Holding the Center: Between Extremes in American Discourse

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This week on the Andrew Yang podcast.

Most people are not on board with the agendas that the very energized illiberal extremes on both sides are foisting on us. And so I really, the optimism I have is that there is actually, you know, quite a large appetite for nuanced centrism that can negotiate and compromise and find common ground.

Our next speaker has a book coming out and we're going to be sitting down. I'm going to interview him about his book. You're in for a treat because he's a brilliant writer, very, very lucid and courageous, I would say. He's written a couple of books. One is, I believe, Self Portraited in Black and White. His book coming out this summer is called the Summer of Our Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, which is a very, very profound title. Please join me in welcoming my friend Thomas Chatterton Williams. How you doing, brother? I should mention too that Thomas spends a lot of time in the area. His family has a home and a town like two towns over from here. You know, sets a theme here. It's like I reached out to people who I know love Hudson Valley, and Thomas certainly falls in that camp.

Absolutely. Yeah.

That's fun. So there's a theme to this particular session called Unlearning Race, which itself seems sort of provocative. But you've written pretty extensively on this topic. What do you think we're getting right and wrong on race? I mean, that's a lot. So you could probably talk for some time, but You've done a lot of speaking and writing on this topic.

Yeah, well, I think that this country, you know, it has obviously a long and tortured history of thinking about dealing with racial division and identity. And it gets things quite wrong. And it started off with some things quite wrong. You know, color was a kind of shorthand for freedom or unfreedom, obviously, in a nation that had slavery within its borders. But also, America is a multi ethnic society that has increasingly, you know, generation after generation, gotten a lot of things right. You know, America is an extraordinarily diverse society where people really do. Where a lot of coexistence really happens quite smoothly. My book in 2019, Self Portrait in Black and White, was really a meditation on the difference between my experience growing up racialized as black in American society at the end of the 20th century and my father's experience growing up racialized as black in the American south prior to the civil rights era, in the era of Jim Crow and segregation. And we really grew up in two different countries. By the time that I became a parent myself and was raising children in Paris, France, I was raising children who were descendants of American slaves. But most people, by looking at them, would not be able to tell that they were black in any way or descended from Africans in any way. And so it forced me to reflect on what these boundaries are that we take as so self evident and obvious and permanent, and what it would mean if we were able to, in some naive way, but in some necessary way, transcend these ways of thinking about ourselves and each other to really achieve the multi ethnic society that I think we can achieve if we allow ourselves.

Wow, that sounds profound and like a beautiful vision. So that was the book in 2019. Was that your first book or was that.

That was. That was to my father's dismay, that was my second memoir before the age of. So I wrote a coming of age memoir when I was in my twenties. And Self Portrait was much more of a father, daughter, son, father kind of meditation on not coming of age, but meditation on parenthood.

I ask because it seems like your third book is coming out this summer. I have now written three nonfiction books. And one of the things that happens is everything you write kind of builds on the last thing you wrote. And there's a germination period where after you finish a book, you're like, I'm not going to write for quite some time. I don't know if you've had that. But then slowly. So things start creeping into your mind and you start putting thoughts down. I mean, in your case, you write regularly for the Atlantic. What is that cadence? You know, like, I mean, I read your columns all the time, but I feel like you have a new piece that comes out. How often?

Normally one to two a month. You know, I do about 12 pieces a year, but sometimes, you know, in November, there were. You know, there were a lot of things to write about the election, or sometimes it gets busier. I try to write. You know, I try to. For me, it's better to take a thought that, you know, you tweet or something and try to turn it into something that is actually providing food on your table for your family than to just give it away for free on Twitter. I struggle with that, but I try to take. I try to react to news and test kind of thoughts on social media, and then if there's some type of interest in the thought, then that often can turn into a short piece. And then I always have longer pieces going on the back burner, too.

So in your case, the new book that's coming out, was it born. It must have been born of some of the. The journalism you were doing during what you described as some of our discontent, which I believe is summer 2020.

Yeah, that's right. You know, there was a lot to think about and reflect on and write about during the summer of 2020 and going into 2021, when, you know, most of the time I was in France and we were still locked down in a national, like, quarantine well into 2021, until, like, this time of year 2021. So, you know, I was obviously like everybody else, thinking about all of the ways in which, you know, the racial reckoning, the pandemic and the specter of Trump and the reelection and, you know, the idea that we had come very close to losing our democracy. Now, that seems. It seems different now. But, you know, all of these things were combining to seem like that was one of those hinge years, one of those, like, 1968 type years where there was a before and after 2020, it had impacted all face of society. And, you know, I was writing journalism around different, you know, institutional effects that, you know, had been going on. Like, you know, I had obviously written a lot about, you know, to use a cliche, cancel culture or, you know, speech issues, things like this. And, you know, it started to coalesce in my mind into a kind of book, which often happens. You know, you finish a book and you say, I'm never doing that again. It was too painful. But over time, ideas build up and build up and build up, and you can't get them out in any other form than this beautiful object that we have that combines five years of thinking, it compresses it into 200 or 250 pages and can be read in three hours. So at some point, I realized I had enough to say about my experiences and observations in 2020, that it was becoming a book. And then it took me longer than I thought to finish it.

Well, you know, I think there's, like, a plus and a minus to the fact that some time has elapsed since the summer 2020, where you have, like, different perspective and you talk about now our sense as to what did change and did not change. I mean, there was this contemporaneous feeling. It's like, oh, you know, there's going to be some big change coming out of this. And then now people look back and say, what did change as a result? I'm sure those themes are pretty front and center in your book.

Yeah, well, I was lucky. You know, sometimes you take so long that you didn't get the book out that you. Events start to happen and you get the time to add that into the book. So I was 16 months late delivering. And so I got right up into the election, and I got to see how.

Dude, I have always taken those deadlines so seriously. I can't imagine being.

You always turn in a book on time.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, they give me a deadline. It's the Asian in me. I'm like, thinking, I've got some homework. I'm gonna get it done one way or another.

I was like that with my first book, and then I would meet authors, and they were like, I was eight years late delivering, and I was like, you can do that.

When you say delivering, it sounds like you're having a baby. It's like, oh, my delivery date was pushed back.

Anyway, this was fortuitous for me because I think that if I would have published the book when it was due to, it would have not anticipated the kind of turns that we now know came to pass. So it was pretty clear Trump was coming back to office, or he certainly had that chance to. I was able to write about October 7th in Israel and the protests that swept across the nation here during 2023, 2024. So I think that I was able to augment my idea of how significant 2020 was by putting it in a longer story of, like, the movement in American culture from, let's say, the Obama era through October 7, 2023, and that aftermath. So it tells A story of like the social justice kind of the ascendancy of the social justice movement and then in its downfall essentially with the backlash that swept back as the pendulum has swung with Trump.

Yeah, you referenced cancel culture a little bit earlier. So here's the conventional wisdom. I don't think I'm surprising anyone with this, that there was this element of cancel culture that went overboard and it started to alienate folks in various sectors of American life and that contributed to Trump's return in 24. And first, let me throw that out both to you and the audience. I mean, that's something I think most of us now feel is part of the story.

I think it's not very controversial to acknowledge that, you know, one of the most effective political ads in recent history was the ad that Trump ran last fall. She's for they them, he's for you. That was an agree or disagree. That was an extraordinarily effective political ad that actually, you know, seemed to impact the turnout among voters that were not necessarily paying attention to politics day in and day out.

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Thank you listeners. Please make sure to like and subscribe. And if you have any questions, send them to mailbagndrewyang.com and we'll do our best to answer them. Thank you. When I think about summer 2020, I mean I remember death of George Floyd attending a vigil like the outcry, there were protests. You know, to me it was a sign of the times that I don't believe any meaningful federal legislation resulted. All that in part because of the way our political system is currently designed. Where you have this my view dysfunctional two party system that popular will actually is not very material to policymaking. What is material to policy making, just get wonky for a second. Is the primary voters in red states and blue states, which is about 11% of the population. So if you imagine the most conservative 11% in Wyoming or wherever the heck like, you know, that crew controls the electoral incentives for the Republican Party, which then can block any meaningful policy. And so despite all of the passion and anger and people on the street, it didn't touch the political incentives of that 11%. I gave a TED talk on this topic. By the way. How many of you all have seen the Ted Talk. Not many. It's cool. It was the number seven Ted Talk of 2024. And it obviously solved all of our problems. So, you know, anyway, so the reflection people have on 2020 is that there was all this popular energy and then we didn't get tons of policy and then there was a backlash. And I feel like there was like this and there were some excesses among some of the organizations that you associate with that time.

Well, yeah, I mean, some of this stuff is quickly being memory hold and has been because, you know, events are moving so rapidly. And obviously in many cases the backlash has been so extreme that it's difficult to dwell on things that went awry five years ago when people are being disappeared on college campuses right now and things like this. But some of the policy proposals were absolutely astonishing, like defunding and even in some cases, some people were arguing literally for abolishing police departments. Some of these policies were proven wrong by actually succeeding and being implemented. They briefly experimented in certain places and precincts in Minneapolis, for example, with abolishing the police force or trying to do a community based policing. And the actual residents, many of whom were themselves racial minorities, many of whom were black, were livid and insisted on not doing that because it was actually very much counter to their interests and their own, you know, safety. So these were kind of, you know, these theories of kind of, you know, making the society a better society were very utopian in many ways. And there was a window in which I think the tear in the fabric of reality that the pandemic induced and that moment when we were all glued to our smartphones with nothing to do, and we were galvanized around the injustice of seeing this man killed in slow motion. This allowed us to implement many kind of like half baked, ill conceived ideas of fixing society that really did invite, and I don't mean that they justify it, but they invited a reaction that now we are all suffering through because it gave a window to a strongman to come and say, you see how crazy they are at Harvard? You see how crazy they are here. I'm going to fix this. I'm going to make society normal again. Even though it's insane to think that someone like Donald Trump could make anything normal, but that was really what was at stake in the election.

Yeah, I remember having conversations with all sorts of people, including some people I like and respect prior to this last election, and they were siding with Trump. And I was like, come on. I mean, this is not the way at all. This is really dumb, in my opinion. Sorry, any Trump voters in the audience, but I just thought it was dumb. And then they, and then what they would do is they would say it's like, hey, have you seen the other side? And I was like, Like, I have seen the other side and I still think Trump's going to lead you towards, like, an accelerated disintegration and should be avoided at all cost. Some of the anger I wouldn't have, and, you know, we can tie this into the book, is that, like, you have this dysfunctional, like, two side system where it ends up pitting us against each other. It's like, oh, good, bad, you know, enemy, friend. Most of which is fake, by the way. And then if you are disappointed in the current regime, then you're like, okay, I guess I'll choose whatever the other side is offering. And if you get attacked from one side, then you end up going to the other side. One thing I will say positively about you, I mean, I'd say a lot of positive things, but, but, but one. One of the things that happens too is if you get attacked by one side and you look around and be like, huh? Like, okay, you guys don't seem to like me. Like, who does like me? And then you'll turn around and be like, do you like me? And then the other side would be like, yeah, we like you because the other side hates you or whatever. And so you wind up siding with folks that maybe aren't so great. And that if there was like a universe where you had more than two choices, you know, maybe you'd have like, this very, very different universe. It's like, hey, they don't like you. Like, you can come us. And I imagine that the book sort of makes like a version of that case. I think you talked about how hard it is to hold the center.

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. And you're one of the primary advocates for having some type of third way so that people could kind of triangulate their allegiances and their interests in a way that I think would benefit the culture, the political and the intellectual culture. It's very, very disappointing to have seen so many people who essentially were alienated from, let's say liberals, disaffected liberals, alienated from their side during, you know, let's say, the second part of the Obama administration through 2020. You know, like, we're increasingly alienated from the media institutions, the universities, the cultural institutions. And instead of holding firm to their principled view of what liberalism should actually be, what progressivism should actually be, they embraced something that is much farther away from their values.

Reactionary.

Yes.

And then you wind up justifying stuff. It's like, come on. I mean, you can't really think that's the right move, by the way. I'm going to tell you all a story. Some of you don't know it, some of you know it, Whatever. So I leave the Democratic Party in 2021 because I'm like, look, two party systems gonna lead us to ruin. We need something different. I then get yelled at by various folks in the Democratic Party. I'm like, guys, I was in Georgia freaking last year, like helping you win Senate seats. It's like, I'm still the same person. I just think there's like another path to goodness. And you know who invited me on every single day for the next month? Fox. Where like, fox have on. And they just stick a mic in my face and they're like, hey, hey, Andrew, you want to talk about how bad the Dems are? Like, and then I was like, not really because, like, I think you guys are, you know, full of it, you know, so. But, but that's like the stupid game that the media organizations benefit from. The polarization, unfortunately. They say, like, look like, you know, they come to us, they want a certain message. If you give them that message, then you can be part of this team or that team, but you need to pick a team. I think this, this two sided thing is a wreck. I just wanted to share again to commend you because I think you've taken some degree of incoming. Even your official Penguin Random House fancy bio says like, you know, one of the most revered and reviled. And I was like, who the heck would revile Thomas? I mean, he's such a nice guy. But the fact that they had that in your official bio, I was like, oh my gosh. And then you, you. So you've taken some heat, but you've been principled in high integrity the whole time.

I appreciate you saying that. I'm trying to be, you know, I think it's partially exactly how you say that. There's just professional incentives to be on one side or the other. And it's very difficult to maintain a kind of heterodox position in the middle. But it's also just human nature that I've seen a lot of people that I like a lot. They just, it's very hurtful to, you know, we're, we're tribal on some level. It's very difficult to be expelled from the table you've been sitting at. And so oftentimes people just on a very human level, it's not malevolent, it's not cynical. They're not doing it just for. They are just going where other people are accepting them. And so you saw a lot of people like, flock to Trump in that way. And I think it's sad because he's so much farther. He represents a vision of American society that's so much farther away from where they were starting. But it's a kind of, it's an understandable dynamic on a social level.

I mean, people are now turning on Trump because they're actually seeing him in action, be like, this is what I signed up for. And by the way, I think it's going to get much, much worse economically. So the tariffs that have been implemented, they're rippling. Even the vestigial tariffs on this 90 day stay are going to increase cost by billions and billions of dollars. So back to the book. So you talk about the excesses, and I mean, and this is something I do kind of regret a little bit, is that in some ways, like, you find yourself giving more airtime to the excesses of the left and the excesses of the right, even though, like, the excess, because in part, like the excesses of the right just seem so evident and apparent. I will say that, like, my great disappointment with the left has been that they've let Trump take power twice. It's like, I'm someone who thinks Trump is a disaster. If your job is to keep him from winning, then, like, let's hope you do that. You know, I mean, I endorse Kamal for that reason. I was like, like, let's keep Kamal out. Sorry, let's keep Trump out. Excuse me. And then the Democrats, because of the way that this system is set up, it's like there's like that they're prone to excess, then they're bleeding to. I mean, I will say that, like, I don't regard Trump voters as evil, but I regard a lot of stuff that's emanating from this administration as very dark.

I feel so frustrated that, you know, this was something that was extraordinarily preventable. I mean, it was not inevitable that Trump would win again. He won decisively, but by a very slim margin. And in fact, if the Democrats didn't take their eye off the ball, I think with, you know, with pandering to a kind of very insistent and loud but very numerically small activist faction within their coalition, I think they would have noticed that most Americans did want secure borders and just things that are Kind of common sense that Trump was able to take advantage of and really exploit. And then on top of that, you had the Weekend at Bernie's kind of thing going on deep into the summer. And I was with you retweeting you every time you were trying to explain to people why they should vote for Kamala, even though they're so fed up with X, Y, and Z. But it was obviously too late at that point. And I don't know. I mean, after the weekend, in Bernie's fiasco, I don't know who could have come out of that and necessarily won.

You mean the debate that Biden.

Yeah. And then the realization that, you know, the entire basically establishment media class had been either not wanting to know the true state of Biden's condition or had actually been, you know, conspiring to conceal it. That is actually extraordinarily bad.

So, I mean, I was in New Hampshire making a case for a guy named Dean Phillips. Those of you who are on my mailing list definitely heard about Dean Phillips, because I was like, I turned into the Dean Phillips show for a while.

But we owe him an apology. Everybody owes that man an apology.

Everyone owes Dean Phillips an apology. He's like. He is. He's a good man who's making a case. And then he just got maligned and vilified and had his career ended, honestly. And, you know, one of the things that will instill cowardice in everyone is, like, when someone does the right thing and they have their career ended, then everyone else is like, oh, good thing I didn't do the right thing. You know, like, I just keep my head down and just, like, penguin clap and tell the people that, you know, he's great. But this is part of the problem, is that Thomas will probably, like, line up with me on this. A lot of these people are good people. You know, I mean, one of the easy explanations is all these people are terrible crooks. And by the way, that's a pretty popular argument. Now, you could be like, all these people are terrible crooks. And I was like, yeah, screw them. Get them, throw them out. Burn it down. Like all that stuff. Like, the more nuanced but also equally disheartening version is, some of them are good people. It's just that, you know, like, we're in a system that makes their goodness not terribly impactful and almost irrelevant sometimes.

Yeah. The terrible incentives. You can't really get really good outcomes if the incentives for behavior are set up to produce outcomes that are obviously not good. Where was Cory Booker Doing something or anybody, it was just Dean Phillips. But if anybody else would have just stood with him, you know, I don't want to just get into the frustration that I've been, you know. Yeah. But it is, it's deeply frustrating because every day that something happens, every day you see, like I just before we went on, I looked at my phone and the New York Times said that a two year old American citizen had just been deported unlawfully with no due process to Honduras. And every time you see something like that, you say this really didn't have to happen. Every time you see that, like, you know, Trump is appeasing Vladimir Putin right now. It didn't have to be this way. He didn't have to wreck my 401k in record time. You know, this stuff was avoidable. So it is hard to get over that. But, you know, I'm glad you're with.

Me, Thomas, because like, I also have this, you know, like axe to grind on this. I mean, Dean used to say this is preventable and predictable and I believe it was. And I will level to you all as evidence is that I was standing up there in New Hampshire next to Dean being like, guys, let's freaking do this at something. So this wasn't me. Just there are half a dozen people here who are with me. And we fought it out. And by the way, after that ended, and then Dean was cast to the wilderness and whatnot, then I was like, okay, I did my best, I put it out there and Dean tried his best and his career ended. So I guess we're going to go this direction. And then during the disastrous debate, my phone starts blowing up and then I say something, it's like, them should swap Joe out. And then every major publication calls me. I know, not just like DMs me, like calls me. Wall Street Journal, ABC, Yahoo, are all like, are you willing to say this on the record? It's like, of course I'm willing to say this on the record. And then. Because at that moment, everyone was looking around for someone to say the Dem should swap Joe out. And I was like, I've been kind of saying it for months. So I'm like, I'm very happy to be your guy on this. And then over the ensuing weeks, there was this. Yeah, Cascade. And then the party. Who knew that it would take George Clooney to save America.

Almost. Almost save America?

Oh, yeah. I mean, really almost. So, Thomas, you have really been, I think, like a singular voice and you've taken in coming from both sides in A particular way, like what is your source of strength, integrity, balance? Because it is very stressful having people be mad at you.

Honestly, I have a really tough older brother that I think is probably just the explanation. It was very difficult to get a word in edgewise at the dinner table. That I was growing up in New Jersey, my dad, my brother, you had to argue, you had to be willing to be criticized. If I would say it's raining outside, my brother would say, no, it's not, it's misting or something. And then my dad would look out and say it's damp, it's humid. So actually I just think that was really helpful for the job of being a critic or a writer. I genuinely.

Were you a visiting professor in the area as well?

Yeah, I still am. I'm very happy to be a senior fellow and visiting visiting professor of humanities at the Hana Arendt center at Bard College. Roger Berkowitz, who runs the center, is in the audience. It's a wonderful program. Bard is just like a gem in this area.

Yeah, I suppose we can use that as a segue. So you're a fellow, you might not be like a full on professor, academic and whatnot. My brother's an academic. I do feel like this is a really rough time and where communities that have a lot of academics have seen a real downturn because there are so few people that now have opportunities in those environments. I don't know what the situation has been like locally. Have you witnessed anything like that at Bard or in your social circle?

I haven't at Bard. Bard has been incredibly lucky to be led by a man called Leon Botstein, who's just been. He's been, I think he was the youngest president of an American college and now he's the longest serving president of an American college in history. And he's just been steady. Bart has avoided a lot of the culture war excesses that happen on other campuses. It's really like a bastion of liberalism and so knock on wood. But so far that's really been a kind of outlier. And I don't just say that because my boss is in the audience.

I wasn't sure if he was your boss the way you described him. It sounded like your boss, but I wasn't sure. I'm optimistic about this kind of coalescing around the center that I'm going to say just to put little bit of shared journey on you. It's like I feel like you're part of that, like trying to comprise a center. What can you give the Folks here to be optimistic about moving forward.

That's the hardest question you've asked. No, I really think, I really think. I genuinely believe that most people, and the polling does support this, surveys support this. More in common is a group that really puts out excellent research.

Jonathan Haidt again, right.

He's cited their research.

It might not be him.

Yeah, but they're based between America and the UK and France, and they study all of these societies and they consistently show that most people are in this very large group called the exhausted middle or the exhausted center. And then there's extremely motivated and very polarized factions on the left and the right that are much more energized, they pay much more attention to politics. And they have captured through, you know, through the primary process and through the media landscape, they've captured most of the bandwidth. But most people are not on board with the agendas that the very energized illiberal extremes on both sides are foisting on us. And so I really. The optimism I have is that there is actually, you know, quite a large appetite for nuanced centrism that can negotiate and compromise and find common ground. But it's actually not, you know, it's not something most people can, you know, most people are trying to work and put food on the table, so they can't actually devote their lives to improving our politics. So leadership needs to find ways to do that. You know, intellectual leadership, but political leadership also. And that's where I don't know exactly how that shakes out. And that's why I'm grateful for, for people like you who are trying to innovate, innovate in our political spaces. But most people are there with you. And I know you've seen this when you go on the road. People are desperate for other ways of doing business because we know that something's wrong in the way that business gets done day in and day out right now.

Well, Thomas, thank you for being true to yourself and an awesome writer. Author, I'm sure. Professor. So the book coming out in the summer, the Summer of our Discontent, people should definitely keep an eye out for that. You can pre order a copy now.

I believe pre ordering is the sincerest form of love. That's for sure.

That's true. You're full of it. Unless you pre order Thomas book. But if someone wants to keep up with you, your work, your journalism, how can they best do so?

I'm in the Atlantic regularly. I'm present on Instagram and X and I'm trying to stick my toes into blue sky. If anybody is on there.

People here love Blue sky, man. They'll encourage you to do so. Let's give Thomas Chatterton Williams a round of applause.