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The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House.
Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.
Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half century, taking readers on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycontin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules.
Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement is a brilliant and ambitious argument about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.
Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.
Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half century, taking readers on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycontin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules.
Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement is a brilliant and ambitious argument about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 21, 2020
About the author
Christopher Caldwell
3 books71 followersChristopher Caldwell (born 1962) is an American journalist and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He is a contributing editor at The Claremont Review of Books and a member of the editorial committee of the French quarterly Commentaire. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times and Slate. His writing also frequently appears in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, where he is a contributing editor to the paper's magazine, and The Washington Post. He was also a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Press and the assistant managing editor of The American Spectator.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 217 reviews
February 6, 2020
Anyone who has studied the history of an era, let alone personally lived through it, will undoubtedly find things to mourn in its passing. None of us are free of this, nor is anything wrong with such nostalgia. I'm interested in reactionary political thought because it is a powerful force in our present-day politics but also because many reactionaries are deeply intelligent and provocative thinkers.
This book however is a lame contribution to that tradition. I could sum it up as one long curmudgeonly "Back in my day..." that almost reads like a caricature of conservative writing. Caldwell is nostalgic for the days before the Civil Rights Act and women's liberation for the very boring reason that people like him had more power before then. There are complaints about diversity in film and inequities in the use of racial epithets by African-Americans, not to mention of course the perennial bad happenings on college campuses. It's a real Gran Tourismo of right-wing political cliches.
I grudgingly respect Caldwell for putting his argument out there nakedly without caring what others think of him, up to and including chastising Frederick Douglass for being too pushy about abolishing slavery. The problem is that he also mixes this honesty with arguments that are clearly in bad faith. In the section on women's liberation he writes:
"Female adultery had throughout history been a more serious trespass than male adultery, not because of any irrational sexism but out of a rational instinct for survival. When a man strays, he risks placing a child in some other household. When a woman strays, she risks introducing a creature with ulterior allegiances into the heart of her own."
Surely the child born of a man's adultery in another household would also be susceptible to these "ulterior allegiances"? This is just one illustrative example, where Caldwell attempts to dress up his preferences as almost an extension of natural law. If one wants to make a straightforward argument for ethnic power they should do so consistently without also trying to dress it up as an expression of higher principle. For some reason even honest tribalists find it too hard to refrain from this temptation.
My other criticism of this book is that Caldwell is a humorless writer who has no awareness of the irony of his situation. This makes him a lot less fun to read than literary reactionaries like Michel Houellebecq, let alone many talented anonymous posters on the internet. The meticulous recollections of Vietnam, Playboy Magazine and relatively arcane Supreme Court decisions of a bygone era felt unbearably tedious to anyone not from his generation. I'm sure he remembered what the world was like before all that, but that world is scarcely imaginable today and its never coming back – so what's the point exactly? I'm also capable of remembering a time and place where people like me had greater privileges and powers but that is hardly interesting on its own terms.
After reading Ross Douthat's fascinating and forward-looking new conservative book, I found this barely digestible. About halfway through the text, my head started to nod and eyes began to glaze over. As my vision went out of focus, the blurred letters on the page directed themselves into a new arrangement that expressed my sentiments more succinctly and accurately than any extended review could: "OK BOOMER".
This book however is a lame contribution to that tradition. I could sum it up as one long curmudgeonly "Back in my day..." that almost reads like a caricature of conservative writing. Caldwell is nostalgic for the days before the Civil Rights Act and women's liberation for the very boring reason that people like him had more power before then. There are complaints about diversity in film and inequities in the use of racial epithets by African-Americans, not to mention of course the perennial bad happenings on college campuses. It's a real Gran Tourismo of right-wing political cliches.
I grudgingly respect Caldwell for putting his argument out there nakedly without caring what others think of him, up to and including chastising Frederick Douglass for being too pushy about abolishing slavery. The problem is that he also mixes this honesty with arguments that are clearly in bad faith. In the section on women's liberation he writes:
"Female adultery had throughout history been a more serious trespass than male adultery, not because of any irrational sexism but out of a rational instinct for survival. When a man strays, he risks placing a child in some other household. When a woman strays, she risks introducing a creature with ulterior allegiances into the heart of her own."
Surely the child born of a man's adultery in another household would also be susceptible to these "ulterior allegiances"? This is just one illustrative example, where Caldwell attempts to dress up his preferences as almost an extension of natural law. If one wants to make a straightforward argument for ethnic power they should do so consistently without also trying to dress it up as an expression of higher principle. For some reason even honest tribalists find it too hard to refrain from this temptation.
My other criticism of this book is that Caldwell is a humorless writer who has no awareness of the irony of his situation. This makes him a lot less fun to read than literary reactionaries like Michel Houellebecq, let alone many talented anonymous posters on the internet. The meticulous recollections of Vietnam, Playboy Magazine and relatively arcane Supreme Court decisions of a bygone era felt unbearably tedious to anyone not from his generation. I'm sure he remembered what the world was like before all that, but that world is scarcely imaginable today and its never coming back – so what's the point exactly? I'm also capable of remembering a time and place where people like me had greater privileges and powers but that is hardly interesting on its own terms.
After reading Ross Douthat's fascinating and forward-looking new conservative book, I found this barely digestible. About halfway through the text, my head started to nod and eyes began to glaze over. As my vision went out of focus, the blurred letters on the page directed themselves into a new arrangement that expressed my sentiments more succinctly and accurately than any extended review could: "OK BOOMER".
March 7, 2020
Such a good book, with goodness running in every direction.
January 13, 2021
Not since the eve of our cataclysmic Civil War has the American nation been so perfectly agonized between two militantly distinct and irreconcilable political cultures. Far afield from superficial policy disagreements, Christopher Caldwell argues that since the 1960s Americans have effectively divided their allegiances between rival constitutions that are engaged in a generation-spanning, zero-sum contest for supremacy.
On one side is what may be called the “democratic-republican” constitution that prevailed largely unmolested from the founding of the country to the Kennedy assassination, under which nearly all political questions were resolved by legislative majorities, civil rights jurisprudence exercised only the slightest editorial touch upon majoritarian norms and initiatives, cultural traditions and expectations that would later be excoriated as institutions of “bias” and “systemic oppression” were regarded merely as the normative flowering of a collectively-shared democratic history, most Americans identified themselves fundamentally as members of a European nation displaced across the Atlantic, and issues of racial equality were viewed as one episode of a greater epic about the creation of a constitutional republic. Though the country was framed by the geometries of written law rather than emerging from the mists of tradition, the operation of this original constitution was in practice organic and democratic; it could not be one without being the other.
Beginning with the “Rights Revolution” of the 1960s, and more particularly with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its concomitant case law, a new, “de facto” constitution emerged that would gradually supersede its majoritarian predecessor; and would, by the turn of the twenty-first century, command nearly all the levers of institutional and ideological power, emboldening a triumphal new elite culture and alienating the displaced adherents of the old order, who, regarding most of the major social issues of the last half century, had comprised a substantial majority of the population before their prerogatives were undermined by civil rights litigation.
The new constitution subordinated the ideal of democracy to that of liberalism: traditional majoritarian norms were overruled by legalistic imperatives of individual autonomy, freedom of choice, the liberation of subjective identities, and substantive equality and inclusiveness within every public and private institution. Because the supposed subjection of “marginalized identities” was seen to constitute a civil emergency and a moral blight upon the nation, civil rights activists found it unconscionable—even degrading—to appeal to the halting gradualisms of the democratic process in order to achieve a status and recognition they considered their birthright. The civil rights constitution was thus spearheaded by litigation and top-down institutional imposition rather than by any campaign of public persuasion. Its methodology was akin to that of Rosa Luxemburg, who held that popular consensus conformed to the usage of institutional power instead of the reverse. Much of American social history since the 1960s has confirmed the efficacy of this approach.
When the Civil Rights Act was first signed into law, most Americans viewed it as a temporary expediency that would address a very unique and specific situation: the legally-mandated racial segregation of the American south and the “sham democracies” that defrauded the black populations of the southern states of full and equal participation in the nation’s democracy and civic life. Americans from other parts of the country viewed the south almost as a foreign land, with backwards people who needed to be educated, primitive laws that needed to be corrected and brought into conformity with those of the rest of the nation, and villainous governors and sheriffs whose power needed to be subverted. Civil rights legislation, most believed, was needed to dismantle these alien institutions and to “Americanize” the south.
In some important respects, it succeeded. But in others, its effect was the opposite of what many of its supporters intended, because the enormously invasive powers granted to the federal government by civil rights legislation to scrutinize public and private institutions for racial bias and exclusion extended to the entire country, eliminating a traditionally-recognized right to freedom of association and nationalizing the southern fixation on racism. Rather than Americanizing the south, the civil rights regime southernized America, creating in its wake a permanent legal and political machinery that could be employed in the service of any kind of subjective identity that felt itself excluded from or marginalized by the nation’s traditional democratic culture. In the following decades, on issues including immigration policy, abortion, same-sex marriage, feminism, and transgenderism, civil rights jurisprudence would be used to effect massive political and cultural changes on the United States, allowing its proponents to go over the heads of a resistant public by taking their causes beyond the scope of the democratic process and placing them behind the barrier of civil rights law.
Of particular interest to me is Caldwell’s surprisingly negative take on the Reagan Administration. Elevated to the Presidency by a tidal wave of populist resentment that had arisen in the 1970s (the most conservative decade of the twentieth century, according to Caldwell) in reaction to the excesses and failures of the Johnsonite civil rights ideology, Reagan simply applied the individualistic and countercultural impulses of the sixties to the realm of business and economics. The “Reagan Revolution” was merely the economic counterpart to the cultural revolution of the sixties. “Do your own thing” applied to CFOs and hedge fund managers just as it did to hippies and folk singers (who were often the same people: the eighties marked the height of baby boomer workforce participation).
Rather than addressing the hard question of whether the tax dollars of conservative America should continue to fund the integrationist ambitions of the Great Society programs that millions resented but millions more had come to rely upon, Reagan financed tax cuts and a military buildup with unprecedented levels of debt. What that debt “bought”, according to Caldwell’s understanding, was one generation of brittle and superficial social harmony. It bought a temporary truce between America’s two constitutions, allowing the left’s program of economic justice to continue unabated without compelling the right to share in its costs. The 2008 financial crisis was a major signal that this truce was beginning to unravel.
Since the Reagan presidency, virtually all of the nation’s major corporations have aligned themselves with the liberal jurisprudential ideology. The “movement” for same-sex marriage unified the corporate world more than any other political cause in American history, and thus had hundreds of billions of dollars at its disposal. By the time of the Obama presidency, the total consolidation of institutional control by the liberal constitution over the democratic one had been accomplished, and Obama himself seemed to acknowledge this reality in his second inaugural address, in which he framed American history—all of American history—as a struggle for the civil rights of various groups against a prevailing, through increasingly demonized and alienated, conservative culture.
The stage was set for a revolt.
On one side is what may be called the “democratic-republican” constitution that prevailed largely unmolested from the founding of the country to the Kennedy assassination, under which nearly all political questions were resolved by legislative majorities, civil rights jurisprudence exercised only the slightest editorial touch upon majoritarian norms and initiatives, cultural traditions and expectations that would later be excoriated as institutions of “bias” and “systemic oppression” were regarded merely as the normative flowering of a collectively-shared democratic history, most Americans identified themselves fundamentally as members of a European nation displaced across the Atlantic, and issues of racial equality were viewed as one episode of a greater epic about the creation of a constitutional republic. Though the country was framed by the geometries of written law rather than emerging from the mists of tradition, the operation of this original constitution was in practice organic and democratic; it could not be one without being the other.
Beginning with the “Rights Revolution” of the 1960s, and more particularly with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its concomitant case law, a new, “de facto” constitution emerged that would gradually supersede its majoritarian predecessor; and would, by the turn of the twenty-first century, command nearly all the levers of institutional and ideological power, emboldening a triumphal new elite culture and alienating the displaced adherents of the old order, who, regarding most of the major social issues of the last half century, had comprised a substantial majority of the population before their prerogatives were undermined by civil rights litigation.
The new constitution subordinated the ideal of democracy to that of liberalism: traditional majoritarian norms were overruled by legalistic imperatives of individual autonomy, freedom of choice, the liberation of subjective identities, and substantive equality and inclusiveness within every public and private institution. Because the supposed subjection of “marginalized identities” was seen to constitute a civil emergency and a moral blight upon the nation, civil rights activists found it unconscionable—even degrading—to appeal to the halting gradualisms of the democratic process in order to achieve a status and recognition they considered their birthright. The civil rights constitution was thus spearheaded by litigation and top-down institutional imposition rather than by any campaign of public persuasion. Its methodology was akin to that of Rosa Luxemburg, who held that popular consensus conformed to the usage of institutional power instead of the reverse. Much of American social history since the 1960s has confirmed the efficacy of this approach.
When the Civil Rights Act was first signed into law, most Americans viewed it as a temporary expediency that would address a very unique and specific situation: the legally-mandated racial segregation of the American south and the “sham democracies” that defrauded the black populations of the southern states of full and equal participation in the nation’s democracy and civic life. Americans from other parts of the country viewed the south almost as a foreign land, with backwards people who needed to be educated, primitive laws that needed to be corrected and brought into conformity with those of the rest of the nation, and villainous governors and sheriffs whose power needed to be subverted. Civil rights legislation, most believed, was needed to dismantle these alien institutions and to “Americanize” the south.
In some important respects, it succeeded. But in others, its effect was the opposite of what many of its supporters intended, because the enormously invasive powers granted to the federal government by civil rights legislation to scrutinize public and private institutions for racial bias and exclusion extended to the entire country, eliminating a traditionally-recognized right to freedom of association and nationalizing the southern fixation on racism. Rather than Americanizing the south, the civil rights regime southernized America, creating in its wake a permanent legal and political machinery that could be employed in the service of any kind of subjective identity that felt itself excluded from or marginalized by the nation’s traditional democratic culture. In the following decades, on issues including immigration policy, abortion, same-sex marriage, feminism, and transgenderism, civil rights jurisprudence would be used to effect massive political and cultural changes on the United States, allowing its proponents to go over the heads of a resistant public by taking their causes beyond the scope of the democratic process and placing them behind the barrier of civil rights law.
Of particular interest to me is Caldwell’s surprisingly negative take on the Reagan Administration. Elevated to the Presidency by a tidal wave of populist resentment that had arisen in the 1970s (the most conservative decade of the twentieth century, according to Caldwell) in reaction to the excesses and failures of the Johnsonite civil rights ideology, Reagan simply applied the individualistic and countercultural impulses of the sixties to the realm of business and economics. The “Reagan Revolution” was merely the economic counterpart to the cultural revolution of the sixties. “Do your own thing” applied to CFOs and hedge fund managers just as it did to hippies and folk singers (who were often the same people: the eighties marked the height of baby boomer workforce participation).
Rather than addressing the hard question of whether the tax dollars of conservative America should continue to fund the integrationist ambitions of the Great Society programs that millions resented but millions more had come to rely upon, Reagan financed tax cuts and a military buildup with unprecedented levels of debt. What that debt “bought”, according to Caldwell’s understanding, was one generation of brittle and superficial social harmony. It bought a temporary truce between America’s two constitutions, allowing the left’s program of economic justice to continue unabated without compelling the right to share in its costs. The 2008 financial crisis was a major signal that this truce was beginning to unravel.
Since the Reagan presidency, virtually all of the nation’s major corporations have aligned themselves with the liberal jurisprudential ideology. The “movement” for same-sex marriage unified the corporate world more than any other political cause in American history, and thus had hundreds of billions of dollars at its disposal. By the time of the Obama presidency, the total consolidation of institutional control by the liberal constitution over the democratic one had been accomplished, and Obama himself seemed to acknowledge this reality in his second inaugural address, in which he framed American history—all of American history—as a struggle for the civil rights of various groups against a prevailing, through increasingly demonized and alienated, conservative culture.
The stage was set for a revolt.
March 9, 2023
Caldwell makes complaining about civil rights for blacks, women, and gays seem intelligent. Concerning all the steps toward racial desegregation or equal rights in the USA over the past 60 years, he raises a legal objection: they violate the freedom of association. As he cites Herbert Wechsler’s protest against the 1954 Supreme Court ruling for desegregated schools, “If the freedom of association is denied by segregation, [then] integration forces an association upon those for whom it is unpleasant or repugnant.”
Therefore, Caldwell claims, enforcing the freedom to associate violates the freedom to disassociate. These two freedoms contradict each other. To affirm one freedom denies the other. For Caldwell, this conflict of freedoms is as inevitable as the laws of mathematics: “Just as assuming that two parallel lines can meet overturns much of Euclidean geometry, eliminating freedom of association from the U.S. Constitution changed everything.”
For those determined to exclude other types of people from their social worlds, the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements from the 1960s forward have come at the expense of their own rights. Their battle to reclaim the freedom of dissociation has only just begun, and without victory in that fight they “won’t have a nation.” Again, Caldwell claims it inevitable: “there is a reason most countries are not multi-ethnic countries and why most of those that have tried to become multi-ethnic countries have failed.”
Evidently Caldwell feels that the USA and Canada have failed. The whole effort to equalize rights and build better relations between people of different races, cultures, genders, and sexual orientations has failed. Or maybe Caldwell’s frustration is a response to the progress we’ve made toward a more inclusive world.
Therefore, Caldwell claims, enforcing the freedom to associate violates the freedom to disassociate. These two freedoms contradict each other. To affirm one freedom denies the other. For Caldwell, this conflict of freedoms is as inevitable as the laws of mathematics: “Just as assuming that two parallel lines can meet overturns much of Euclidean geometry, eliminating freedom of association from the U.S. Constitution changed everything.”
For those determined to exclude other types of people from their social worlds, the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements from the 1960s forward have come at the expense of their own rights. Their battle to reclaim the freedom of dissociation has only just begun, and without victory in that fight they “won’t have a nation.” Again, Caldwell claims it inevitable: “there is a reason most countries are not multi-ethnic countries and why most of those that have tried to become multi-ethnic countries have failed.”
Evidently Caldwell feels that the USA and Canada have failed. The whole effort to equalize rights and build better relations between people of different races, cultures, genders, and sexual orientations has failed. Or maybe Caldwell’s frustration is a response to the progress we’ve made toward a more inclusive world.
March 11, 2020
I'm probably not the only liberal on here criticizing this book, but as someone with a doctorate in modern political history I think I have the chops to do so. I have found myself drawn to, or at least challenged by, some conservative arguments in the recent past because of my increasing annoyance with the woke Left, which is prominent in the circles I run in. I thought that Pat Dinneen's Why Liberalism Failed was a cogent critique of a certain type of liberalism; it certainly called for a thorough philosophical response. Douglas Massey's book on European immigration also punched holes in certain liberal orthodoxies, or at least made me come up with better defenses. I didn't feel this way about this book. WHile there are certain specific points out of the many scattershot broadsides he launches, the overall argument does not hold together and is deeply uncharitable.
First off, this is not a history; it is a polemic. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a fairly sloppy polemic. More than that, I found this argument strange. Here's a summary: the Civil Rights Revolution brought about the creation of a de facto Second Constitution, which became enforced by an aggressive federal bureaucracy, effectively stripping the right to freedom of assembly (which he implies, but never states, included a right to discriminate. The "winners" of the last 50 years of American politics are the minorities who have apparently received enormous largesse and special treatment from the government as well as the pro-diversity educated elite who now staff the massive federal gov't and private tech companies which are all (also apparently) passionately devoted to racial progressivism. He treats this new second constitution as the undoing of democracy because no matter how often the people (read: white people) vote for more traditional positions, the civil rights-fed gov't juggernaut just reverses their gains in court or through executive action like anti-discrimination lawsuits, diversity preferences, etc.
To say that minorities have been the "winners" in American society since the 1960s is a farce. From the conservative pushback to mass incarceration to the war on drugs to persistent economic inequality to housing segregation to the election of the Donald, it would be hard to say that minorities have suddenly become the darling children of the federal gov't. Moreover, I can hardly believe that Caldwell's view of democracy is so illiberal and majoritarian that he really opposes laws like Brown and other civil rights gains through the courts. A central concept of liberal democracy is that the core rights of the individual or the minority group are NOT subject to majority decision-making; this is vital for protecting EVERYONE's rights because EVERYONE is a minority in some way: race, religion, viewpoint, gender/sexuality, nation of origin, etc). This part of the argument made me particularly mad; "democracy" for him means whenever progressive gains are overruled at the ballot box (in short, when his side wins) but not when electoral gains allow for more progressive majorities to change the law (which he never discusses)
And another thing: there's no development of the concept of entitlement in this book! The general argument seems to be that minorities as well as the liberal elite now feel entitled for the gov't to work for them. This is odd, particularly because when white people felt that they had lost their country and their gov't they elected a completely unqualified, immoral idiot as their president. If you wanted to make an argument that the entire political system has been infiltrated with a sense of entitlement based on different readings of the Constitution (a sort of Entitlement Talk to complement Mary Ann Glendon's Rights Talk), I'd be here for that. But that's not his argument.
Certain parts of this book just made me mad. Caldwell is largely dismissive of MLK, treating him as a conniving political figure seeks institutional power rather than what he really was. He argues that DOMA was a victory for democracy and Obergefell the renunciation of it while failing to mention the sea change in attitudes toward homosexuality in the gen pop between the 1990s and 2010s. He takes the normal cheap shots at the easiest ridiculous excesses of woke culture in order to minimize the serious inequalities remaining in the country.
It is unfortunate that this argument doesn't hold together, because certain parts of it have the potential to be very compelling. The idea of Reagan of someone whose deficit spending allowed for the continuation of massive gov't entitlement programs. Unfortunately, what this book really appears to be is an extended apology (if that's even the right word) for on-the-fence conservatives who want to convince themselves that they are oppressed and vote for Trump. In that sense, this book is a darn shame.
First off, this is not a history; it is a polemic. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a fairly sloppy polemic. More than that, I found this argument strange. Here's a summary: the Civil Rights Revolution brought about the creation of a de facto Second Constitution, which became enforced by an aggressive federal bureaucracy, effectively stripping the right to freedom of assembly (which he implies, but never states, included a right to discriminate. The "winners" of the last 50 years of American politics are the minorities who have apparently received enormous largesse and special treatment from the government as well as the pro-diversity educated elite who now staff the massive federal gov't and private tech companies which are all (also apparently) passionately devoted to racial progressivism. He treats this new second constitution as the undoing of democracy because no matter how often the people (read: white people) vote for more traditional positions, the civil rights-fed gov't juggernaut just reverses their gains in court or through executive action like anti-discrimination lawsuits, diversity preferences, etc.
To say that minorities have been the "winners" in American society since the 1960s is a farce. From the conservative pushback to mass incarceration to the war on drugs to persistent economic inequality to housing segregation to the election of the Donald, it would be hard to say that minorities have suddenly become the darling children of the federal gov't. Moreover, I can hardly believe that Caldwell's view of democracy is so illiberal and majoritarian that he really opposes laws like Brown and other civil rights gains through the courts. A central concept of liberal democracy is that the core rights of the individual or the minority group are NOT subject to majority decision-making; this is vital for protecting EVERYONE's rights because EVERYONE is a minority in some way: race, religion, viewpoint, gender/sexuality, nation of origin, etc). This part of the argument made me particularly mad; "democracy" for him means whenever progressive gains are overruled at the ballot box (in short, when his side wins) but not when electoral gains allow for more progressive majorities to change the law (which he never discusses)
And another thing: there's no development of the concept of entitlement in this book! The general argument seems to be that minorities as well as the liberal elite now feel entitled for the gov't to work for them. This is odd, particularly because when white people felt that they had lost their country and their gov't they elected a completely unqualified, immoral idiot as their president. If you wanted to make an argument that the entire political system has been infiltrated with a sense of entitlement based on different readings of the Constitution (a sort of Entitlement Talk to complement Mary Ann Glendon's Rights Talk), I'd be here for that. But that's not his argument.
Certain parts of this book just made me mad. Caldwell is largely dismissive of MLK, treating him as a conniving political figure seeks institutional power rather than what he really was. He argues that DOMA was a victory for democracy and Obergefell the renunciation of it while failing to mention the sea change in attitudes toward homosexuality in the gen pop between the 1990s and 2010s. He takes the normal cheap shots at the easiest ridiculous excesses of woke culture in order to minimize the serious inequalities remaining in the country.
It is unfortunate that this argument doesn't hold together, because certain parts of it have the potential to be very compelling. The idea of Reagan of someone whose deficit spending allowed for the continuation of massive gov't entitlement programs. Unfortunately, what this book really appears to be is an extended apology (if that's even the right word) for on-the-fence conservatives who want to convince themselves that they are oppressed and vote for Trump. In that sense, this book is a darn shame.
February 25, 2021
If you want to know how we got to the place where everything is political, everything is racially charged, cancel culture, homosexuality is mainstream despite there not being a lot of them, and of course how we got President Donald Trump then read this book. Excellent work on what has happened since 1960.
January 23, 2020
A thoughtful look at the United Stated since the 60s. It is a mix of history, social commentary, and politics—yet reads like a novel. Completely engaging. A must read.
January 31, 2020
This is one of the most informative books I've ever read. There's an 'oh my gosh' moment from the depth of insight on nearly every page. It succinctly describes movements and periods of history with simple metaphors that challenge the current idea of what America was like before the sixties (pre-Kennedy Assasination) and humanizes the Americans who lived then and all the way through.
Although Caldwell is a conservative, his descriptions of all sides of the political push-pull are very empathetic, even if slightly detached. His treatement of original sources is superb.
You will learn a lot from reading this book. I'm going to read it again.
Although Caldwell is a conservative, his descriptions of all sides of the political push-pull are very empathetic, even if slightly detached. His treatement of original sources is superb.
You will learn a lot from reading this book. I'm going to read it again.
December 28, 2020
Best book I’ve read in 2020. Even if you disagree with Caldwell, it is worth taking the time to understand his thesis and critiques of both the right and left.
June 29, 2022
9.5/10.
Caldwell has written the perfect book on the degeneration of America since the 1960s. It has fallen under the regime of “rights” — rights that are usurping the actual constitution for the new constitution established in 1964. This new constitution fights for blacks, women, gays & co., all while throwing away the white man. Caldwell somehow published this through the mainstream press — I don’t know how — but it is a delightful book on the development — the great fall, that is — of America since the 1960s and how our society got infected by “diversity”.
Caldwell has written the perfect book on the degeneration of America since the 1960s. It has fallen under the regime of “rights” — rights that are usurping the actual constitution for the new constitution established in 1964. This new constitution fights for blacks, women, gays & co., all while throwing away the white man. Caldwell somehow published this through the mainstream press — I don’t know how — but it is a delightful book on the development — the great fall, that is — of America since the 1960s and how our society got infected by “diversity”.
March 1, 2020
Except for the opinions of whites and blacks as civil rights legislation came to fruition, there was nothing here I hadn’t known.
Other than a particular recapitulation of history, Caldwells point is that the civil rights legislation was the start of a new constitution: professionally gamed cases, disregard for the fourth amendment, and ever expanding scope of judicial action.
He’s not wrong. Scalia’s Originalist position is an obvious push back against the forces Caldwell enunciates. Rand Paul’s ambivalence over the civil rights acts and their disregard for an individual’s right of free association is more of the same. The incredible growth of a federal and college bureaucracy designed to now root out even a disparity of outcome certainly leads credence to the author’s supposition.
But as Rachel Maddow’s angry response to Paul or that young women at Yale who demanded she be protected from dissonant opinions attest, the Left has no time for nuance, just heroic victimhood.
Other than a particular recapitulation of history, Caldwells point is that the civil rights legislation was the start of a new constitution: professionally gamed cases, disregard for the fourth amendment, and ever expanding scope of judicial action.
He’s not wrong. Scalia’s Originalist position is an obvious push back against the forces Caldwell enunciates. Rand Paul’s ambivalence over the civil rights acts and their disregard for an individual’s right of free association is more of the same. The incredible growth of a federal and college bureaucracy designed to now root out even a disparity of outcome certainly leads credence to the author’s supposition.
But as Rachel Maddow’s angry response to Paul or that young women at Yale who demanded she be protected from dissonant opinions attest, the Left has no time for nuance, just heroic victimhood.
May 14, 2020
Caldwell: an alternate view of our crises
All the problems we see today have roots that most don't think about. This is important reading for those who desire wisdom.
All the problems we see today have roots that most don't think about. This is important reading for those who desire wisdom.
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April 8, 2023Such a fascinating book. People across the political spectrum will benefit from reading it.
Leftists (such as myself) who naively thought the Sanders campaign heralded a turn away from identity politics to something more universal were in for a rude awakening. Same with rightwingers and moderates confidently predicting that political correctness or "wokeness" had peaked and was now collapsing from the weight of its own absurdity.
Leftists (such as myself) who naively thought the Sanders campaign heralded a turn away from identity politics to something more universal were in for a rude awakening. Same with rightwingers and moderates confidently predicting that political correctness or "wokeness" had peaked and was now collapsing from the weight of its own absurdity.
July 16, 2020
In normal circumstances this is the kind of book that is fun to read and debate. It has a central idea that is somewhat hyperbolic and yet has enough supporting evidence that both sides can get a kick out of knocking it around. I think the Age of Entitlement is the best moniker I’ve heard that describes these last 60 years. Even outside of government and politics people have very little appreciation for what they have and endless envy for what others possess. Some people are open about their envy. Other people hide their envy with by spinning into government policy. If you want to test the essence of your friendship with someone ask whether you’re happy for their success, especially when that success tops your own. If you’re a person who has few very real friendships this is probably the reason why.
The book, of course, is not about interpersonal relationships, but government policy. But at the center of government policy is how politicians use envy effectively. Many books have explained that courts have ignored the constitution as a means to an end. Caldwell goes further by proposing that legislation from the 1960s has become a second constitution that has trumped the initial one. Things we could have freely discussed back in January haven’t been the same since March. There are people I know that are currently taking politics too personally to discuss good intentions versus merits. At some point they either snap out of it or they’ll have to hate me. But for now, I’ll save my actual review for another day.
The book, of course, is not about interpersonal relationships, but government policy. But at the center of government policy is how politicians use envy effectively. Many books have explained that courts have ignored the constitution as a means to an end. Caldwell goes further by proposing that legislation from the 1960s has become a second constitution that has trumped the initial one. Things we could have freely discussed back in January haven’t been the same since March. There are people I know that are currently taking politics too personally to discuss good intentions versus merits. At some point they either snap out of it or they’ll have to hate me. But for now, I’ll save my actual review for another day.
December 28, 2020
Deeply distressing, but regrettably accurate. Caldwell’s account of American history since the 1960s focuses on how the framework of civil rights law introduced a new, substitute constitution with many unforeseen effects. His analysis helps explain the current political realignment.
February 8, 2021
Caldwell moves chronologically from the 1950s and 1960s up to present day (basically 2016, just before Trump). He tackles hippies, civil rights, feminism, the tanking economy and jobs in the 1970s, outsourcing, the housing crisis, the 2008 recession, BLM, some trends in academia, and so on. He obviously did a lot of research, and his writing style is easy to keep up with. I’d recommend the audiobook format which makes it more accessible.
December 8, 2020
Very excellent political and cultural examination of America from the 60's to the 2016 election. This major conservative writer shows how we let a Second Constitution muscle aside the first one, got political correctness, lost free speech, became divided, and how we are not becoming one again anytime soon. He does a lot of explaining without forcing his conclusions, and of course, there is no name calling. As a real scholar and gentleman, he can disagree with someone without calling them names. Imagine that.
January 18, 2021
The Age of Entitlement is an intelligent revisionist account of American history since the sixties.
Having read it twice, I marvel at what Caldwell has accomplished here. This is a book without pretense or filler. Each page shares a vital fact or concept applied by a sharp philosophical mind.
If you watched the news asking yourself how things got to this point, The Age of Entitlement is the place to start. I hope Caldwell plans to write more in the near future.
Having read it twice, I marvel at what Caldwell has accomplished here. This is a book without pretense or filler. Each page shares a vital fact or concept applied by a sharp philosophical mind.
If you watched the news asking yourself how things got to this point, The Age of Entitlement is the place to start. I hope Caldwell plans to write more in the near future.
November 25, 2022
I really can't recommend this book enough. Very informative, spanning decades of America's decline (I'd call it subversion and/or purposeful (racial) destruction), full of interesting tidbits, statistics and red pills, infuriating, but also somehow easy to read.
I had the ironic realization, as I approached the end of the book and was reading about uppity [censored] that were complaining about Yale not feeling like a home, along with various facts about murderous, dumb criminals that BLM was protesting about, that for all my learning and listening and reading and cogitating and subjecting myself to the torturous truth of everything - there really is no solution (in reasoning, discussing, engaging) other than a bullet. (No, that is not a call for violence - how could it be? Just like any other number of claims that obviously could not be made in our society, regarding race, sexuality, history, etc.) But then some closing paragraphs in the book gave me hope that maybe collapse (which I believe is inevitable anyway) could be a viable alternative. (And yes, some things perhaps previously mentioned will be flying when collapse comes, and all political correctness and racial fantasies and uppity [censored] will fly right out the window.):
"The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was, as we have noted, a legislative repeal of the First Amendment's implied right to freedom of association. Over decades it polarized the political parties and turned them into something like secret societies, each of them loyal to a different constitutional understanding. Democrats, loyal to the post-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that they owed their ascendancy to a rollback of the basic constitutional freedoms Americans cherished most. Republicans, loyal to the pre-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that the only way back to the free country of their ideals was through the repeal of the civil rights laws. The combination was a terrible one--rising tensions along with a society-wide inability to talk or think straight about anything.
The stifling of public discussion could calm things for only so long. The system required more than the majority's silence; it required the majority's resources. In this respect the post-Civil Rights Act constitution resembled New York's subway. That New York should have underground trains might seem the most "natural" thing in the world. But, every day, seven hundred pumps work around the clock to remove tens of millions of gallons of water from the city's underground. Left alone for even a brief period, the subway would be reclaimed by a mighty network of rivers, springs, and inlets surging underground.
The work of integrating Americans by race and sex, as it is now understood, has come to require a similarly unstinting maximum vigilance. What would the country's social structure look like after six months without affirmative action? Five years? The tiniest dissents at the margins of civil rights thus came to seem like existential threats, and the most routine alternations of power as assaults on the American way."
I had the ironic realization, as I approached the end of the book and was reading about uppity [censored] that were complaining about Yale not feeling like a home, along with various facts about murderous, dumb criminals that BLM was protesting about, that for all my learning and listening and reading and cogitating and subjecting myself to the torturous truth of everything - there really is no solution (in reasoning, discussing, engaging) other than a bullet. (No, that is not a call for violence - how could it be? Just like any other number of claims that obviously could not be made in our society, regarding race, sexuality, history, etc.) But then some closing paragraphs in the book gave me hope that maybe collapse (which I believe is inevitable anyway) could be a viable alternative. (And yes, some things perhaps previously mentioned will be flying when collapse comes, and all political correctness and racial fantasies and uppity [censored] will fly right out the window.):
"The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was, as we have noted, a legislative repeal of the First Amendment's implied right to freedom of association. Over decades it polarized the political parties and turned them into something like secret societies, each of them loyal to a different constitutional understanding. Democrats, loyal to the post-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that they owed their ascendancy to a rollback of the basic constitutional freedoms Americans cherished most. Republicans, loyal to the pre-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that the only way back to the free country of their ideals was through the repeal of the civil rights laws. The combination was a terrible one--rising tensions along with a society-wide inability to talk or think straight about anything.
The stifling of public discussion could calm things for only so long. The system required more than the majority's silence; it required the majority's resources. In this respect the post-Civil Rights Act constitution resembled New York's subway. That New York should have underground trains might seem the most "natural" thing in the world. But, every day, seven hundred pumps work around the clock to remove tens of millions of gallons of water from the city's underground. Left alone for even a brief period, the subway would be reclaimed by a mighty network of rivers, springs, and inlets surging underground.
The work of integrating Americans by race and sex, as it is now understood, has come to require a similarly unstinting maximum vigilance. What would the country's social structure look like after six months without affirmative action? Five years? The tiniest dissents at the margins of civil rights thus came to seem like existential threats, and the most routine alternations of power as assaults on the American way."
June 2, 2020
I got to page 17 and had to stop. I wish I could give it zero or negative stars. Below I discuss six points in the first 17 pages, only the first 17 pages, again just the first 17 pages, where this guy shows he's both a racist and an idiot.
To set the record straight, I’m a white guy, So don’t all you racists complain that I’m just a disgruntled black guy.
This guy is one of the worst racists that I have ever encountered. His arguments circle all the way back around to how black people should still be slaves. The cost to free them was just too high and wasn’t the “natural course of things”
His arguments through page 17 were lies or stupid or both.
He talked about how Frederick Douglass in denouncing slavery never once considered in his arguments the costs of eliminating slavery. And those costs were too high. That’s why reconstruction failed. Well, geez, I guess we should’ve just kept slavery. It was cheap. The Civil War was a waste of time. And 600,000 American lives.
He said Brown versus Board of Education decision was wrong because the 14th amendment only says “equal protection under the law”. He is a liar, a bit more clever than Fox News, but still a liar. In section 1 the 14th amendment says equal rights and immunities for all citizens. I’m guessing that a public education is included in those rights.
He also argues that the schools for blacks in the south were becoming equal to those of whites. Becoming equal is the exact same thing as NOT equal.
He argues that today’s schools teach about racism to the exclusion of literature and civics. What the hell school did he go to?
He argues that Rosa Parks wasn’t an innocent little old lady. She was an activist. I have to ask you, what the hell difference does that make? Whether she’s an activist or not she decided she was going to sit wherever the hell she wanted.
He said blacks pushed for change too much. They should’ve just let things take their natural course. Well, asshole, pushing for change is letting things take their natural course. We pushed for the American revolution. We pushed for women’s voting. We pushed in World War I. We pushed in World War II. Yeah, we should let those things take their natural course. World War II. Heil, Hitler. You’d probably like that. This authors “natural course” means white men keep their power and black men keep their place.
If you (i.e., conservatives) are looking for a book that fallaciously argues against every progress against racism we’ve made in this country, this is the perfect book for you. And I guarantee you that you will see no holes in his arguments.
If you’re looking for an interesting book that represents a fair and balanced history of our times, stay the hell away.
This guy scares the hell out of me in a way Fox News doesn’t. He couches his clear racism in so-called scholarly arguments.
I would pay to see Coates debate with this racist/idiot.
To set the record straight, I’m a white guy, So don’t all you racists complain that I’m just a disgruntled black guy.
This guy is one of the worst racists that I have ever encountered. His arguments circle all the way back around to how black people should still be slaves. The cost to free them was just too high and wasn’t the “natural course of things”
His arguments through page 17 were lies or stupid or both.
He talked about how Frederick Douglass in denouncing slavery never once considered in his arguments the costs of eliminating slavery. And those costs were too high. That’s why reconstruction failed. Well, geez, I guess we should’ve just kept slavery. It was cheap. The Civil War was a waste of time. And 600,000 American lives.
He said Brown versus Board of Education decision was wrong because the 14th amendment only says “equal protection under the law”. He is a liar, a bit more clever than Fox News, but still a liar. In section 1 the 14th amendment says equal rights and immunities for all citizens. I’m guessing that a public education is included in those rights.
He also argues that the schools for blacks in the south were becoming equal to those of whites. Becoming equal is the exact same thing as NOT equal.
He argues that today’s schools teach about racism to the exclusion of literature and civics. What the hell school did he go to?
He argues that Rosa Parks wasn’t an innocent little old lady. She was an activist. I have to ask you, what the hell difference does that make? Whether she’s an activist or not she decided she was going to sit wherever the hell she wanted.
He said blacks pushed for change too much. They should’ve just let things take their natural course. Well, asshole, pushing for change is letting things take their natural course. We pushed for the American revolution. We pushed for women’s voting. We pushed in World War I. We pushed in World War II. Yeah, we should let those things take their natural course. World War II. Heil, Hitler. You’d probably like that. This authors “natural course” means white men keep their power and black men keep their place.
If you (i.e., conservatives) are looking for a book that fallaciously argues against every progress against racism we’ve made in this country, this is the perfect book for you. And I guarantee you that you will see no holes in his arguments.
If you’re looking for an interesting book that represents a fair and balanced history of our times, stay the hell away.
This guy scares the hell out of me in a way Fox News doesn’t. He couches his clear racism in so-called scholarly arguments.
I would pay to see Coates debate with this racist/idiot.
February 13, 2020
This was a hard book to put down. It’s essentially an economic, political, and cultural commentary on how America’s current issues have their roots in the 60s. It starts with how the 60s civil rights act bypassed the constitution to set up legal precedents that extended the government’s judicial reach beyond what the founding fathers intended. Since then, the nations “human rights” oriented laws stand on a foundation of legal precedents rather than the constitution, for better or worse, and how various groups can and have used those precedents to bypass the constitution. If you want a good understanding of how the center of the country feels and why Trump won - this book sums it up well.
A few times he sounded like an unsubstantiated curmudgeon, letting his yearning for a time bygone consume his rationality, but they were very few. Otherwise, it’s a sobering read that sums up today’s identity politics, Reagan’s biggest yet largely unspoken legacy (it ain’t good...), how progressive policies are not the right tools to fix the issues this country faces today, and much more. Highly recommend!
A few times he sounded like an unsubstantiated curmudgeon, letting his yearning for a time bygone consume his rationality, but they were very few. Otherwise, it’s a sobering read that sums up today’s identity politics, Reagan’s biggest yet largely unspoken legacy (it ain’t good...), how progressive policies are not the right tools to fix the issues this country faces today, and much more. Highly recommend!
February 22, 2020
What we did.
Caldwell’s book offers valuable reflections on what happened to the Constitution and our freedoms during the Great Progressive Cultural Revolution. This is a bold work in how it is willing to confront directly the degree to which the Civil Rights Act and the downstream changes that it and other legislation of that era wrought transformed society and civilization in ways contrary to those who accepted such reforms were promised (though, it remains an open question as to what degree the changes accord with the true intentions of those who authored such changes).
Caldwell’s book offers valuable reflections on what happened to the Constitution and our freedoms during the Great Progressive Cultural Revolution. This is a bold work in how it is willing to confront directly the degree to which the Civil Rights Act and the downstream changes that it and other legislation of that era wrought transformed society and civilization in ways contrary to those who accepted such reforms were promised (though, it remains an open question as to what degree the changes accord with the true intentions of those who authored such changes).
February 12, 2020
I read this having read a couple reviews claiming it was an insightful critique of US liberalism since the civil rights era. It is no such thing. There are rare bits of this that are thought-provoking, but more broadly it is a conservative funhouse mirror of actual history. From trotting out utter untruths like the CRA caused the financial crisis to insanely selective attacks on billionaire philanthropism this is a train wreck that I’m angry I wasted my money on.
May 4, 2021
I began listening to this audiobook with the expectation that it might prove a novel critique of the 1960s. The publisher's blurb certainly suggested it, and I also recalled Ross Douthat saying that the book contained interesting insights. I now know that I should have done more digging before purchasing it. There's quite a bit that's intellectually weak about this book in addition to its horrid public policy suggestion: repealing the civil rights laws of the 1960s. Below I only list a few particular problems, though there are others that may occur to me should I be forced to think about this book at any future point.
The thesis of the book goes as such: Americans naively passed a frenzy of civil rights laws in an outpouring of affection in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination. These Americans found the racism of southerners repugnant and Jim Crow unjust, but they also believed that with a few temporary, targeted measures these injustices could be overcome. The laws passed by this generation of Americans in their optimism (We defeated the forces of Nazism! surely we can handle the "foreign policy" problems of the southern states.) did not realize that they were forming the backbone of an alternative constitutional order as opposed to the constitution written by the founders in 1788. This alternative constitutional order would go on to create the conditions for why America currently sucks (yes, the opioid crisis, angry kids on college campuses, the 2008 recession, offshoring, and various cultural phenomena that the author dislikes are all explained by framing laws to promote things like African American voting rights and equal access to employment). That's the thesis put about as fairly as I can apart from the cynical parenthesis.
On to the problems:
The author makes the mistake of a couple of other historians that I have read before. He appears to believe that by historicizing a problem he is refuting it. It would make more sense to engage in a direct, historically informed polemic for what he is trying to accomplish. As it stands, Caldwell is using a claw hammer to knock down an oak tree. There's no surprise the tree is still standing when Caldwell exhausts his energy. If refutation is not his goal, then I see little reason to read the book outside of entertainment value, which is slim.
The author clearly thinks the civil rights laws of the sixties were inappropriately framed and applied, but we never get a thorough analysis of what these laws actually did. I could theoretically see the argument that civil rights laws were passed with good intention to horrid effect if those effects were actually shown within the text of the law or its application. There may actually even be validity to the claim, but Caldwell does not give us the kind of careful analysis as to how civil rights actually generated a modicum of harm to any Americans outside a few very high level cases (one example of harm he cites strangely enough is the Bakke Supreme Court case in 1977, which sided for the white contender while still upholding affirmative action in principle).
Caldwell cites statistics to prove that Americans from all regions of the country were actually very conservative in their desire to not associate with black people. Apparently this shows that a majority did not desire the actual effects of civil rights law in midcentury America. This alone does not invalidate such laws, though Caldwell implies such. Indeed, it's arguably such attitudes that rendered black civil rights necessary. From what I recall we did not and do not live in a majoritarian democracy (See The Federalist Papers, particularly Federalist 51). That a conservative would try to use polling data to make anything other than a descriptive point is beyond me. And yet polling data is one of the primary tools Caldwell uses throughout the book as he makes judgments. Surely I'm missing something, and I welcome comment from anyone who has also read the book to correct me here.
Caldwell writes about freedom of association as a constitutional right that civil rights law effectively stripped away, though such a right is never enumerated in the first amendment or elsewhere in the U.S. Constitution. There is a freedom to assemble with other citizens, though it appears from the wording to imply assembly for the purpose of petitioning the government. Ironically, the first time a right to freedom of association was ever interpreted as such under the Constitution was in NAACP v. Alabama (1958) when the state required the chapter to divulge their membership roster. The court found that the people within the NAACP had a right to associate without government interference. See: https://www.archives.gov/founding-doc... and https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/...
The claim that we now have two constitutional orders that are in turn supported by two different parties proves unsustainable as well with the history we find. Anyone who thinks the U.S. constitutional order has not undergone de facto as well as de jure constitutional change (in both the broad, Greek politeia sense of the word as well as a more narrow sense of the written Constitution) since the founders is ignorant, a fool, or a deceiver. Reconstruction alone constitutes sufficient refutation of positing any pristine post-1789 constitutional order by the 1960s.
There's no clear historical causation that even suggests a clear trail from civil rights to gangsta rap, fentanyl, gay marriage, or anything else the author claims. Full speed ahead and damn any contingency!
In other words, the only thing remotely sophisticated about this tome is its prose style, which is not unpalatable. It also has a nice cover image.
There's surprisingly little about entitlements in this book, though that is less a critique than an observation.
I'm open to correction. Perhaps I too am merely being naive or ignorant, and there's likely something I missed in listening to The Age of Entitlement rather than reading and marking it up. Alas, the book is fairly long, and time is fleeting. Now to wash it out by reading some real history. Or perhaps I will read some fiction? At least it will likely prove more interesting.
The thesis of the book goes as such: Americans naively passed a frenzy of civil rights laws in an outpouring of affection in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination. These Americans found the racism of southerners repugnant and Jim Crow unjust, but they also believed that with a few temporary, targeted measures these injustices could be overcome. The laws passed by this generation of Americans in their optimism (We defeated the forces of Nazism! surely we can handle the "foreign policy" problems of the southern states.) did not realize that they were forming the backbone of an alternative constitutional order as opposed to the constitution written by the founders in 1788. This alternative constitutional order would go on to create the conditions for why America currently sucks (yes, the opioid crisis, angry kids on college campuses, the 2008 recession, offshoring, and various cultural phenomena that the author dislikes are all explained by framing laws to promote things like African American voting rights and equal access to employment). That's the thesis put about as fairly as I can apart from the cynical parenthesis.
On to the problems:
The author makes the mistake of a couple of other historians that I have read before. He appears to believe that by historicizing a problem he is refuting it. It would make more sense to engage in a direct, historically informed polemic for what he is trying to accomplish. As it stands, Caldwell is using a claw hammer to knock down an oak tree. There's no surprise the tree is still standing when Caldwell exhausts his energy. If refutation is not his goal, then I see little reason to read the book outside of entertainment value, which is slim.
The author clearly thinks the civil rights laws of the sixties were inappropriately framed and applied, but we never get a thorough analysis of what these laws actually did. I could theoretically see the argument that civil rights laws were passed with good intention to horrid effect if those effects were actually shown within the text of the law or its application. There may actually even be validity to the claim, but Caldwell does not give us the kind of careful analysis as to how civil rights actually generated a modicum of harm to any Americans outside a few very high level cases (one example of harm he cites strangely enough is the Bakke Supreme Court case in 1977, which sided for the white contender while still upholding affirmative action in principle).
Caldwell cites statistics to prove that Americans from all regions of the country were actually very conservative in their desire to not associate with black people. Apparently this shows that a majority did not desire the actual effects of civil rights law in midcentury America. This alone does not invalidate such laws, though Caldwell implies such. Indeed, it's arguably such attitudes that rendered black civil rights necessary. From what I recall we did not and do not live in a majoritarian democracy (See The Federalist Papers, particularly Federalist 51). That a conservative would try to use polling data to make anything other than a descriptive point is beyond me. And yet polling data is one of the primary tools Caldwell uses throughout the book as he makes judgments. Surely I'm missing something, and I welcome comment from anyone who has also read the book to correct me here.
Caldwell writes about freedom of association as a constitutional right that civil rights law effectively stripped away, though such a right is never enumerated in the first amendment or elsewhere in the U.S. Constitution. There is a freedom to assemble with other citizens, though it appears from the wording to imply assembly for the purpose of petitioning the government. Ironically, the first time a right to freedom of association was ever interpreted as such under the Constitution was in NAACP v. Alabama (1958) when the state required the chapter to divulge their membership roster. The court found that the people within the NAACP had a right to associate without government interference. See: https://www.archives.gov/founding-doc... and https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/...
The claim that we now have two constitutional orders that are in turn supported by two different parties proves unsustainable as well with the history we find. Anyone who thinks the U.S. constitutional order has not undergone de facto as well as de jure constitutional change (in both the broad, Greek politeia sense of the word as well as a more narrow sense of the written Constitution) since the founders is ignorant, a fool, or a deceiver. Reconstruction alone constitutes sufficient refutation of positing any pristine post-1789 constitutional order by the 1960s.
There's no clear historical causation that even suggests a clear trail from civil rights to gangsta rap, fentanyl, gay marriage, or anything else the author claims. Full speed ahead and damn any contingency!
In other words, the only thing remotely sophisticated about this tome is its prose style, which is not unpalatable. It also has a nice cover image.
There's surprisingly little about entitlements in this book, though that is less a critique than an observation.
I'm open to correction. Perhaps I too am merely being naive or ignorant, and there's likely something I missed in listening to The Age of Entitlement rather than reading and marking it up. Alas, the book is fairly long, and time is fleeting. Now to wash it out by reading some real history. Or perhaps I will read some fiction? At least it will likely prove more interesting.
December 4, 2022
Caldwell casts a cold-eyed gaze on the trends of late 20th century America. He lays much of the blame on the birth of a parallel Constitution in the 60s (i. e. the Civil Rights legal regime) that was subsequently buttressed by the Great Society, Reaganite neoliberalism, and political correctness culture. It's probably one of the better arguments for the New Right (meaning the New New Right of national populist and dissident flavoring who attached themselves spiritually to Donald Trump). I think a critique of the mutilation of the spirit of the Civil Rights Act is warranted but that subtle legal and cultural shifts can restore the intended effect of the original spirit of the law. However, I think Caldwell's analysis founders a bit because it fails to recognize some of the factors at the root of the problems he laments, and when he does identify causes accurately I somewhat disagree with his normative positions. We won't and can't return to largely small town and agrarian models of social organization and the integration of world markets can't be walked back. So I'm just not sure what possible future for America Caldwell would identify as ideal or even tolerable. This is mostly a sophisticated apologia for anti-elite and anti-establishment sentiment in America today.
January 9, 2021
This book should be read in conjunction with "Ship of Fools" to get a flavor for the dangers posed by Western "elites" to their own people, and by extension, to the human race!
October 30, 2022
Very coherent arguments overall. This is not a book you want to read if you want to be especially hopeful about America.
November 19, 2020
This is, if nothing, a provocative book. The fundamental argument by Caldwell is that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created a "second" constitutional regime which is in fundamental conflict with the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of association and free speech. He starts with some recitation of the history immediately before and after the Civil Rights Act.
Caldwell adds some very interesting assertions which gets one to think. For example, he argues that the Boomers as they came into leadership were highly stratified from higher income backgrounds - that might well have been brought about by the differentials that were created by the increasing returns on higher education which were not as simple as is normally presented. Between 1973 and 2000 the return on education was 21% for those with graduate degrees but for BAs the return was actually negative. For high school grads (-26%) and for dropouts (-38%) the returns were horrific. He goes through some other statistics post 1960 - for example we dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did for the entire WWII - and the people who got drafted were predominantly not college grads.
He differentiates between two theories of discrimination - perpetrators versus victims. The enforcement against the alternative theories is wildly different. The Victim version is fundamentally negative and impedes the reconciliation that the sponsors of the CRA intended.
He also describes in fairly interesting detail the effects of this alternative method of enforcement on various populations - what was designed to reconcile races has actually exacerbated divisions. He offers some compelling statistics that were first presented in books like Charles Murray's Coming Apart and in Hillbilly Elegy.
He also argues that we have gotten into some bizarre ways of thinking about the world. He presents the tragic story of the two Yale house masters who were bounced out of the University by bigots for arguing for a very traditional version of free speech. He also raises some questions about where political correctness will lead us to - for example (Rachel Dolezal) who claimed she was black. He wonders if it is possible to be transgender then why is it not possible to be transracial.
I was concerned by many of his characterizations about issues like the role of Supply Side Tax theory. But those are footnotes to the troubling history he presents on the "new" constitution. The US is mired in a deep set of conflicts which at this point do not seem to be reconcilable - he argues that the base of those issues is the Civil Rights Act - I think the causation is a bit more complex.
Caldwell adds some very interesting assertions which gets one to think. For example, he argues that the Boomers as they came into leadership were highly stratified from higher income backgrounds - that might well have been brought about by the differentials that were created by the increasing returns on higher education which were not as simple as is normally presented. Between 1973 and 2000 the return on education was 21% for those with graduate degrees but for BAs the return was actually negative. For high school grads (-26%) and for dropouts (-38%) the returns were horrific. He goes through some other statistics post 1960 - for example we dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did for the entire WWII - and the people who got drafted were predominantly not college grads.
He differentiates between two theories of discrimination - perpetrators versus victims. The enforcement against the alternative theories is wildly different. The Victim version is fundamentally negative and impedes the reconciliation that the sponsors of the CRA intended.
He also describes in fairly interesting detail the effects of this alternative method of enforcement on various populations - what was designed to reconcile races has actually exacerbated divisions. He offers some compelling statistics that were first presented in books like Charles Murray's Coming Apart and in Hillbilly Elegy.
He also argues that we have gotten into some bizarre ways of thinking about the world. He presents the tragic story of the two Yale house masters who were bounced out of the University by bigots for arguing for a very traditional version of free speech. He also raises some questions about where political correctness will lead us to - for example (Rachel Dolezal) who claimed she was black. He wonders if it is possible to be transgender then why is it not possible to be transracial.
I was concerned by many of his characterizations about issues like the role of Supply Side Tax theory. But those are footnotes to the troubling history he presents on the "new" constitution. The US is mired in a deep set of conflicts which at this point do not seem to be reconcilable - he argues that the base of those issues is the Civil Rights Act - I think the causation is a bit more complex.
August 10, 2021
Engrossing read. It takes great courage to write a book like this. I imagine Caldwell will be removed from any vestiges of polite society in which he lived. It hit all the right buttons for me.
Caldwell holds nothing back -- he mentions all sorts of unmentionables. He punches left (a lot) but also right -- at Ronald Reagan (throughout the book) and Ayn Rand. The critique of Rand hit home for me, as I went through a Libertarian phase in my 20s (having read Atlas Shrugged and several other Libertarian mainstays) -- like many young men who suddenly realized that being a Republican white male was supremely low status. Libertarians are cool, right?
His thesis is that "The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible—and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out."
"The reinterpretation of America’s entire history and purpose in light of its race problem is the main ideological legacy of the last fifty years."
One of the recurring topics in the book is our loss of Freedom of Association that has ultimately come about through civil rights ideology.
Similar to so many conservative polemics, this one ended with a thud. I finished the last page and thought: did my version leave out another chapter or two? He shows us how we got lost, but not how to get out of the woods. Also, the book almost entirely lacks a spiritual diagnosis and cure.
Caldwell holds nothing back -- he mentions all sorts of unmentionables. He punches left (a lot) but also right -- at Ronald Reagan (throughout the book) and Ayn Rand. The critique of Rand hit home for me, as I went through a Libertarian phase in my 20s (having read Atlas Shrugged and several other Libertarian mainstays) -- like many young men who suddenly realized that being a Republican white male was supremely low status. Libertarians are cool, right?
His thesis is that "The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible—and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out."
"The reinterpretation of America’s entire history and purpose in light of its race problem is the main ideological legacy of the last fifty years."
One of the recurring topics in the book is our loss of Freedom of Association that has ultimately come about through civil rights ideology.
Similar to so many conservative polemics, this one ended with a thud. I finished the last page and thought: did my version leave out another chapter or two? He shows us how we got lost, but not how to get out of the woods. Also, the book almost entirely lacks a spiritual diagnosis and cure.
August 2, 2020
Pity poor Christopher Caldwell – born 50 years too late and not able to live out his peak years in the 1950’s and early 60’s where in the idealized conservative’s brain men were men, women knew their place in the kitchen, gays were firmly in the closet, dark people had separate but (un)equal facilities and goats were scared. Has a book ever been more ironically titled? Within one finds an overly long litany of all of the author’s entitlements that have been lost: the ability to discriminate against those deemed your genetic inferior, the privilege to say whatever offensive thing comes to mind, and the right to look down your nose at those not your social equal. Historical revisionism abounds and is firmly entrenched in the far right mold of grievance culture. There are no alternative historical paths laid out of course – absent the limited gains of the 1960’s for women, gay, and minorities Caldwell doesn’t articulate how culture or history should have happened or should be improved. To arrive at that one has to read between the very loud dog whistles to imagine his world that more resembles Saudi Arabia than anything one would associate with modern day America.
It’s instructive to read a book like this to get an idea of what the common right winger believes and aspires to. It feels gross while taking it in, but it's instructive to wade in these fetid pools to take in first hand the gas that they've been lighting themselves with lately.
It’s instructive to read a book like this to get an idea of what the common right winger believes and aspires to. It feels gross while taking it in, but it's instructive to wade in these fetid pools to take in first hand the gas that they've been lighting themselves with lately.
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