The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

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.

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.

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.

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.

What made the modern framers of civil rights different from the nineteenth-century ones was their conception of power and their genius for wielding it. They succeeded where their forebears had failed because they 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.

The reaction, when it came, was pitiless. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts provided permanent emergency powers to smash the sham democracy of the segregated South. They mixed surveillance by volunteers, litigation by lawyers, and enforcement by bureaucrats. This was a new model of federal government, with a transformative power that was immediately apparent. Thoroughgoing and versatile, often able to bypass the separation of powers, civil rights law became the template for much of American policy making after the 1960s, including on matters far removed from race.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954),

because of “intangible considerations” and “qualities which are incapable of objective measurement,” segregation “is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group.”

Since the damage it aimed to mend consisted of “intangible considerations,” there was no obvious limit to this surveillance.

eliminating freedom of association from the U.S. Constitution changed everything.

Strauss warned: “The prohibition against every ‘discrimination’ would mean the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between the state and society, in a word, the destruction of liberal society.”

In August 1963, the month of the March on Washington at which Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech, 50 percent said the country was moving “too fast” on integration, versus 10 percent who said “not fast enough”—a ratio of 5 to 1. That ratio fell to 2 to 1 (30 to 15 percent) in January, during the debate over the Civil Rights Act. But in October, on the eve of the election, it was back over 3 to 1 (57 to 18 percent) again. It never disappeared.

Whites were muddle-headed on the subject of race. It is clear that they did not understand that the Civil Rights Act was a big constitutional deal.

Fewer than a quarter of Americans actually did want the law to be enforced.

For all their pious sentiments about desegregating the South, whites opposed every single activist step that might have brought desegregation about, and every single activist who was working to do so.

Most Americans, liberal as well as conservative, saw the race problem as something distant. It had to do only, or mainly, with the exotic culture of the South, where segregation was legal. The problem was almost one of foreign policy.

Outside the South, white people seemed to believe it would be a simple matter to get rid of segregation,

by sheer open-minded niceness, at no price in rights to anyone.

Americans’ basically wrong assessment explains why problems emerged so soon after the passage of civil rights legislation. It may also explain why the legislation passed in the first place.

As a practical matter, whites did not suspect they would see the vast increase in federal government oversight that would become the sine qua non of civil rights.

Subcommunities, as Glazer called them, were often suspicious, hostile to outsiders. They were also indispensable for giving people of humble prospects a dignified place in the social order, and keeping the ruthless machinery of market competition at bay.

Now government would set about destroying those subcommunities—eventually doing so in the name of “diversity,”

Victims

are unlikely to view the system as repaired until those practical burdens are removed. Perpetrators, on the other hand, see an ethical failure on the part of society’s leaders and feel society will have done its duty as soon as most people are behaving ethically—speaking

it was blacks’ views that were more congruent with the reality of what would be required, and what would be effective, in bringing racial equality about.

What was being fought over in the 1960s was something different from civil rights. It was a conception of human rights that had arisen in the twentieth century.

The riots were the civil rights movement—not the whole of it, certainly, but an important element of it.

To part of the country the riots were a social movement:

To the rest of the country, the riots were just crime:

1964,

37 percent of whites less sympathetic to blacks than they had been a year before, with only 15 percent more sympathetic. A measure that had been intended to normalize American culture and cure the gothic paranoia of the Southern racial imagination had instead wound up nationalizing Southerners’ obsession with race and violence.

Once its ostensible demands had been met, the civil rights movement did not disband. It grew. It turned into a lobby or political bloc seeking to remedy the problem according to what Freeman would call the victims’ view: “lack of jobs, lack of money, lack of housing.” The federal government made it a central part of its mission to procure those things for blacks.

Americans were by no means opposed to black advancement—but they had accepted the government’s assurance that de jure racism was the main obstacle to it.

They were probably surprised when the advance in blacks’ fortunes slowed after 1964, relative to its rate in the two decades after the Second World War.

The country’s political leadership was thrown into a consternation

Every corner of American political culture would be affected by the effort to explain that failure away. Every corner would be racialized. No one would be permitted to sit back and just allow social change to happen. Every American had to be enlisted as a zealous soldier in the war on racism.

“affirmative action”—ordering

the Griggs decision made clear that the government was now authorized to act against racism even if there was no evidence of any racist intent. This was an opening to arbitrary power. And once arbitrary power is conferred, it matters little what it was conferred for.

The innovations of the 1960s had given 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. Not just excluded and exploited Southern blacks but all aggrieved minorities now sought to press their claims under this new model of progressive governance.

The civil rights model of executive orders, litigation, and court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emergent idea of fairness against old traditions:

Civil rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted.

That is not how civil rights had been sold to the American public. Its toolbox of reform measures had been advertised as a remedy to one heinous constitutional exception.

Americans who felt that civil rights were justified by an especially shameful history also thought it was limited by that history. They would not have consented to it otherwise.

The civil rights movement was a template. The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life, starting with the roles of men and women.

World War II

reversed the integration of women. The war done, women were shunted from the jobs they had filled, to make way for the returning heroes.

Between 1920 and 1958, women went from a third of college students to a quarter.

Americans groped their way only slowly toward an understanding of what a liberated woman was.

For most women, the “problem that has no name” was not a problem.