[Williams] 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 ... Reductive ... Williams’s analysis lacks proportion ... Bizarrely hyperbolic ... 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 ... Williams’s book is impaired by slapdash prose. His writing abounds with interminable, convoluted sentences that teem with digressions and then awkwardly limp toward disorienting conclusions
Editorial indulgence has resulted in such a sludge of footnotes and block quotes that the eye must often dismount and continue on foot. The reader will find here no argument she could not have inferred from the titles of a dozen identical books on wokeness; nothing has been added but sentences.
Williams has pulled off an astounding chess move: He has written something that is virtually impossible to disagree with without proving its grounding thesis ... No matter what I say here, whatever inconsistencies I point out, whatever disagreements we have about the timeline of events and their effects, my engagement with his ideas can be dismissed as a result of my ideology, and further proof of his claim that his intellectual opponents do not wish to argue in good faith (as only he can define it).
He’s a more ambiguous and engaging figure than his caricaturists suggest ... This is a clever and compelling book that embraces complexity. Chatterton Williams’s style is a touch rarefied for my taste, his language inflected by the stodge of academic jargon, but his thinking is dextrous and his insights are acute.
Unsatisfying ... The result is a serious effort to take stock of the illiberalism besetting contemporary American culture that too often gets bogged down in its own anti-wokeism.
