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Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool, Self-Portrait in Black and White, and Summer of Our Discontent. He is a visiting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Thomas Chatterton Williams discuss why the summer of 2020 played out as it did, the subsequent backlash, and why ideas core to the 2020 protests have now been quietly abandoned.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Your new book is all about the summer of 2020, but really more broadly about what the summer of 2020 tells us about this juncture of American history. It’s funny reflecting back at those events, because they seemed so momentous at the time, and I think that they are deeply impactful on where we are today. Yet at the same time, it feels so remote. The pandemic has in many ways been memory-holed. It’s rare that we think about it these days, in part because it was an unpleasant time. But even the racial reckoning, which more than the pandemic is really at the heart of your book, feels like something that we’re nearly downplaying now. These were the biggest protests against racial injustice, probably in the history of mankind, as you point out. They did go hand in hand with significant public disorder and a strange cultural moment, motivated by very real anger, very real injustice, but that could nearly be described in parts as a strange kind of mania, all of us pretending that people like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo were the great sages of the age. Now, even some of the ideas that animated that particular strand of it now have been memory holed and we pretend that we never believed in them. Talk us through this strange paradox.
Thomas Chatterton Williams: Yeah, it’s so strange. This was one of the most momentous and I guess passionately felt moments or years in our collective lives. But today we almost have this impulse to only focus narrowly on the present, and to act as though that time isn’t still relevant to the political and cultural events that we’re dealing with now. And I think that it’s inextricable from the present moment. It’s really one of those hinge years where there was a before and there was an after, like 1968 or maybe 2001. It was a pivotal moment. And there’s a kind of criticism that you get whenever, especially if you’re not a supporter of Donald Trump, you’re not in the MAGA movement, if you’re a liberal who insists on pointing out the self-sabotaging overreach that the progressive left subjected us all to when they were ascendant in the institutions that really influence our public lives. When you point that out, there’s this kind of reflexive response that it’s beside the point now, because people are being snatched in front of the Home Depot or all of these other egregious abuses that the Trump administration really is doing. Or they say it didn’t happen like that. There’s a kind of desire to downplay the excess of five years ago.
I think you cannot understand the intensity of the backlash, that really is worse than what happened in 2020, that we’re living through now without understanding the kind of cultural events and ideas that didn’t cause but absolutely provided a kind of justification for the abuses of power that are happening now. You can find any number of examples. But there’s always an argument, and you’ve been one of the best voices pointing it out, that wokeness, or whatever you want to call it, creates the reactionary backlash. These things feed off of each other and the only real solution is a principled liberalism in the middle that many people don’t want to actually buy into or get exhausted from attempting to buy into.
Mounk: I think one of the concerns that we’ve obviously shared in this space is that a lot of people want to say, on the one hand, there is this form of right-wing authoritarian populism, demagogues like Donald Trump. On the other side there is wokeness. And you have to choose. Because they’re enemies, and because the political sphere feels increasingly like it’s split between them, you have to think about which of those two is the lesser evil and then pick your side. Some people might pick the side of Trump. A lot of our friends and acquaintances in our social circle will then pick the side of those liberal strands on the left. The argument that I’ve always made, and I know you’ve always made as well, is that this is a false way of thinking about it. That one: when you put these forms of left-wing illiberal thought in competition with those forms of right-wing illiberal thought, then often the right-wing forms of illiberal thought are going to win. I think there’s plenty of evidence for that from around the world.
But the second point is that it’s a false choice, that these two movements actually nourish and reinforce each other, that each is the excuse for the other. And the only way to break out of that really dangerous spiral is to have a principled alternative, which allows us to live more peacefully and sensibly together. Take us back to that moment in 2020. The pandemic is raging. There’s still very heavy restrictions on people being able to leave their homes, to socialize, to go to church services, to attend funerals. And then those videos of George Floyd being murdered in the streets of Minneapolis are starting to make the rounds on social media. You’re in Paris at that point. When did you recognize that this was going to be a seminal cultural moment, a turning point in how we think about race? And how did you perceive those events at the time?
Williams: I remember that moment so vividly and it’s early in the book. My family and I were lucky to have left Paris at the beginning of the pandemic and we were sheltering in place closer to the ocean in the west of France with some friends at their house. I remember, I went upstairs to the office I was using and went onto Twitter and saw this video—you saw so many videos of violence over the years, but this one really stood out. And I said to myself at the time, wow, that’s really, that’s really something awful. But I was still amazed by the degree to which it went viral, as I think everybody must have been. But if you pull back and look at that moment and remember it, we had been by that point locked down in a way that none of us really have a memory of—nothing like that had happened in our lifetimes. We were all quarantined. We were all also dealing with relatively novel technologies that have changed the way that information is disseminated in the way that people collectively organize around the same few memes and the same few arguments and ideas. This book is really trying to make sense of the ways in which what happened in 2020 couldn’t have happened without a confluence of at least three factors, which is the pandemic, the racial reckoning, and the kind of specter of Donald Trump that’s haunting all of it and intensifying every political disagreement. So we’re all organized around this kind of homogenous reality that’s coming to us through the screens that we’re glued to, and the pause of our real lives gives people a lot of time to reflect on issues that they might not be able to devote so much attention to.
And if you remember, there had been for quite some time by that point an urge to rebel against something. Part of the country was rebelling against lockdown orders. And that was considered politically unacceptable if you were not part of the right. That was not to be done—they were grandmother killers and all of this, selfish people who wanted to operate their hair salons while a “black plague” was descending upon the country because this was also already by that point a racialized pandemic. The New Yorker ran a piece called The Black Plague and there was a kind of biological racecraft applied to the idea that poorer people in certain communities who were working in certain types of more high risk jobs and were as a result of that at greater risk of exposure and at greater risk of death from COVID, that it was actually in fact a racial effect of the pandemic. These things were kind of conflated.
Mounk: As a side note, explain to our audience what you mean by this term racecraft, as coined by Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields, which I think is a really useful term that has come to be in use in certain circles, but I think is still not known that widely. Tell us a little bit what you mean when you say there’s this biological racecraft where The New Yorker and other mainstream publications were kind of portraying this as a natural biological basis to the racially disparate effects that the pandemic may have had at a certain stage of its development. Later on, actually, the pandemic in a way that was never broadly covered in the media, ended up affecting and killing proportionately as many or even more white people than ethnic minorities.
Williams: It’s the slipping of race into a kind of explanation where other factors actually can explain what’s going on. It’s not racism, it’s the use of the kind of idea that racial difference is real. And it’s a reification of the racial categories. So a good example that Barbara and Karen Fields—the two scholars who coined the term are sisters—use is that there’s this swimming pool that’s segregated, or is effectively segregated, and a bunch of inner city black kids are brought to the pool and start to swim, and all of the white people get out of the pool and they say that they got out of the pool because the kids are black. The police come and the kids have to leave and the kids can’t swim in the pool because they’re black. That’s not why they can’t swim in the pool. But race just slips in and we almost without thinking about it think that there is an explanation in which the color of one’s epidermis is the reason they can’t swim in a pool, when there’s all these other assumptions and gestures and habits and ways of thinking and seeing difference and making meaning in that difference that are at play that have nothing to do with anything biological. So I’m saying that there’s a racecraft in saying that this was a “black plague” and that black and brown people are more at risk from COVID, when in fact what you’re talking about is people that work in certain jobs, people without certain economic means at their disposal, all of these factors, but there is nothing biologically or racially real about the discrepancy in the numbers we are seeing. And so that kind of slips into the conversation and makes it about white supremacy and all these other things instead of about epidemiological responses to an epidemic that is still unfolding.
Mounk: One way to capture this—I don’t think that that gets to the full breadth of what Karen and Barbara Fields are saying here—is that in France, social scientists tend to look at class, but not race. And so they see everything in class terms, even when there’s a racial dimension. In the United States, we tend to look at racial differences, but not the class differences, so some of these early differences in who was affected by COVID had to do with differences in age structure and family structure differences and who’s likely to be in certain frontline jobs. Those each have reasons that have to do with America’s history and therefore also of certain forms of racial injustice. But to sort of go from black people at this stage of a pandemic are more affected by COVID in part because perhaps they’re more likely to work frontline jobs where they’re continuing to be out there during the high phase of a pandemic to saying, this is the “black plague,” and there’s something kind of metaphysical about the way in which it attacks the black body—that’s what I think the Field sisters would rightly decry as a form of racecraft.
To go to this moment, it’s interesting to look at a few of these different elements, one of which is the pandemic and then the way that intersects with the online world. The first thing is that I think pandemics bring us in touch with our mortality and moments in history when we’re in touch with our mortality, whether that is the actual plague or other pestilent diseases or wars, tend to create millenarian movements. There’s a kind of obvious connection between those two things that was somewhat missed in 2020. There was something about the summer of George Floyd, which was a millenarian movement. And I don’t think it is a coincidence that it came at the time of the pandemic. A second, more prosaic, reason is that you were locked in at home without being able to go see your friends, without being able to go see family. And then when this happened and the first protest broke out and a thousand public health officials said, it’s good for public health for people to go to protests. It was the one experience of collective effervescence you could have. You couldn’t go to a concert. You couldn’t go play basketball with your friends. You couldn’t go to church for that matter. You could go take part in those protests, and that surely was a very important element of this as well.
Williams: That’s exactly what I was going to say when we went off into the conversation on racecraft is that it was politically unrespectable to go out and rebel against stay at home orders or anything like that. That was right-coded. But suddenly, there was a righteous cause that you could actually join and that would allow you to go outside and rebel. And it would be seen through the prism of moral clarity. And it would be completely different, you were told. You were even told by public health officials that it would be different because racism is also a pandemic. There was a letter signed by over a thousand public health officials and physicians that said that they could not in good conscience tell people not to mask collectively in the fight against racism when just prior to the day that George Floyd was killed, their guidance was to make sure you do mask collectively. So this was really something that happened like with a flip of a switch. One day we’re shaming people for being out in the streets, the next day we’re actually shaming people for not being out of the streets. I mean literally, you were asked, where is your black square on Instagram? What are you doing in this moment of racial reckoning? You can’t just be sitting home and being complacent or self-centered. That was really a shocking thing to see. I think you’re right about the millenarian impulse. There was a kind of sense of, the institutions that we believe protect us clearly are letting us down. The president’s on TV every day saying, maybe drink some bleach, maybe shine a light inside your body, things like this. He’s kind of cavalierly playing with the body politic.
This is one of the things that I think is very moving about the moment. I don’t mean to disparage it entirely. There was a very earnest sense of goodwill that many people in the country felt about earnestly trying to improve the society and fight something that seemed horrific—that this man was so callously kneeled upon for 10 minutes, essentially, until he died in plain daylight, in front of a bunch of onlookers, and people themselves were feeling vulnerable and were outraged that a policeman could so cavalierly play with their safety as it felt like even the president was cavalierly playing with all of our safety and his mismanagement of the pandemic. I think there was a sympathy that was genuine. But I think it’s had all kinds of disastrous consequences, especially when we got to the point that lawlessness, disorder, rioting, looting, violence, all of this can be justified when one is feeling that their kind of political disagreements are not being taken seriously through the proper venues.
Mounk: One way to think about this is to try to separate out the noble core of that moment. And, like you, I share the instinct to say, the biggest mass protests against racism in favor of racial justice in the history of humanity must have something noble about them. And I’ve always believed that we shouldn’t cede the term of anti-racist to people with a very peculiar brand of ideology rooted in a particular kind of form of critical race theory. I’m deeply and proudly and fundamentally an anti-racist. I’m just a universal anti-racist, somebody who opposes racism on universalist grounds, because I don’t think that race or those forms of racecraft have anything to do with the worth of an individual human being, and therefore I oppose social arrangements which denigrate people or relegate them to second class citizenship or mistreat them on the basis of that racecraft. But there’s that very noble instinct, which is what brought the vast majority of participants out in the streets into these protests in a particular historical moment. But that also helps to explain some of that character further. And then there’s sort of a form it took.
One part of a form it took is, like many mass protests, that you then end up having riots and public disorder. But somehow we weren’t willing and able to talk about that. The nobility of the cause in whose name those riots were happening—even if in many cases they really had nothing to do with them, either in terms of who the people rioting were or the nature of a rioting, like robbing stores in Soho—somehow made such big swaths of mainstream media unwilling to criticize or even just to acknowledge that. We had outlets like NPR running articles in favor of looting, written by highly privileged people. The second tragedy of that moment, is how is it that that anti-racist instinct, which I think for most people was the universalist instinct—to say, why is it that disproportionately many black people are killed by police in this country? Why is it that the history of slavery still has all of these after effects in our society today?—then got commandeered by this very strange ideology promulgated by the sort of sages of 2020, like Kendi and DiAngelo, who were sacralized, whose ideas were pushed forward in such a way that the mildest disagreement with them felt like sacrilege, and that mainstream outlets killed articles by regular columnists and contributors and staff writers that would criticize them in any kind of way for fear of their own staff and outside reactions, et cetera. Then somehow, five years later, we pretend these ideas never existed and those figures have basically fallen out of public life. The tragedy is that all of this energy doesn’t get channeled and fomented into building an ideology that can actually improve America and help the country live up to its grandest promise, but rather gets hijacked by these ideas that feel powerful in 2020 and now are not fully—I don’t want to overstate the point—but to a large extent disowned, even by the people who were as loud as mouthpieces not half a decade ago.
Williams: One of the reasons you can’t cleanly extricate the current crisis from what preceded it is because take for example the backlash against DEI and things like this. That backlash is not coming out of nowhere. The truth is that very few black people actually find themselves living day-to-day in the same circumstances that George Floyd was living in. He’s a real member of the American subaltern. The man is impoverished, without education, without resources or connections, addicted to drugs. He died as a black man, but he also died first and foremost, I would argue, as a poor man. And that is not a condition that is universally shared by black Americans in the year 2020. What this quickly became—and also I would say that the numbers of unarmed black men who are killed in police custody are actually quite low in a nation of this size, they’re higher than is acceptable, they’re higher than in comparably rich countries, but it is not the kind of genocide or epidemic that it was described at as at the time—but one thing that actually caught on very quickly was that the way to address inequality and racial bias and oppression became expanded. It can become an HR issue. It can become an issue of access to elite institutions and greater equity within the meritocratic spaces that everybody wants access to. And so the issue of George Floyd’s death was able to be used almost metaphorically in a way that his kind of victimization was a garment that could be donned by anybody who could claim membership in that identity group. And you saw pretty extraordinary things happening in 2020. Nothing actually shocked me more than what happened at the Poetry Foundation, if you remember this. The Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune endowed the Poetry Foundation with a $257 million endowment. They were in charge of Poetry magazine. In the days after George Floyd died, you immediately had people who have no life experiences that resemble George Floyd’s whatsoever, claiming that the entire Poetry Foundation’s board and operating structure had to be reimagined and the endowment had to be made available to them so that they could figure out how to use it to fund, I forget the phrase, but like black flourishing. Things like this started to happen. George Floyd died, so my play on Broadway has to be funded. George Floyd died, so I need this fellowship at Harvard. This was really happening.
We live in a moment now where the backlash to DEI is such that it’s, it’s, it’s bone chilling. They are shaking down the greatest institutions of higher learning that have ever been created.
Mounk: Shame if something bad should happen to your lovely university you’ve got over here.
Williams: They are shaking them down like protection rackets in Brooklyn in the forties or something. It’s astonishing, but it is a reaction to something else that happened that was unbelievable actually: that George Floyd died so I have to run the Harvard Law Review. So it’s not the same in proportion, but it is not exactly a kind of unimaginable reaction to previous shakedowns that were happening. What happened at the Poetry Foundation was a combination of Barbarians at the Gate and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. It was a hostile takeover with the techniques that Tom Wolfe was already remarking on, of kind of playing on racial guilt. And it was effective. And it inspired an enormous amount of resentment. People who are angry about it haven’t forgotten. People who thought this was a response to an outrageous death of a man in Minneapolis seem to have memory holed the extraordinary abuses that were sometimes even deemed necessary.
Mounk: I have a few thoughts on this. One is that often in politics, the anger is elicited by one thing, but the area in which somebody has agency doesn’t cleanly match that, so that’s what it ends up having impacts on. To use a completely different example, the reason why the Trump administration is going after universities is probably to be found in comparative literature departments, and departments of American studies, and departments of Middle Eastern studies or something like that. But the federal government doesn’t fund those departments. It funds mostly scientific labs through the NIH and other funding bodies. And so it’s able to go after the hard sciences, even though what it’s angry about is the humanities. It’s a weirdly misplaced attack, because that’s where the tool is.
A very different example with the same sort of structure is that we are rightly angry at the fact that a lot of African-Americans still live lives of deep disadvantage. This affects the fate of somebody like George Floyd, who’s a complicated figure, but shaped, as you’re saying, perhaps in certain ways by his race, but certainly also by his class. But it’s not very easy to take somebody who’s living in the poorer segments of the Twin Cities or in stretches of Baltimore or in the South Side of Chicago or in the poorest parts of New York and somehow elevate them to some form of affluence. What you can do is to take those people who are already relatively elite, who are already poets or already at an elite university and say, well, they should now be promoted and visualized, et cetera. So the anger which is triggered by the fate of the poorest black Americans then somehow turns into every fellowship from this prestigious program, every slot on this theater schedule, every dollar from the endowment of a poetry foundation, has to go to these comparatively relatively privileged people. And there’s a kind of weird misplacement there.
Williams: There’s a very weird space because of this idea of representation: through the magic of representation, an Ivy League educated upper middle class person who has a similar physical appearance in certain superficial ways to George Floyd has to be made whole. Even when—and I think this is inextricable from the backlash—even when objectively, regardless of ancestry and historical circumstance and oppression, they’re probably in an advantageous position vis-à-vis most white Americans. That is something that I think a lot of people were seeing with their own eyes, that people that were already doing better than them were also somehow representing or being represented by George Floyd, and being given advantages that were just compounding the spoils they’ve already received in that game of representation. And so I think that that created an oftentimes-extraordinary racist backlash that’s unjustifiable, but also it was an awareness that these people are already getting by fine in the meritocracy. It was a very strange thing to witness.
I have a good friend who I met by profiling him a couple of years ago, Michael R. Jackson. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, just a brilliant guy. And he’s black and he said, when George Floyd died, a theatergoer wrote to me and said, ‘I need to buy you a bulletproof vest.’ And he said, why? I don’t need that. I’m a successful playwright. That’s almost insulting. The guy just kept demanding that he needed him to be safe and that it was open season on black males. So, as a joke, said, just Venmo me the worth of the vest, and the guy Venmos him $400. This stuff was happening. Just like that any Pulitzer Prize winning playwright is a stand-in for the American subaltern is disrespectful to the actual plight of George Floyd. It trivializes the challenges that he was actually against, to think that giving any black person within your vicinity $5 by Venmo to get a Starbucks coffee, which was happening, that that somehow is addressing the deep and severe inequality that does have roots in the American slave trade, and American chattel slavery and the African slave trade. To think that that can be redeemed by just reaching for any person of color in your vicinity and trying to make them whole in some small way that makes you feel good.
I think the Black Square phenomenon where white people were not even interacting with black people, but were just amongst themselves exerting a kind of pressure to perform the care of black people that never even required the presence of a black person. This was astonishing. It had physical instantiations in places like Portland. There’s these neighborhoods where not a single black person lives. There might be somebody sleeping on the street nearby, but no one owns a home in these neighborhoods and every home had Black Lives Matter on it. There’s more Black Lives Matter signs than black neighbors. This is just intra-white kind of status jockeying and virtue signaling. And I think that rubbed a good proportion of the country the wrong way. This is also linked to the phenomenon that really gets short shrift still is that Trump, after the pandemic loss in 2020, steadily built increasing support among blacks and Latinos and other so-called people of color who felt alienated from that kind of white virtue signaling too.
Mounk: In 2016, Trump, during the election campaign, explicitly addressed African Americans, saying, vote for me. What do you have to lose? And rightly, that elicited a lot of outrage, with people saying, what do you mean black people don’t have anything to lose? A lot of black people have a lot to lose in this country. And somehow in 2020, that line by Trump became the standard representation of African Americans in the mainstream media. That the state and the fate of the average black person in the United States is so dire that they’ve got nothing to lose, basically. They don’t have anything to lose if people torch down neighborhoods, many of which are disproportionately black.
And of course, I thought about this a good amount when I was writing The Great Experiment and I looked into a lot of figures and data, et cetera, about various minority groups in the United States, particularly African Americans. There’s two truths that we have to hold in our heads at the same time. And somehow that seems too complicated for a lot of political discourse. And the first of those is that the average African American is doing pretty well. In fact, the average African American is now more affluent than the average European, in part because the standard of living of the United States is now much higher than that of Europe. On all the relevant metrics, the average African American is more affluent than the average European. And I have a line in that book, the average African-American lives in the suburbs rather than in the inner city. They have a white-collar job rather than a blue-collar job or unskilled work. They have employer-sponsored health insurance, which is, of course, a sign of having a relatively high-quality job, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, at the same time, there is a disproportionate share of African-Americans who do suffer from the kind of compound disadvantage that George Floyd suffered from. That is not the majority of African-Americans, not anywhere close to it, but it is proportionate. There’s absolutely also Latinos, Asian-Americans, and of course white people who suffer from that compound disadvantage. But it is disproportionately high. And obviously when you are in some parts of the country, whether it’s the South Side of Chicago, certain parts of Philly, et cetera, you see that and that is a real challenge. What’s frustrating about this conversation is the inability to keep those two things in our heads at the same time. That there’s now a big thriving black upper and upper middle class. That the average black American leads a pretty decent life by comparison to any other country today and any period in the history of mankind. And that there’s also a tragically disproportionate share of black people who, because of the legacy of slavery and a million other things, still do continue to suffer from those injustices. And a politics that takes all three of those insights seriously would be a lot more productive than one that only focuses on one of those three points.
Williams: That’s right, it would require a kind of nuance that I think is actually difficult to achieve because of that technological component of the past ten to fifteen years which is when the social justice movement really rose up to dominate institutions. One of the things that I think distorts the public conversation in our politics so much and has really become a huge problem since about 2012, 2013, is the rise of Twitter and other social media platforms with the iPhone in the pocket and the camera technology. We have an ability to disseminate videos and the algorithmic sharing of feeds. People have no conception of the amount of unarmed black people that are actually killed by police. I think the year that George Floyd died, people thought 1,000 unarmed black people died a year. It’s not close to that. It’s like 25 in a population of 44 million in a nation of greater than 330 million. It’s absolutely abhorrent. But it is not the genocide that some people were saying, there’s a black genocide as the letter to the Poetry Foundation Board actually stated. It’s nothing like that, but the kind of ubiquity of the spectacle of black death, and this notion that black men are being stalked and this incessant display of black pain and suffering and violence against what was at the time called black bodies, I think that really shaped the politics around this being an emergency that couldn’t rely on the usual way of doing business, and any means necessary was required for an intervention against the kind of precarity with which black people’s lives are lived. This is a feature of a society that doesn’t have a sense of how large it is—numerically, most people killed by police are white, but very few people actually appreciate that. People think that there’s more black people in the country than there are. So there’s a lack of understanding of numbers and probability and frequency of occurrences that I think really distorts what we’re talking about when we talk about class, race, law enforcement. And I don’t know how to actually get over that.
When you look at people’s perceptions of black crime, it’s also similarly distorted. And since Elon Musk took over Twitter, you get this kind of incessant black crime porn that makes people think that black people are much more deserving of violent responses from the police than, in fact, we are. Social media exacerbates all the discursive problems that we’re seeing.
Mounk: Another element of the summer of 2020 seems peculiar in retrospect—and which I think does help to build your thesis that all of this led to considerable backlash— is the cancellations of people who had minor or imagined transgressions against the politics of the moment, and just the kind of culture of collective irrationality around some of those things. I’ve written about a bunch of these things. Listeners to this podcast will recall some of these examples—the Latino utility worker who is accused of making a white supremacist sign when he just has his hand dangling out of a truck. The sign he’s accused of making is just the okay sign, which for most people in America just means that’s okay, but in some weird corners of the internet has become far right. The professor who holds a lecture about filler words and repeats a few times the most common Chinese filler word, which has some passing resemblance to the N word and thereby gets denounced by his dean and suspended from his teaching.
I want to make two points about this. The first is how the background of a pandemic had a lot to do with that as well. That if you have all day to sit at home and find things to be upset about on Twitter, if you have staff meetings in which you’re not physically in the same room and you can’t look at each other in the eye and you can’t take somebody aside and say, hey, let’s work this out, that makes it much easier to all take to Slack or take to Zoom chat and say, this person is evil, they’re going to be fired right now. I think a lot of the most absurd examples of what happened in 2020 are products of that. But the second is that I think it does have lasting impacts in ways people underestimate. By definition, everything that we read about in terms of these constellations are stories of relatively prominent people at relatively prominent institutions. Otherwise we wouldn’t read about it—it wouldn’t make The New York Times. But I’m just struck by how many people who are actually quite sympathetic to woke ideology in various ways, who are certainly sympathetic to the protests over the killing of George Floyd, have since told me about their personal stories, in obscure organizations involving obscure people, being cancelled in the same kind of way. And I do think that when you’re trying to look at why it is that so many Latinos, Asian Americans, some African Americans have moved away from the Democrats over the last five years, and why so many young people who I think often experience those cancellations in middle school, in the community, have become quite skeptical about the political left in America. I mean, Joe Biden’s age and all of that obviously played a role as well, but I think that does have some of its roots in that really unforgiving culture of cancellation.
Williams: Yeah, unforgiving is the word. There’s such little space for grace anywhere now, and I think that that is directly related to the ease with which somebody can just become a representation of something that’s not attached to an actual person’s complexity. The pandemic made us retreat to our screens. You don’t walk out into the hallway and work things out, but you make an example of your own, you perform your own values by targeting somebody who represents the wrong values and you jockey for status and position that way. Let’s not forget, these types of purges—as Hannah Arendt even pointed out—are job opportunities. People were getting rid of people with outmoded ways of thinking and sliding into promotional slots in the organizations that they thought that they would run better. That’s part of it. And then what you’re also talking about that I think is really important is that cancellations are not just the things that you read about. As you say, they’re at the institutions that you read about. But the much more important thing going on is the onlooker effect. The amount of people you never read about being canceled because they watched the example be made and then they self-censored.. You’re continuously surprised at the amount of support someone like Donald Trump has, because everybody’s unwilling to say what they actually think about issues, because there is no grace extended and there is no notion of good faith disagreement on certain issues, so every election now he is he gaining with black males, he is gaining with Latinos because no one’s telling you what they actually think.
That is the most destructive consequence of the coercive virtue signaling on the left that really dominated the most influential academic, media, and cultural spaces. Cancellation to this day is really downplayed. Anytime you try to talk about one of the things that you mentioned or any of the ones that I mentioned in the book, the response is: Trump is disappearing people or any number of what about-isms. But the idea that politics can be conducted where something is only wrong when it’s done against the values that I hold, that just doesn’t work. That cannot work.
This is probably the most naive thing I’d advocate for, but there really has to be some kind of move back to extending grace and allowing for people to disagree and trying to have that kind of nuanced compromise or negotiation about what values can be. And especially when we’re talking about values that are not yet set as agreed-upon norms around race or gender, most of the cancellations also happened on kind of contested norms that were not yet set in place, that somebody could be canceled for saying the wrong thing that wasn’t yet agreed upon, or it wasn’t yet a consensus. That was kind of a way of staking out the territory, making an example of somebody so that you now have a new norm. I think that that was extraordinarily destructive. I’ll just end the point by saying that if you’re actually just trying to achieve greater dignity and inclusion for trans people, well, what did that actually achieve? Because it was a Pyrrhic victory. Because now they have even less than they had been prior, so we could say that they overplayed their hand.
Mounk: One of the ways in which that moment has stayed with me, and I think will stay with me for the rest of my life, is that I do feel I’ve experienced what it feels like to live through a kind of collective moral panic. I want to be clear that the punishments that were meted out in 2020 were not comparable to those that were meted out in Salem in the 17th century or in China in the 1960s. But many of the mechanisms were. The accusation of a thought crime, of a weird behavior, which were often extremely circumstantial. The fact that anybody who then came to the defense of that person themselves immediately made themselves guilty and subject to attack. The forms of enforced silence. I’m just struck by how, in those months and years, people, when you would talk about certain subjects in a random Starbucks somewhere where you didn’t have any reason to think anybody who knew you was anywhere around, would just like inadvertently and without being conscious of it, just like drop the the level of sound which we’re speaking by an order of magnitude and suddenly you’re nearly whispering. Sometimes I pointed it out, but you realize you suddenly started whispering, and people were kind of taken aback and shocked by it, but say, oh yeah, I guess that’s right, I was worried that somebody might overhear what I’m saying. That to me has revealed something about human nature that I had read about in books, but that I now understand more fully. I suppose that’s a positive thing. I’m quite an optimistic person, but in general it has made me a little bit more pessimistic about human nature. These forms of collective moral panic are ever-present and are present on the right as well as the left, and are present in the service of exclusion and nationalism as well as the supposed service of fighting for the inclusion of minority groups. And if we don’t learn that lesson of always being on guard against those forms of collective mania and punishment, I think it’s going to have very bad effects in all kinds of ways.
Williams: You’re really talking about the fundamental aspect of human nature that is searching for scapegoats, designating scapegoats, and the kind of, as René Girard points out so well, the kind of communal cohesion and harmony that’s achieved through the designation and punishment or outcasting of the scapegoat. That’s so real. And I think that why 2020 matters so much to me, and why I couldn’t just move on and worry about the next thing, is because that is the first time in my life that I ever saw that play itself out. I’m 44 years old. And it’s terrifying. And people think, there’s no big deal, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and if some privileged editor loses a job, why are we all sitting here talking about it?
But the effects are much more destructive than that. Guilt by association is one of the most nefarious things that you can have in public life. The shaming of people, and convicting somebody based on an accusation—I think that’s one of the scariest things that was really weaponized at this time. Then what has happened is that we do have to acknowledge that everything is more intense and disturbing and dangerous when it has the power of the government behind it. Any number of punitive measures or things that look like cancel culture that the Trump administration is doing, you can find a precedent for that that happened in the years preceding it in any number of institutions and which were brought about by the left. It might be a cynical justification, but it forms the justification in their minds and in their excuse-making that they use for why they’re doing this now.
Because you have a situation where both sides see that the normal way, the liberal way of doing business, can’t be demanded of them in a state of emergency, and this is an emergency, and they have to win at all costs. It’s a zero-sum game. I’ve been left a bit more pessimistic, too, but I ultimately do think that I just have to believe. This is the part of me that was shaped during the Obama era, and I can’t quite shake it. I have to believe in that glimpse of a multi-ethnic society that wanted to transcend the divisions and oppressions of the past. I have to believe that that still is really possible and what the country wants and that we’re on a detour. A very dangerous one, more dangerous than I had thought even in 2016, but that we ultimately do have the ability to and want to get back to that kind of direction that Obama, I think, really opened up when he showed that the country was happy at the idea that it could perhaps become post-racial.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Thomas explore the idea that Obama signalled the move to a post-racial society, why it’s important to critique Trump despite the left’s failings, and how the Democratic Party can rebuild its appeal to voters. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
