The Goldilocks of Bothsidesism

IN HIS NEW BOOK Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, Thomas Chatterton Williams proposes a unified field theory—of elections, not electrons—in our wildly disunified society. He argues that leftist politics and culture went astray and even insane over the past five years—especially in the George Floyd era of the Black Lives Matter movement and the DEI era among institutional elites that followed, but also in COVID-19 management. That pair of originating sins squandered what Williams often seems to assume had been a fair and amicable 21st-century American Eden. The wily serpent he accuses of feeding us the fatal apple was identitarianism, and once we swallowed that, our national soul became forfeit to the demonic Donald Trump.