A look into how 2020 shaped America’s political landscape

Thomas Chatterton Williams will never forget where he was when he first saw the video of George Floyd’s murder. It’s seared into his memory, much in the same way that people describe 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination.

Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic and was among those who could work from home during the pandemic.

After sending his kids out to play after lunch, Williams, whose mother is white and father is Black, came across the video while scrolling through social media. There had been similar killings in the past, but he said that what he saw that day, “was something that I just knew in my bones was utterly wrong.”

In the intervening months, the direction and scale of national rhetoric took a turn that Williams also found to be wrong and, very much at odds with core, liberal principles. Identity-based politics, a closed-minded approach to opposing views and reactionary cancel culture suddenly became the norm. Not to mention the proliferation of violence that was acceptable if done in the name of ending racism.

When James Bennet, the opinion editor of The New York Times was forced to resign for running an op-ed from Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, Williams and some of his colleagues decided to address it.

On July 7, 2020, Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.“ Williams spearheaded the effort and it was signed by 153 writers and intellectuals, including J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky and Salman Rushdie.

While the letter agreed with the fundamental principles of the social justice movement, it condemned the direction public discourse on the left was heading — towards an “ideological conformity.”

It found there to be “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

In the years since, the issues the Harper’s letter addressed — which were poorly received by many on the left at the time — have become some of the defining political issues of the last five years.

To address the proliferation and adoption of such counterproductive stances, Williams looked from where they came — the era defining year of 2020 — and wrote a book that’s “an argument for why we must resist the mutually assured destruction of identitarianism — and really believe in the process of liberalism again."

His book, “Summer of our Discontent‚” came out this month. The Deseret News chatted with Williams about holding a mirror up to liberals’ anti-democratic ideology from the inside, the Obama to Trump transition, and what it will take for America to become a pluralistic, multi-ethnic nation. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Deseret News: How would you explain what the book is about?

Thomas Chatterton Williams: The summer of 2020 was really one of these pivotal hinge years — like 1968 or 2001 — where there’s a delineated before and after. The moment was inflected by three things.

The pandemic is an enormous part of the book. Life was upended and we were not living as we had prior to that and, in some ways, things have not ever been the same. The racial reckoning was able to break through, in large part, because of that suspension of normalcy. Then you have the fact of Donald Trump running for reelection and the politics of the nation being so hyper partisan and everything seeming so urgent — there is this understanding that democracy itself was on the line, and maybe it was.

Those three things came together to make this very, very urgent time. Ideas that were not new, that were rather niche, suddenly broke through and gained purchase. I’m talking about “intersectionality” and anti-racism ideas about social justice that had been percolating. They defined that moment.

The book is oriented around this hinge year. It’s trying to trace the ideas and events that finally broke through in 2020, to make sense of the world that we’ve inherited and trying to understand the backlash that it inspired. Because I don’t think you can understand the redemption and reemergence of Donald Trump in a vacuum, it’s fully in conversation with the excesses of the progressive social justice movement that preceded it.

I’m really wedded to the idea that, first and foremost, the sanctity of the individual is what matters, and that people always have a capacity to surprise you, and to be more complicated than any reductive category can allow.

—  Thomas Chatterton Williams

DN: When did you start to feel discomfort or revulsion towards politics and social structures that were outwardly supportive of free speech, but did not, in action or kind, give space for opposing viewpoints?

TCW: I want to stress that on May 25, 2020, I saw the video of George Floyd. It was a horrific killing. It was something that I just knew in my bones was utterly wrong, so I was fully on board with this idea that this must be condemned in the strongest sense possible. The country can’t have these appalling instances of racialized injustice and the killing of poor, unarmed Black men.

By the time that the real protests had started in the streets a few weeks later — some of which I really thought were justified — The New York Times published this op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton. Which — agree or disagree — it makes sense for the Times to have published. The reaction that it inspired and the lockstep uniformity of this copy-pasted condemnation that all these journalists at The New York Times used to scapegoat, swarm, stigmatize and publicly destroy the editor of the op-ed page, James Bennet, struck me as so beyond the pale.

It seemed to me like such a gross response to an injustice — that you could somehow address injustice with more injustice, by canceling people for trying to have a discussion about how the nation should respond to the moment it’s been thrust into.

The cancellation of James Bennet is when the Harper’s letter became the only response that we felt was appropriate. We didn’t want to be on the side of a movement that was so intoxicated by its own self-righteousness that it would create new victims. That idea that this omelet of social justice is going to be so delicious that it doesn’t matter how many eggs you have to break to get it made.

That in no way made up for the tragedy that we had just seen in Minneapolis. You’re not actually addressing the root cause. You’re also justifying great disorder and violence. This was also a moment in which it wasn’t just “let’s get the editor of The New York Times fired,” it was also “you might have to burn a building or that’s not the worst thing that can happen.” Everything was justified in this battle against racism.

We didn’t want to be on the side of a movement that was so intoxicated by its own self-righteousness that it would create new victims.

—  Thomas Chatterton Williams

DN: You refer to the Obama years as a honeymoon phase, but there’s a large swath of the country that doesn’t see it that way. How do you explain the loss of what he represented to those who don’t understand that time in the same way?

TCW: I try to paint the picture of what he represented to many of us in terms of possibility: for the first time, it seemed plausible that we could, not forget the oppressions and conflicts of the past, but actually move beyond them.

A lot of white people of good faith were genuinely invested in the idea that through the ascent of a Black president and this type of really transformative figure, that white people could finally be, like, “let off the hook.”

Then, if not forgive them, Black people could move on in a way that the country needs. And there were many Black people who were excited by the idea that white people could extend full recognition and respect as was evidenced through the recognition and respect that this transformative, extraordinarily talented and attractive man and his family were receiving.

That was a country that, not all, but a huge plurality of the country — for a moment — was really excited by this idea that we could achieve the multi-ethnic society that had been out of our reach in previous eras. That maybe this was possible and then we could have this America that was multi-hued but was really one people.

I don’t blame Obama for this personally, but what happened because of his presidency not living up to that enormous amount of hope was that the disillusionment and the comedown was so extreme that it makes sense that business as usual couldn’t just happen with a Clinton presidency. The reaction was such that it made Trump possible or even inevitable.

DN: Do you think the left’s emphasis on social justice rhetoric helped create — or justified, even — conditions that opened the door for a second Trump presidency?

I do not think it justified it, and I don’t even think it caused it. That gives up too much agency for people who chose to support Trump and chose to support him again and again. This is the third election he’s been a part of. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that it wasn’t an aspect of making his return possible and attractive to large segments of the country.

It presented such a disturbing vision of what the country looks like under self-righteous and illiberal progressives. The Democratic Party really did allow itself to be captured by very illiberal activists. More than race, on gender issues this became deeply unattractive to normies in much of the country, of all ethnic persuasions.

DN: You wrote that the predominant implicating factor in George Floyd’s murder was not his race, but was his social class.

In recent decades, who’s the last Ivy League educated young Black man that you remember being killed by police the way that George Floyd died?

We don’t have videotapes of unarmed upper-middle class Black lawyers being killed. We do have videotapes of poor people of all classes being killed, even though we don’t talk about the common experience of poor people’s engagements with law enforcement.

It seems quite obvious that the response to the death of George Floyd also wasn’t a movement that really changed the on the ground lives of the Black core. What it did do, was it became a way in which Black dramatists on Broadway could say, “I need funding for my play.”

It presented such a disturbing vision of what the country looks like under self-righteous and illiberal progressives.

—  Thomas Chatterton Williams

If class doesn’t scream at you in this situation, I don’t know what else would. And of course, class is raced and race is classed. We have a history of the Black poor being poor in many ways, because — like my own family — they were shut out of the opportunities over the last century to buy homes. Nobody is saying that there’s not an interplay between race and class but, in 2025, to say that the class aspect isn’t the most salient aspect, is really disingenuous.

DN: You wrote that the book is an “argument for why we must resist the mutually assured destruction of identitarianism.” How would you define identitarianism?

There’s right-wing identitarianism and left-wing identitarianism, and the defining feature that unites both is that it’s the category that matters above all, that individuals are subsumed within larger groups and group identity is what cannot be transcended.

You can use that to be anti-racist or racist, but the thing that they agree on is that it’s the identity category that takes precedence. I think this is always a negative. I’m really wedded to the idea that, first and foremost, the sanctity of the individual is what matters, and that people always have a capacity to surprise you, and to be more complicated than any reductive category can allow.

DN: Does that not leave space for the way that other people perceive those identity categories?

No. My life has been informed by the fact that I’m a descendant of African slaves, but I don’t think that that could ever give you a complete picture. Even if you use it for so-called anti-racist ends, it can only ever take you so far.

One of the points I tried to make in the book is like what does it mean to say that there’s a “Black point of view” or there are “Black interests?” One really important example from this era was that it was in the interest of Black people to defund, abolish or diminish the police presence in their communities. That was something that would be done on behalf of Black people, except for the uncomfortable fact that actual Black people tended to be — not the elites who set the discursive agenda in the media or in academia, but actual Black people — in these communities where violence is not just a theoretical construct but is actually a component of their lived reality were most loudly saying “Do not defund or abolish the police. We need police.” So what’s the Black point of view?

White people are the only category in the country who Donald Trump lost support with in 2024. So, what’s the white interest?

These categories don’t tell you enough. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be proud of where your ancestors came from or have certain cultural traditions, but that can never be the most salient aspect of who you are or how we interact with each other if we want to actually come together in a multi-ethnic society where we have to be American citizens together.

I really do believe that. That’s not just like a polemical point that I try to score against opponents. That is key to how the country can ever live up to its full potential.