I’m thrilled to welcome Thomas Chatterton Williams to the podcast this week. Williams is a colleague of mine at AEI, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and the author of the provocative new book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, which examines how the year 2020 broke American politics:
Taking aim at the ideology of critical race theory, the rise of an oppressive social media, the fall from Obama to Trump, and the twinned crises of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, Williams documents the extent to which this transition has altered media, artistic creativity, education, employment, policing, and, most profoundly, the ambient language and culture we use to make sense of our lives.
Williams also decries how liberalism—the very foundation of an open and vibrant society—is in existential crisis, under assault from both the right and the left, especially in our predominantly networked, Internet-driven monoculture.
Please listen in and check out Williams’s new book!
A transcript of this podcast is available on the post page on our website.
