The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The three great progressive endeavors of the preceding decades—civil rights, women’s liberation, the attempt to impose a liberal order on the world militarily—had all been resoundingly repudiated by the public.

The mood was one of nostalgia and failure. The American public had come to see the political project of the 1960s as dangerously utopian. They brought California governor Ronald Reagan to power to put an end to it. Instead, in ways that neither his supporters nor his detractors have ever fully understood, he rescued it.

The victory of Ronald Reagan

was partly an answer by non-elite Boomers to the zeal of their activist contemporaries, partly an expression of elite Boomers’ own changed priorities as the oldest of them entered middle age.

Kurt Andersen

‘Do your own thing,’ ” he wrote, “is not so different than ‘every man for himself.’ ” The 1980s are what the 1960s turned into.

The hippie agenda, as its most eloquent champions tended to lay it out, was often conservative. It defended tradition against progress. The mainstream, corporate, military-industrial culture built up since the war had sought “ruthlessly to cut the past away,”

The return of power to communities that Reagan promised never happened. On the contrary, the world that his supposedly conservative presidency left behind was more indulgent of the anti-conservative impulse to “cut the past away,” provided the cutting were done heedlessly by businessmen rather than purposefully by bureaucrats. American conservatism was something Reagan tapped rather than embodied. His version of it was oratorical, not constitutional. And conservatism’s lack of a worked-out constitutional dimension would create the crisis out of which, decades later, a harder-edged “Tea Party” populism grew.

Those of Reagan’s supporters who called themselves conservatives snickered at such mockery, but time has vindicated Trilling and Howe. Like Taft, Reagan changed the country’s political mood for a while, but left its structures untouched.

Indeed, Reagan raises the perennial question of whether conservatism is possible at all in a political culture that has the “pursuit of happiness” written into its founding documents.

Reagan

That he learned to sound certain conservative notes about sex in the 1970s, and even gave a barn-burning speech against abortion in 1983, should not distract from his pre-eminence as a sexual progressive.

Reagan’s stress on “family values”—a

disguised his acquiescence to modern ways.

Reagan’s libertarian vision had as much of Martin Luther King’s “dream” in it as it did of Ayn Rand’s capitalism. It was sunny and it was progressive.

Reagan’s own greatest achievement: He arranged a truce between the World War II generation and the Baby Boomers, whose interests had, until his campaign, appeared irreconcilable. The demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe described “an implicit deal in which G.I.s achieved economic independence (and spent the post-Vietnam fiscal ‘peace dividend’ almost entirely on themselves) while Boomers asserted their social independence.”

At first, the American Baby Boomers appeared to be doing with little effort what other generations had only managed to do by the sweat of their brow. But that was an illusion. What they were doing was using their generation’s voting power to arrogate future generations’ labor, and trading it to other nations and peoples for labor now. Reaganism meant Reaganomics. Reaganomics meant debt.

supply-side economics.

Economies throughout history had grown rich and remained stable without necessarily licensing the very richest to make money hand over fist. But the Wanniski vision jibed with the have-it-all culture at large. By this time, he had won over Jack Kemp.

Clearly Reagan bought Wanniski’s political insight about the advantages of playing Santa Claus. It is less clear that he bought Wanniski’s economics.

The difficulty of shrinking government led nobody in the president’s entourage to reconsider his tax cuts. A means had become an end.

Reagan’s defenders credit him with having prepared the country for the competitive conditions of the global economy. He did, but that was no part of his vision.

Reagan did not win two elections by promising to close more plants, outsource more jobs, and lay off more industrial workers.

From an actuarial and from a human-capital perspective, the quarter-century after Ronald Reagan’s election should have been the easiest time to balance the budget in the history of the republic.

The borrowing power of the Baby Boom generation was invested in avoiding the choices that the confrontations of the 1960s had placed before the country. What the debt paid for was social peace, which had come to be understood as synonymous with the various Great Society programs

We should understand the Great Society as the institutional form into which the civil rights impulse hardened, a transfer from whites to blacks of the resources necessary to make desegregation viable.

it was being presented to the public as the merest down payment on what Americans owed. The best evidence we have is that it was too much for most Americans from the beginning.

The rhetoric that brought Reagan two landslides was, among other things, a sign that 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.

In retrospect, we can see that by acquiescing in the ouster of Nixon after the previous landslide, those who voted for him had lost their chance to moderate the pace of that change. With the impeachment of Nixon, promoters of the Great Society had bought the time necessary to defend it against “backlash,” as democratic opposition to social change was coming to be called. In the near-decade that elapsed between Nixon and Re...

Meanwhile, his 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.

Those losing out had to be compensated. Consider affirmative action—unconstitutional under the traditional order, compulsory under the new—which exacted a steep price from white incumbents in the jobs they held, in the prospects of career advancement for their children, in their status as citizens. Such a program could be made palatable to white voters only if they could be offered compensating advantages. A government that was going to make an overwhelming majority of voters pay the cost of affirmative action had to keep unemployment low, home values rising, and living standards high. Reaganomics was just a name for governing under a merciless contradiction that no one could admit was there: Civil rights was important enough that people could not be asked to wait for it, but unpopular enough that people could not be asked to pay for it.

Reagan permitted Americans to live under two social orders, two constitutional orders, at the same time. There was a pre–Great Society one and a post–Great Soci...

Ronald Reagan saved the Great Society in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt is credited by his admirers with having “saved capitalism.” That is, he tamed some of its very worst excesses and found the resources to protect his own angry voters from consequences they would otherwise have found intolerable.

Failing to win a consensus for the revolutions of the 1960s, Washington instead bought off through tax cuts those who stood to lose from them. Americans would delude themselves for decades that there was something natural about this arrangement. It was an age of entitlement.

Low-wage immigrants subsidize the rich countries they migrate to,

Ultimately, natives pay some kind of “bill” for such labor.

for a mature, settled society, mass immigration can be a poor choice,

Reagan flung open the gates to immigration while stirringly proclaiming a determination to slam them shut. Almost all of Reaganism was like that.

The Hart-Celler bill would alter the demography of the United States. It would also alter the country’s culture, committing the government to cut the link that had made Americans think of themselves for three centuries as, basically, a nation of transplanted Europeans.

To do away with illegal immigration, Americans would have had to send a strong message, not just in their statutes but in their enforcement practices and their day-to-day behavior, to the effect that illegal immigration, and therefore illegal immigrants, were not welcome. Every poll from the time tells us that Americans intended to convey just such a message.

In late amendments, the 1986 IRCA bill was filled with language stressing that an employer could be held liable for discriminating on account of national origin. This looked like window dressing, but in the new, post–Civil Rights Act judicial climate, it became the heart of the bill. It turned inside-out the penalties against employers for hiring illegal immigrants. However harsh the “employer sanctions” had originally looked on paper, they required employers to act in ways that civil rights law forbade. An American boss now had more to fear from obeying the immigration law than from flouting

Every law was turning into an expansion of civil rights law.

The phrase “people of color,” which crept into vogue sometime during the Reagan administration, was a linguistic Rubicon. On the other side of it, an entirely new and harder-line spirit of civil rights would prevail.

Almost everyone other than white heterosexual males could benefit in some way from civil rights laws.

The old project had aimed at fixing an unfair system. This could best be done by talking about justice rather than race,

The politics that emerged as the twentieth century ended, by contrast, were zealously racial.

although no one had voted to make it so, the social changes of Reagan’s late 1980s were all suddenly going with the grain of the Johnson revolution.

The Supreme Court would now be fought over with the same rancor and no-holds-barred partisanship that once marked democratic politics, because, since the legislative revolution of 1965, the courts and the bureaucracy had replaced democratic politics.

A more skeptical view of Reagan is that he was put at the command of a victorious insurgency and handed away its victories. He abused the trust of a democratic movement and created conditions under which the next populist movement that arose would be satisfied only with deeds, not words.

A big problem with immigration was that it bred inequality. Its role in doing so was as significant as that of other factors more commonly blamed: information technology, world trade, tax cuts.