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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE LIBERAL WHO HATES LEFTISTS  
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Pratinav Anil
July 22, 2025
The Guardian
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_ In his caustic critique of identity politics, Williams ends up
condemning every kind of collective action. _

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_Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of
Discourse_
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Knopf
ISBN: 9780593534403

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
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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
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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
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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
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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”.

Pratinav Anil is College Lecturer in History at St Edmund Hall,
Oxford, and author of _Another India._

* contemporary politics
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* political journalism
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* manners and mores
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