled'. This in a town with a 'well-deserved reputation' for 'exquisite gastronomy'. Quelle horreur. He concludes by suggesting that the left and right are just as odious as one another. The storming of the Capitol in 2021, he says, had a mimetic quality, the populist right 'aping' the 'flamboyant reflex' of the unruly left. With such invidious comparisons, and with such a dim view of collective action, Williams is unable to make the case as to how precisely his homeland is to move towards a post-racial utopia. Excelling in sending up bien-pensant opinion, he has no answers. Fixated on slagging off the left, he has marooned himself on an island of vacuity. So when he articulates a positive vision of the future, all he offers are new age nostrums such as 'reinvestment in lived community' and 'truth, excellence, plain-old unqualified justice'. His plea for perspective is similarly misplaced. Young black Americans, Williams whinges, have been seduced by the race pessimism of the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, his more popular nemesis. He enjoins us to look on the bright side: the racial wage gap is closing; black school attainment rates are nearing white levels. Williams's Panglossian outlook is, I suspect, a form of American parochialism. His homeland, he says, is a 'society that is frankly more democratic, multi-ethnic, and egalitarian than any other in recorded history'. The Gini coefficient and Democracy Index beg to differ. There are eminently sensible reasons for race pessimism in America. Segregation and ghettoisation are facts of life. The wage gap between black and white people is still a staggering 21% (in Britain, it's under 6%). White Americans live three-and-a-half years longer than black Americans on average (black Britons outlive white Britons). Collectively, it was not the complacent optimists (who declared we had never had it so good) but rather the do-gooding pessimists (that demanded change at the dreaded 'macro level') who overthrew slavery and fought for civil rights. Individually, too, pessimism pays. For someone who sets great store by personal agency, Williams will no doubt appreciate Billy Wilder's melancholy observation – occasioned by losing three relatives at Auschwitz – that 'the optimists died in the gas chambers; the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills'. Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse by Thomas Chatterton Williams is published by Constable (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Russia Today
20-07-2025
- Politics
- Russia Today
The ideology behind the ‘New America' is more dangerous than it looks
For the past 500 years, the West has reigned as the world's dominant civilization. Though its grip has loosened in recent years, the West – especially the United States – remains the most powerful force in global politics and the international economy. This power, while capable of building plenty, also carries the potential to destroy a lot. Today, a new ideology is taking shape in the West, particularly in the US. Under the right conditions, it could prove as dangerous to humanity as fascism and Nazism were in the last century. The reelection of Donald Trump may mark a decisive turning point, transferring power to people and ideas that are, at best, deeply ambiguous. This 'New America' is not driven by a single worldview, but rather by a convergence of four ideological factions. At the center stands Trump himself and his allies – throwbacks to the era of great-power imperialism. Trump's inaugural speech to launch his second term left little doubt: He called for territorial expansion, industrial growth, and a resurgent military. America, he declared, is 'the greatest civilization in the history of mankind.' He spoke approvingly of President William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, both architects of American imperialism. The vision is unmistakable: American exceptionalism, enforced by military might and driven by the logic of conquest. It is the language of empire. Then there are the right-wing populists – figures like Vice President J.D. Vance, strategist Steve Bannon, and journalist Tucker Carlson. Their rallying cry is 'America First'. They champion traditional values, claim to speak for the working class, and disdain the liberal elite concentrated in coastal cities. They oppose globalism, support trade protectionism, and promote isolationism in foreign policy. This faction is not particularly new in American politics, but its influence has deepened, especially under Trump's patronage. A newer – and perhaps more unsettling – element of America's emerging ideology is represented by Silicon Valley billionaires. Elon Musk is the most visible figure, briefly heading Trump's Department of Government Efficiency in early 2025. But the more influential actor may be Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and early internet pioneer who became an informal adviser to Trump. Andreessen's political turn followed his frustration with Biden-era regulations on crypto and artificial intelligence. In 2023, he published a manifesto called 'The Techno-Optimist', a document that preaches unrestrained technological acceleration. In his view, scientific innovation and free markets can solve all of humanity's problems – if only government gets out of the way. Andreessen quotes Nietzsche and invokes the image of the 'apex predator' – a new breed of technological superman who sits atop the food chain. He writes, 'We are not victims, we are conquerors… the strongest predator at the top of the food chain.' Such language might seem metaphorical, but it is revealing. Andreessen's list of intellectual inspirations includes Filippo Marinetti, the Futurist who helped lay the aesthetic groundwork for Italian fascism and died fighting the Red Army at Stalingrad. The most intellectually developed thinker of the techno-libertarian camp is Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and the data surveillance firm Palantir Technologies. Thiel is no longer a marginal figure – he is now arguably the second most important ideologue of the New America, after Trump himself. Thiel is also a master strategist. He personally mentored and funded Vance, now vice president and possibly Trump's heir apparent. At the same time, he backed Blake Masters in Arizona, although that bet didn't pay off. Thiel reads the Bible, quotes Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, and speaks openly about the limits of democracy. 'Freedom is no longer compatible with democracy,' he has said. He has compared modern America to Weimar Germany, arguing that liberalism is exhausted, and a new system must rise. Despite his libertarian leanings, Thiel's companies develop AI tools for the Pentagon and fund next-generation weapons systems through firms like Anduril. Thiel believes that America has entered a long decline – and that radical technological leaps are needed to reverse it. One of his pet projects is the 'Enhanced Games', a competition where doping and biohacking are allowed. Co-organized with Donald Trump Jr., the event reflects Thiel's obsession with transhumanism and human enhancement. In foreign policy, Thiel views China as America's primary enemy. He has called it a 'semi-fascist, semi-communist gerontocracy' and pushed for complete economic decoupling. Interestingly, Thiel is far less hostile to Russia, which he sees as culturally closer to the West. In his view, pushing Moscow into Beijing's arms is a strategic mistake. The final group behind the New America are the theorists of the 'Dark Enlightenment', or neo-reactionary movement. These intellectual provocateurs reject the Enlightenment values that once defined the West. Nick Land, a British philosopher living in Shanghai, is among the founding thinkers of this school. He predicts the end of humanity as we know it and the rise of posthuman, techno-authoritarian systems governed by capital and machines. For Land, morality is irrelevant; what matters is efficiency, evolution, and raw power. Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), an American programmer, is another central figure. A friend of Thiel and an insider in Trump's intellectual circle, Yarvin advocates replacing democracy with a corporate-style monarchy. He imagines a future of sovereign city-states run like companies, where experimentation with laws and technologies is unrestricted. Yarvin is clear in his rejection of American global leadership. He believes the US should withdraw from Europe and let regional powers settle their own disputes. He speaks warmly of China, and his views on World War II are unorthodox to say the least – suggesting Hitler was motivated by strategic calculation rather than genocidal ambition. Many of these ideas may seem fringe. But fringe ideas have power – especially when they echo through the corridors of political and technological influence. Carl Schmitt's legal theories enabled Hitler to seize dictatorial powers in 1933. Today, the intellectual allies of Trump and Thiel are crafting their own narratives of 'emergency', 'decadence', and 'reawakening'. What's emerging in America is not a retreat from hegemony, but a reformatting of it. The liberal international order is no longer seen as sacred – even by the country that built it. The new American elite may be withdrawing troops from Europe, the Middle East, and Korea, but their ambitions have not shrunk. They are turning instead to subtler methods of control: AI, cyber dominance, ideological warfare, and technological superiority. Their goal is not a multipolar world, but a redesigned unipolar one – run not by diplomats and treaties, but by algorithms, monopolies, and machines. The threat to the world is not just political anymore. It is civilizational. The superhumans are on the article was first published by Russia in Global Affairs, translated and edited by the RT team
Wall Street Journal
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Are Liberals Finally Tiring of Cancel Culture?
'Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?,' asks a New York Times headline that teases a cure to what ails the New York Times. The newspaper has shown some recent indications of a healthy desire to step back from the progressive ledge, and let's hope that Sunday's guest essay is another baby step toward a post-ideological journalism. David Litt writes in the Times:
Fox News
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Edward Lawrence: The trade deal with Vietnam is the 'first of a flurry of deals' that likely will occur before July 9th deadline
All times eastern FOX News Radio Live Channel Coverage WATCH LIVE: Will Cain talks to Tomi Lahren on the growing ideology gap between men, women
