Christopher Caldwell: The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020.
Christopher Caldwell rightly understands the social and political reforms undertaken in the 1960s as a regime change in the United States, a change that has continued to into our own time and provoked strong efforts at counterrevolution. He means to explain “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 a gift but as an oppression.”
The assassination of President Kennedy “gave a tremendous impetus to changes already underway,” including the questioning of the authority of modern science (seen in the writings of Thomas S. Kuhn), feminism (Betty Friedan), environmentalism (Rachel Carson), civil rights (Martin Luther King), and the Vietnam War (the New Left). Reformers and revolutionaries seized upon the emotional reactions to the assassination by making it a symbol of a regime they wanted to be in crisis. Meanwhile, the existing regime, itself the product of the revolution effected by Progressives in the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations, scrambled to answer these challenges, challenges coming not (as accustomed) from the Right but unexpectedly from the Left. “A welfare state expanded by Medicare and Medicaid, the vast mobilization of young men to fight in 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.” These institutions, policies, and laws came to amount not merely to “a major element in the Constitution” but to “a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.” This explains the much-remarked ‘polarization’ and ‘incivility’ of our contemporary politics: “It is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail.” Caldwell holds that this controversy sets “the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it” against “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.” This ignores the intervening Progressive revolution—there are three political ‘layers’ to the matter, not two—but it does bring out the starkness of the conflict over the character of the American regime.
He begins with race. “Today slavery is at the center of America’s official history, with race the central concept in the country’s self-understanding.” “Never before the 1960s was this the case”; previously, the theme of “building a constitutional republic” prevailed in and outside the classroom, as generations sought (in Lincoln’s words) to perpetuate our political institutions and even the Progressives sought to build what their flagship magazine called “the new republic.” But the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “empowered the Federal Government to reform and abolish certain institutions that stood in the way of racial equality and to establish new ones,” “subjecting to bureaucratic scrutiny any company or institution that received government money,” especially their hiring practices. Subsequent legislation built up “the mightiest instrument of domestic enforcement the country had ever seen,” the “largest undertaking of any kind in American history” in terms of money and rivaling the conquest of the American West, the construction of transcontinental railroads and highways, and the containment of Soviet communism in terms of time and effort. To civil rights, the Left added the ‘wars’ on poverty and on drugs, expanding the administrative state still further. But it is “the reinterpretation of America’s entire history and purpose in light of its race problem” that stands as “the main ideological legacy of the last fifty years,” animating not only the teaching of ‘social studies’ but of literature and some topics in the sciences. “The U.S. government sought to mold the whole of society—down to the most intimate private acts—around the ideology of anti-racism.” The civil rights ‘activists,’ as they called themselves, “were confident in resorting to coercion, indifferent to imposing financial burdens on future generations, and willing to put existing constitutional freedoms at risk in order to secure new ones” by exercising “permanent emergency powers” in “a new model of federal government” that “bypass[es] the separation of powers,” a government in which administrators legislate, execute, and adjudicate.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka anticipated this fusion of powers. “It was less a judicial argument than a judicial order.” The case evidently turned on the question of “whether the Fourteenth Amendment,” with its equal protection clause, “had intended to permit segregated schools.” But the justices instead “asked whether the doctrine of ‘separate but equal,'” enunciated in the earlier case of Plessy v. Ferguson “was possible in practice.” They determined that it was indeed possible, inasmuch as segregated schools had been equalized or were on the way to being equalized in their physical characteristics. They instead rejected separate but equal as injurious to the souls of black folk, as a badge of unjust prejudice against them. By “grant[ing] the government the authority to put certain public bodies under surveillance for racism,” an intangible phenomenon, the Court set “no obvious limit to this surveillance.” When the Civil Rights Act extended this authority to private bodies, desegregation began to imply “a revocation of the old freedom of association altogether.” “Eliminating freedom of association from the U.S. Constitution changed everything, inasmuch as Tocqueville understood civil associations the democratic substitute for the aristocratic class, which had served as a political buffer between the modern state and those ruled by it. Now, there was in principle no legitimate intermediary between ‘the state’ and ‘civil society.”’ This transformed what was still called liberalism into illiberalism—into a new form of absolutism, one ruled not by a Louis XIV but by the new administrative oligarchs. “The problem is that rights cannot simply be ‘added’ to a social contract without changing it.” “To establish new liberties is to extinguish others,” a sobering and true thought that deserves more attention than it usually gets.
“All sorts of constitutionalist and libertarian fears, chuckled at and pooh-poohed on the floor of the Senate” during the debates over civil rights legislation “came to pass” because supporters of the legislation thought that racial justice would be easier, entailing far less extensive and rigorous government intervention, than it did. Most black leaders knew better but they also proved more comfortable with tough remedies. “When riots eventually came, in big cities and on college campuses, blacks leaned toward thinking they helped more than hurt integration”; that, one might say, was their mistake, although violence may have spurred still more extensive regulation even as whites’ animosity towards blacks sharpened.
The Civil Rights Act enabled the government to require private firms to take “affirmative action” to remedy intentional and unlawful forms of racial discrimination. In practice, however, “the act opened almost all American businesses to lawsuits for discrimination, whether they had engaged in it intentionally or not.” A subsequent Supreme Court decision further authorized the federal government “to act against racism even if there was no evidence of any racist intent”; once such “arbitrary power is conferred, it matters little what it was conferred for.” “Just a half a decade into the civil rights revolution America had something it had never had at the federal level, something the overwhelming majority of its citizens would never have approved: an explicit system of racial preference.” This “wrought a change in the country’s constitutional culture,” giving “progressives control over the most important levers of government, control that would endure for as long as the public was afraid of being called racist.” Progressives quickly moved to fortify the new regime by including “all aggrieved minorities” as its clients under the slogan, ‘Race, class, and gender.’
Regarding the latter, in her book The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan charged that women had lost ground since the ‘first wave’ of feminism, the campaign for women’s right to vote, had been superseded by the masculine culture fostered by victory in World War II and institutionalized by the GI Bill, which benefited men far more than women when it came to preparing them for better-paying jobs. While “men became titans of, or at least soldiers in, the industrial economy,” “their women were left stranded in empty houses full of high-powered cleaning machinery”—a fix that “had never been their lot before.” What is more, most women were satisfied with that, a condition Friedan and her allies in the ‘second wave’ feminist movement successfully sought to reverse. As universities expanded to accommodate the additional men who could now afford higher education, they came to admit more women, too, thereby “insulat[ing] a critical mass of elite women from child-rearing expectations” and priming them for enlistment in another army of sorts, one “mobiliz[ed] against ‘sexism.'” The woman who coined that word defined it as “judging people by their sex where sex doesn’t matter.” The problem, Caldwell remarks, “is that sex often matters, and matters more than anything,” being “fundamental in a way that race or class is not,” namely, in the fact that “men don’t carry babies.” Thus “feminism had to contend not just against bigotry but also against nature.” Fortunately for the movement, modern science aims at the conquest of nature. “The power of feminism rested on advances in contraception and abortion, and on the spread of civil rights principles out of government and into the corporate world.” Despite the socialist rhetoric and indeed convictions of leading feminists, feminism itself became “an ideology of the innovative, entrepreneurial, and managerial classes, an ally of technocracy, modernity, progress, and wealth.” Corporations profited because when women entered their offices and factories salaries for men could be cut. By the 1970s, with both parents working, birthrates declined, and consumer spending increased, replacing an ethos of child-rearing and household investment with one of consumption. The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade made abortion more readily available, and although Americans still “had a sense that abortion was bad,” they “lacked a moral framework that would allow them to think about abortion logically and confidently.” With the sexual libertinism of the 1960s already in place, “the hope that traditional sexual morality could survive the introduction and destigmatization of abortion was a vain one.” Politically, this moral revolution induced the Democrats to become “the party of new, court-mandated rights” of “all kinds” and of “promoting judges not for their impartiality but for their political reliability.” With Republicans taking the opposite stance, the authority of the Supreme Court itself became a matter of partisan controversy, “eroding [its] constitutional legitimacy” in the long run. Americans began “to identify the constitution-changers as a class—a new elite that had been formed in the crucible of protest against the Vietnam War.”
The Johnson Administration’s failure in Vietnam, the result of lying and incompetence at the Pentagon and in the White House, discredited the American military for a generation. The postwar “template on which the whole civilian order had been patterned”—animated by esteem for soldiers, cops, TV cowboys as our noble protectors—made “the sunny, can-do twentieth-century America Way now look mediocre and tainted.” The Baby Boom generation turned against the military draft, protesting the war “as much”—some of us would say much more—to “keep themselves out of the war as to end it.” While the draft existed, increasing numbers of young men avoided the draft by extending their years undertaking ‘higher education,’ which got them a deferment from service. Because better-educated, this Left-leaning cohort rapidly moved into positions of authority, across the professions. And because so large, “the biggest in American history,” “no generation was more fused over and pandered to” by politicians, businesses, and their advertisers. The result: “For three quarters of a century, other generations would be forced to share the preoccupations of their fellow citizens born in the late 1940s and early 1950s.” Electorally, this led to the apparently ‘conservative’ backlash of the 1980s. But institutionally, the Left had ensconced itself in the ruling institutions of the country.
Caldwell finds in President Ronald Reagan a man who “tapped rather than embodied” American conservativism, one who “changed the country’s mood for a while,” but did nothing to change the institutional structures now dominated by the Left. He failed to return political authority to local communities and failed to appoint genuinely constitutionalist judges to the Supreme Court. He did help to win the Cold War and to secure “for another generation of Americans the exorbitant privilege of using the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and getting to write the rules of international commerce.” His rhetoric touting ‘conservative values’ found no counterpart in domestic policy, and indeed when governor of California he liberalized abortion laws and introduced no-fault divorce under the guise of a “Family Law Act.” “By the time of his campaign for the presidency in 1980, it would have been fair to say Reagan had done more than any politician of either party to build up the institutions of post-feminist sexual liberation.” As president, he showed that “talking of values was a way of pretending that no one had any real grievance or interest worth arguing over,” a way of “arrang[ing] a truce between the World War II generation and the Baby Boomers” whereby the former G.I.s received economic independence while Boomers won social independence. More radically, Caldwell asks, “whether conservativism is possible at all in a political culture that has the ‘pursuit of happiness’ written into its founding documents.” (That, it is likely, depends upon what citizens say ‘happiness’ is.)
The centerpiece of Reagan’s economic policy, ‘supply-side’ economics, which held that high tax rates on the few rich people eroded investment capital without doing much for the many middle-class and poor. But the extra monies accrued went not so much from the government back to the people, rich or poor, as from discretionary domestic spending to the military Reagan was strengthening in his effort to win the Cold War and to Great-Society-spawned entitlements and interest payments. More indebtedness and borrowing ensued, as “Americans were unwilling to bankroll with their taxes the civil rights and welfare revolution of the 1960s and the social change it brought in its train.” Since “entire populations had become dependent on the Great Society,” its programs had by now become “too big” to be allowed to fail. Reagan’s tax cuts “provided a golden parachute for the white middle class, allowing it, for one deluded generation, to re-create with private resources a Potemkin version of the old order,” as “Reagan permitted Americans to live under two social orders, two constitutional orders, at the same time,” buying “through tax cuts those who stood to lose” from the 1960s revolutions, and winking at massive legal and illegal immigration of low-wage workers for the same reason. “It was an age of entitlement.”
That white middle class eventually found itself boxed in by a new rhetorical and political strategy adopted by the Left to counter Reaganite rhetoric. By 1990s, the phrase ‘people of color’ heralded “the strategy of bundling different minorities into a coalition,” one which has expanded beyond race to include class and ‘gender,’ a term that makes sexuality less a matter of biology than of grammar, of the manipulation of words. The manipulation of words is the province of the educated few, the new (or at least more extensively empowered) professional classes. “The weakening democratic grip of the public on its government” continued, as “power disappeared into back rooms and courtrooms” while mass immigration of ‘people of color’ coupled with the civil rights laws of the 1960s lent the Left ever-increasing political heft. The business classes went along, inasmuch as “those who profited most in the 1980s” turned out not to be entrepreneurs chasing the American Dream but “highly credentialed people profiting off of financial deregulation and various computer systems that had been developed” by the Pentagon, “the sort of people you met at faculty clubs and editorial-board meetings,” a “new social class” which “had at its disposal both capitalism’s means and progressivism’s sense of righteousness, ready “to breathe life back into the 1960s projects around race, sex, and global order that had been interrupted by the conservative uprisings of the 1970s.”
The characteristic buzzword for this project has been ‘diversity.’ Previously, Senator Stephen Douglas had defended his policy of allowing America’s western territories to enter the Union as free or slave states by citing the diversity of soils and climates; surely, he argued, the wide differences in such geographic conditions justified the adoption of equally diverse laws respecting slavery. Whether a territory blocked or permitted slavery within its borders should be decided democratically, by popular sovereignty, with no reference to such abstractions as natural rights. The ‘diversity’ movement issuing from the 1960s New Left, as its partisans settled into influential positions in business, politics, and education, found substantial material aid in the globalization of economics and, to some extent, law, and in the main technological innovation of the time, the personal computer. With globalization, “American businessmen freed themselves from the customs that had bound them to their country’s workforce,” moving their factories overseas and moving foreign workers into their businesses at home. By these stratagems, business owners managed to blind themselves, and many others, from the continued reality of nation-states, especially after America outlasted the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Simultaneously, personal computers have enabled two generations of Americans to imagine that national boundaries are meaningless. (At one point in the early 2000s, I told a group of college students that wars would eventually be fought in cyberspace, a thought they rejected. Didn’t I know that computers were making war obsolete by breaking down political borders? I didn’t at the time, and I confess that I still don’t.) Indeed, unlike economic globalization, the ‘virtual reality’ of computers distracts on-line ‘communities’ from reality itself, including real community: “Befriending people was once life’s profoundest joy, and it was free,” but ‘friending’ people on Facebook only “required buying a machine and paying Mark Zuckerberg.” None of this bothered most among the academic and media classes, who turned from much of their hostility toward technology, prominent in the 1960s, to delight in the ease computers brought to their chattering. Globalization and computerization empowered each other, as computers made economic globalization possible by lengthening supply chains; low-paid foreign workers could assemble machines remotely, leaving high-wage workers in the United States and elsewhere scrambling in search of work in the ‘service’ sector.
Diversity and egalitarianism combine to make moral relativism, now baptized ‘postmodernism.’ Postmodernists used their newfound technological and economic reach to delegitimize existing social bonds, “from communism to mainline Christianity.” “Every institution it penetrated, it politicized.” Politics, however, requires some form of authority; the ideology of ‘diversity’ itself proved a ready instrument. In its 1978 Bakke decision, the Supreme Court effectively transformed the rationale of affirmative action programs in universities. In the decade or so prior to the decision, affirmative action was justified on the basis of righting past wrongs—slavery and segregation. Now “racial preference was meant to remedy not past but present discrimination,” which was simply assumed to exist in every college and university, whether there was any evidence of it or not. Anyone who argued “that any part of the difference in outcomes” of, for example, standardized admissions tests or graduation rates, “was attributed to anything other than racism, the entire logic of civil rights law would break down.” Sex (renamed, tellingly, ‘gender,’ a word taken over from grammar) received the same treatment, with the term ‘sexism’ deployed in the same way as ‘racism.’ Opinion itself needed to be surveilled and policed. “Thus began a process that would saturate the national culture with racial and gender politics,” the insistence not on free speech or academic freedom but on ‘political correctness,’ enforced not by Jacobin-like mobs but by academic and government administrators “frightened of civil rights law.” “In the quarter-century after Reagan, conservatives lost every battle against the substance of political correctness,” its advocates having effected “the most comprehensive ideological capture of ideological power in the history of the United States.”
What had begun as a ‘subversive’ movement against ‘the Establishment’ had pervaded the Establishment, animating the mild, softly despotic administrative state, not only in government and academia but in business corporations. Conservatives won elections but the offices they held were ones “from which real political power had been withdrawn.” Administrative regulation had largely replaced laws framed by elected representatives. And such regulation came not only from governmental and academic regulators but from the ‘private enterprise’ American conservatives had long lauded. “Reagan had won conservatives over to the idea that ‘business’ was the innocent opposite of overweening ‘government,” but now “businesses were the hammer of civil rights enforcement, in the forefront of advancing both affirmative action and political correctness,” having established departments of ‘human resources” staffed with “diversity compliance officers” who “carried out functions that resembled those of twentieth-century commissars.” “Only with the entrenchment of political correctness did it become clear what Americans had done in 1964: They had inadvertently voted themselves a second constitution without explicitly repealing the one they had.” When these two constitutions, instantiated by two different regimes, came into conflict, “it was the new, unofficial constitution, nurtured by elites in all walks of life, that tended to prevail,” intimidating their opponents with charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. At the same time, the “behavioral economics” propounded by such academic eminences as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler found ways to enable government to shape the choices consumers make. “The strongest case for letting people make choices without the interference of the state rests not on their competence as choosers but on their dignity a persons,” Caldwell remarks, but if human nature is almost infinitely malleable, as the new economists were happy to assert, what does human dignity really amount to?
“The New Economy” of globalization and computerization thus empowered a new political as well as economic oligarchy by “rendering nonsensical, at least for a while, all kinds of inherited cultural and political beliefs about sovereignty, national independence, and social cohesion.” Presidents beginning with Bill Clinton promised to compensate the classes who had lost work and seen their moral and political convictions trashed. The way to do this was by helping them to borrow money, especially for housing and education (the latter ostensibly to ready their children for jobs in the New Economy). Personal and government debt have ballooned ever since, with ever more of that proverbial American ingenuity going into inventing “new ways to borrow money.” “Anti-racism women’s rights, sexual liberation, world hegemony, government through technology—none of these was free. All would have to be paid for, which meant that they would be fought over.” One may deplore contemporary ‘polarization’ in American politics. One cannot evade it.
Barack Obama was the first post-Baby Boom generation president (Trump was a throwback, as is Biden, but their days are obviously numbered). In point of fact, Obama descended from American slave owners, not slaves, and “until he went to college, Obama had had less direct contact with black American culture than almost any of his white Senate colleagues.” But no matter, politically. His story “owes more to postmodern university narratives of chosen identity”—for example, the carefully drawn barbershop scene in Dreams of My Father —than “to anything inherited from the racial confrontation and injustices of the segregated South.” Such a narrative fits perfectly into the new, “permanent regime,” in which “everything appear[s] in a different light” than it did in the regime it replaced. Under this regime, the internet empowered people “as consumers” and producers, but it left them vulnerable as citizens, enthralling them with the charms of economic life while distracting them from the rigors of citizenship. Self-government became government by the new elites or, more precisely, the new elites in coalition with the old minorities, both “benefit[ing] in the same way from laws passed to constrain majority power,” laws passed because the majority was either distracted or, when not distracted, demoralized by the chatter of the chattering elite classes—chatter purveyed not only on the Internet and in the news and entertainment media but in the schools, whose educational policies were formulated by foundations funded by the new billionaires. President Obama issued the necessary executive orders to implement those policies, carefully “bypassing Congress on controversial matters” as “intellectuals and pundits egged him on,” recommending “lines of policy that would only recently have been thought autocratic.” If there’s no real human nature, and no Homo economicus as a result of that nature, then “there’s no Homo democraticus, either.” Indeed, no Homo politicus of any kind, only administrators and their clients. Civil rights as defined by administrators “thus does not temper popular sovereignty, it replaces it.” There can and should be “no areas of human life in which the state’s vigilance is not called for.”
“But wait: If people’s calculations are always under suspicion of bias, then what places the calculations of ‘activists’—of politicians and professors, behavioral economists and diversity counselors—in the Socratic position above suspicion? Aren’t their minds fallible, too? Why do they get to be the ‘choice architects,’ while others merely inhabit the structures of their design? This is a bit of a mystery.”
What is considerably less imponderable is the consequent instantiation of a legal right to marry for homosexual couples. Judge Margaret Marshall of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, ruled in favor of ‘gay marriage’—arguably a contradiction in terms no matter which of the two main definitions of ‘gay’ one has in mind—by “reason[ing] from, not to, a redefinition of marriage, taking it not as a foundation of society anterior to and recognized by government but as a welfare institution established by government, like a dog park or a VA hospital which carried” what the justice termed a “cornucopia of substantial benefits.” This “reversed the burden of proof on all marriage questions that came before courts,” and it wasn’t long before the U.S. Supreme Court justices followed along in Obergefell v. Hodges, making “gay marriage the law of the land.” In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wondered if “the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage.” For his part, Justice Kennedy never said that they had, assuming that “the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had not enhanced the Constitution as it had once been understood but had replaced it.” For his part, Mr. Obama, “the first president to understand civil rights law this way, a de facto constitution by which the de jure constitution could be bypassed,” undertook “to lead the country on that new constitutional basis,” his considerable rhetorical skills aiding to make the new race bias seem bias free as “a sort of official fiction”—the noble lie, as it were, of the newest of new ‘republics.’
“The United States had re-created the problem that it had passed the Civil Rights Act to resolve: It had two classes of citizens,” with white, heterosexual males as the new lower rail on the fence. Those who still respected the pre-1964 regime and the understanding of civil rights prevailing within it “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.” They partook of “a society-wide inability to talk to think straight about anything.”
Recent Comments