The eternal vacuity of reactionary centrism

Thomas Chatterton Williams has always been a particularly representative example of the particular strain of reactionary centrism that Bari Weiss has mobilized to great profit and some measure of assistance to Donald Trump. He has once again exposed his ideas in the form of a book, and Justin Driver’s review is all the more compelling for being measured [free link]:

In “Summer of Our Discontent,” he continues that critique, dissecting the fallout from “the racial reckoning of the summer of 2020,” and positioning himself as a defender of traditional liberal values against the illiberal elements that he believes have captured progressives and conservatives alike. He styles himself as casting a plague on both American political houses, bemoaning “the ill-conceived identity politics of the left” and “the spiteful populism of the right.” In fact, though, he fixates on mere blemishes dotting the house to his left and too often neglects the unmistakable stench of decay emanating from the house to his right. He portrays the reactionary mood in our politics as arising largely in response to the left’s supposed excesses, rather than also endeavoring to probe its independent animating forces.

His reductive analysis reaches its nadir when he suggests that the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol can helpfully be viewed as, in effect, the left’s chickens coming home to roost. Following in the wake of the post-Floyd protests, the Jan. 6 insurrection represented “a gross apotheosis of a kind of increasingly common tendency, visible on the social justice left for years now, to make the country’s politics in the street whenever feeling sufficiently unheard,” he maintains. Never mind that the thousands of post-Floyd protests were overwhelmingly nonviolent and that the protesters included among their number such notorious firebrands as Mitt Romney.

In short, Williams’s analysis lacks proportion. He does not seem to grasp that the left’s illiberalism occupies a marginal position in mainstream Democratic politics and the right’s illiberalism possesses a stranglehold on the Republican Party. Today, many Americans justifiably fear rising authoritarianism and worry that the nation might not withstand sustained attacks on our core democratic institutions. But Williams manages to contort himself into asserting that the American left somehow poses significant threats along both these dimensions.

[…]

In passing, Williams labels President Trump “juvenile and polarizing,” and notes that he exhibits “meanness and mendacity,” among other drive-by opprobria. But he does not summon the energy to treat Trump with the sustained attention that the dominant political figure of our age demands. A book that purports to examine the last decade of racial politics but refuses to confront fully Trump’s political ascent and career cannot help providing a myopic vision of our era. The neo-nativist, racialized conceptions of American citizenship central to Trump’s worldview have assumed new prominence during his second administration. But they were blatant from his initial forays into electoral politics, when he doubted Barack Obama’s eligibility for the presidency and declared an Indiana-born federal judge biased because he was “Mexican.”

You have heard these ideas many, many, many times, and they have never been interesting or useful once.

By far the most devastating part of the review, however, is this verbatim quote of Williams’s prose:

For non-whites, even though the mixed-race population has become the fastest-growing segment of the American demos and, in real terms, a disproportionate but statistically small and decreasing number of unarmed Black civilians were killed by police annually (typically between 15 and 25 per year from a population exceeding 40 million, according to The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database) — and indeed other quality-of-life markers have been equalizing for significant numbers of Black people since the civil rights movement — the death of [Trayvon] Martin followed by [Michael] Brown (regardless of the specific contingencies of that case), and a high-profile slate of videotaped police and vigilante killings that converged with the proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones and the pervasiveness of social media, thwarted any self-congratulatory sense of the inevitability of social progress still alive in the first half of Obama’s second administration.

This is a book expensively paid for and published by Knopf. If this one sentence (!) of ungainly gibberish is the result of substantial editing it’s scary to imagine what the first draft was like.

The lesson here is that there’s no message elite editors want to hear more than “both sides do it, and if conservatives do it it’s probably not too bad and also liberals made them do it.” If that’s the one and only idea in your arsenal, you are looking at a lifetime of sinecures and healthy advances and you don’t need to have any talent for writing or thinking at all.