What We Can Learn from Woke Chaos

‘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.