The Age of Entitlement

America Since the Sixties

Christopher Caldwell

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501106910
• eBook ISBN: 9781501106934
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: History

A major American intellectual and "one of the right's most gifted and astute journalists" ( The New York Times Book Review ) makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, 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 and his conclusion is this: 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 you on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycotin, 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 an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight" ( New York magazine) about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.

Part I

THE REVOLUTIONS OF THE 1960s

1

1963

The assassination of Kennedy

In the mid-1960s, at a moment of deceptively permanent-looking prosperity, the country’s most energetic and ideological leaders made a bid to reform the United States along lines more just and humane. They rallied to various loosely linked moral crusades, of which the civil rights movement, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, provided the model. Women entered jobs and roles that had been male preserves. Sex came untethered from both tradition and prudery. Immigrants previously unwanted in the United States were welcomed and even recruited. On both sides of the clash over the Vietnam War, thinkers and politicians formulated ambitious plans for the use of American power.

Most people who came of age after the 1960s, if asked what that decade was “about,” will respond with an account of these crusades, structured in such a way as to highlight the moral heroism of the time. That is only natural. For two generations, “the sixties” has given order to every aspect of the national life of the United States—its partisan politics, its public etiquette, its official morality.

This is a book about the crises out of which the 1960s order arose, the means by which it was maintained, and the contradictions at its heart that, by the time of the presidential election of 2016, had led a working majority of Americans to view it not as a gift but as an oppression.

The assassination of Kennedy

The era we think of as the sixties began with relative suddenness around the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Americans are right to say that nothing was ever the same after Kennedy was shot. You can hear the change in popular music over a matter of months. A year-and-a-half before Kennedy was killed, “Stranger on the Shore,” a drowsy instrumental by the British clarinetist Acker Bilk, had hit number one. A year-and-a-half after the assassination, the musicians who would form Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and various other druggie blues and folk-rock bands were playing their first gigs together in San Francisco.

This does not mean that the assassination “caused” the decade’s cultural upheaval. The months before Kennedy’s death had already seen the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (August 1962), which upended notions about science’s solidity and a lot of social and political assumptions built on it; Rachel Carson’s exposé of pesticides, Silent Spring (September 1962); and The Feminine Mystique (February 1963), Betty Friedan’s attack on what she saw as the vapidity of well-to-do housewives’ existence. Something was going to happen.

The two conflicts that did most to define the American 1960s—those over racial integration and the war in Vietnam—were already visible. In October 1962, rioting greeted attempts to enforce a Supreme Court decision requiring the segregated University of Mississippi to enroll its first black student, James Meredith. The last summer of Kennedy’s life ended with an unprecedented March on Washington by 200,000 civil rights activists. Three weeks before Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was ousted and then murdered in a coup that Kennedy had authorized.

Kennedy’s death, though, gave a tremendous impetus to changes already under way. Often peoples react to a political assassination, as if by collective instinct, with a massive posthumous retaliation. They memorialize a martyred leader by insisting on (or assenting to) a radicalized version, a sympathetic caricature, of the views they attribute to him. The example most familiar to Americans came in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, when the country passed constitutional reforms far broader than those Lincoln himself had sought: not only a Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery but also a broad Fourteenth Amendment, with its more general and highly malleable guarantees of equal protection and due process.

Something similar happened in the 1960s. A welfare state expanded by Medicare and Medicaid, the vast mobilization of young men to fight the Vietnam War, but, above all, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts—these were all memorials to a slain ruler, resolved in haste over a few months in 1964 and 1965 by a people undergoing a delirium of national grief. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was able to take ideas for civil rights legislation, languishing in the months before Kennedy’s death, and cast them in a form more uncompromising than Kennedy could have imagined.

Civil rights ideology, especially when it hardened into a body of legislation, became, most unexpectedly, the model for an entire new system of constantly churning political reform. Definitions of what was required in the name of justice and humanity broadened. Racial integration turned into the all-embracing ideology of diversity. Women’s liberation moved on to a reconsideration of what it meant to be a woman (and, eventually, a man). Immigration became grounds for reconsidering whether an American owed his primary allegiance to his country or whether other forms of belonging were more important. Anti-communist military adventures gave way, once communism began to collapse in 1989, to a role for the United States as the keeper of the whole world’s peace, the guarantor of the whole world’s prosperity, and the promulgator and enforcer of ethical codes for a new international order, which was sometimes called the “global economy.”

There was something irresistible about this movement. The moral prestige and practical resources available to the American governing elite as it went about reordering society were almost limitless. Leaders could draw not just on the rage and resolve that followed Kennedy’s death but also on the military and economic empire the United States had built up after World War II; on the organizational know-how accumulated in its corporations and foundations; on the Baby Boom, which, as the end of the twentieth century approached, released into American society a surge of manpower unprecedented in peacetime; and, finally, on the self-assurance that arose from all of these things.

The reforms of the sixties, however, even the ones Americans loved best and came to draw part of their national identity from, came with costs that proved staggeringly high—in money, freedom, rights, and social stability. Those costs were spread most unevenly among social classes and generations. Many Americans were left worse off by the changes. Economic inequality reached levels not seen since the age of the nineteenth-century monopolists. The scope for action conferred on society’s leaders allowed elite power to multiply steadily and, we now see, dangerously, sweeping aside not just obstacles but also dissent.

At some point in the course of the decades, what had seemed in 1964 to be merely an ambitious reform revealed itself to have been something more. 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. Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave—it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation. The increasing necessity that citizens choose between these two orders, and the poisonous conflict into which it ultimately drove the country, is what this book describes.

2

Race

The Civil Rights Act—Freedom of association—What did whites think they were getting?—What did blacks think they were getting?—Not civil rights but human rights—Origins of affirmative action and political correctness

The very first days of the 1960s saw the publication of a scholarly landmark. In January 1960, Harvard University’s Belknap Press brought out a new edition of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), edited by the historian Benjamin Quarles, a professor at Morgan State University in Maryland.

Today, with the figure of Douglass towering over American culture, in high school curricula and museum exhibits, on postage stamps and television specials, we might assume that what made the publication important was Quarles’s new interpretation of a classic American autobiography. We would be wrong. Far from being thought a classic in 1960, Douglass’s earliest memoir, covering his years as a slave, had been out of print for more than a century and almost unmentioned in print since the Civil War. Douglass’s career as an abolitionist orator, newspaper publisher, and diplomat was important to historians of the nineteenth century. But his struggles as a slave were not of obvious relevance to mid–twentieth century Americans.

Today slavery is at the center of Americans’ official history, with race the central concept in the country’s official self-understanding. Never before the 1960s was this the case. For almost all of American history, racial conflict was understood as a set of episodes—some shameful, some glorious—set against a larger story about building a constitutional republic. After the 1960s, the constitutional republic was sometimes discussed as if it were a mere set of tools for resolving larger conflicts about race and human rights.

The Civil Rights Act

If the 1960s were a revolutionary time, the core of the revolution was race. Black people in Southern states, with a few reform-minded white allies across the country, were challenging, and demonstrating and marching against, various local systems built up in the century since the Civil War to keep black people apart from white people. The whites who had erected and enforced these systems used them to claim the best fruits of the local economy.

World War II had knit the country together, exposing Southerners to the variety of European-descended ethnicities now present in the Northeast and Midwest, and introducing Americans to the problems of other regions. (But not directly to the problems of other races, for the armed forces would not be integrated until 1948.) In the 1950s, highways, televisions, and corporate expansion made it hard to hide any part of the country from any other part. Systems of racial separation, known collectively as Jim Crow, lost much of their logic and, with it, their power to enforce, intimidate, and control.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed by Lyndon Johnson in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s death, was meant to deliver the coup de grâce to Jim Crow, and to end the black marches and police crackdowns in Mississippi and Alabama that television viewers were seeing almost weekly. The act banned racial discrimination in voting booths (Title I); hotels, restaurants, and theaters (Title II); public facilities, from libraries to swimming pools to bathrooms (Title III); and public schools (Title IV).

But that was not all it did. It also empowered the federal government to reform and abolish certain institutions that stood in the way of racial equality and to establish new ones. By expanding the federal Civil Rights Commission (Title V); by subjecting to bureaucratic scrutiny any company or institution that received government money (Title VI); by laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees; by creating a new presidential agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), with the power to file lawsuits, conduct investigations, and order redress—by doing all these things, the act emboldened and incentivized bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and political agitators to become the “eyes and ears,” and even the foot soldiers, of civil rights enforcement.

Over time, more of the country’s institutions were brought under the act’s scrutiny. Eventually all of them were. The grounds for finding someone or something guilty of discrimination expanded. New civil rights acts—notably the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968—brought new rights for black citizens and new bureaucracies to enforce them.

Civil rights transformed the country not just constitutionally but also culturally and demographically. In ways few people anticipated, it proved to be the mightiest instrument of domestic enforcement the country had ever seen. It can fairly be described as the largest undertaking of any kind in American history. Costing trillions upon trillions of dollars and spanning half a century, it rivals, in terms of energy invested, the peopling of the West, the building of transcontinental railways and highways, the maintenance of a Pax Americana for half a century after World War II, or, for that matter, any of the wars the country has fought, foreign or civil.

On top of those conflicts, the United States has had two massive domestic policy programs that mobilized public resources and sentiments so thoroughly that they were presented to the public as what the philosopher and psychologist William James called a “moral equivalent of war”: the War on Poverty in the 1960s and the War on Drugs in the 1980s and ’90s. Both were mere battlefronts in a larger struggle over race relations. 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.

The scholar Derrick Bell described the quarter-century after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) as “the greatest racial consciousness-raising the country has ever known.” This consciousness-raising has only intensified since. Race is the part of the human experience in which American schoolchildren are most painstakingly instructed. Their studies of literature, of war, of civics, are all subordinated to it.

Race was invested with a religious significance. It became an ethical absolute. One could even say that the civil rights movement, inside and outside the government, became a doctrinal institution, analogous to established churches in pre-democratic Europe. And yet there was something new, something mid–twentieth century, about the way the U.S. government sought to mold the whole of society—down to the most intimate private acts—around the ideology of anti-racism. You could see this ideology emerging in the way Quarles reimagined the young Frederick Douglass:

Naturally the Narrative does not bother to take up the difficulties inherent in abolishing slavery. These Douglass would have dismissed with a wave of the hand. Similarly the Narrative recognizes no claim other than that of the slave. To Douglass the problems of social adjustment if the slaves were freed were nothing, the property rights of the masters were nothing, states’ rights were nothing. He simply refused to discuss these matters. As he viewed it, his function was to shake people out of their lethargy and goad them into action, not to discover reasons for sitting on the fence.

It is true that, in the years before the Civil War, not only the young Douglass but also the New England abolitionists in whose orbit he moved sometimes spoke in such an absolutist way. But when Quarles wrote in 1960, such a stance was still out of favor. As most historians till then had understood it, the absolutism of Douglass and others had hurried the country into a bloody civil war and unnecessarily complicated the reconstruction that followed. In fact, the constitutional and social obstacles to abolishing slavery had been formidable, making attempts to “shake people out of their lethargy and goad them into action” correspondingly dangerous. When Rutherford B. Hayes, on taking the presidency in 1877, ended the military occupation of the South and, with it, efforts to reform race relations there, it was not because he was a coward or a reactionary. Barely a decade after a civil war that had cost 600,000 lives, the entire country, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Part I: The Revolutions of the 1960s
• Part II: The New Constitution
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright