The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

As long as Americans were frightened of speaking against civil rights legislation or, later, of being assailed as racists, sexists, homophobes, or xenophobes, their political representatives could resist nothing that presented itself in the name of “civil rights.” This meant that conflict, when it eventually came, would be constitutional conflict, with all the gravity that the adjective “constitutional” implies.

The globalization of the division of labor that gathered speed in the 1980s

The country would therefore become an economic part rather than an economic whole, rendering nonsensical, at least for a while, all kinds of inherited cultural and political beliefs about sovereignty, national independence, and social cohesion. In this sense the New Economy was like the new constitution. Over the fifty years leading up to the election of 2016, those who found ways to use the newly unleashed powers flourished. Those who continued to believe they could trust in old traditions, or vote their way to the country they wanted, lost ground.

Until the 1980s, the U.S. financial system was heavily regulated. Banks could not lend across state lines. Nor could small banks speculate in stocks.

even if families paid slightly higher interest rates when they tried to borrow, the old system gave them a more than equivalent return in stability. It captured bankers and their assets for local communities, keeping money and credit in the area during downturns,

But these caps could hold only so long as the government kept inflation in check. When Lyndon Johnson launched his two-front war on segregation and North Vietnam, inflation rose, and the middle class began to demand more interest income from its saved money.

By the end of the 1970s, the United States was operating under two new and dangerous conditions: First, a middle-class constituency had arisen for more financial risk-taking.

Second, the public rebelled against paying for the social programs of the 1960s, on which interracial comity had come to depend.

Housing and Community Development Act. It inaugurated the process we have seen at many junctures in this book: the sudden irruption of civil rights law and diversity promotion into an area from which it had been mostly absent, in this case mortgage finance.

lowering underwriting standards.

There was inequality, certainly, but inequality was not the same thing as discrimination.

Except that, increasingly, in the minds of civil rights enforcers, it was.

By the time Clinton left office, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) required that low-income loans make up 50 percent of the GSEs’ portfolio. Republicans never objected.

George W. Bush’s administration in the new century raised the GSEs’ quota for low-income loans to 56 percent. That brought an astonishing deterioration in the quality of housing assets. By 2007, high-risk mortgages (as distinct from low-income ones) made up 22 percent of the GSEs’ portfolio, up tenfold from a decade before.

The less likely you were to pay off a mortgage, the more likely you were to get one.

No well-informed accountant thought these loans could survive an economic downturn, and they did not. The politicization of poor people’s mortgages in a single country brought the world to the brink of economic disaster.

To inquire too closely into borrowers’ creditworthiness would leave bankers in danger of falling afoul of anti-discrimination laws, particularly after Clinton’s redlining initiative.

The “off-balance-sheet liabilities” of the finance crisis were largely those of the civil rights revolution.

The debt crisis was a sign that the United States was nearing the limits of its ingenuity in finding new ways to borrow money. Without extra money, the country could no longer afford to pay for both a pre– and a post–Great Society social order. When we speak of “polarization” today, what we mean is the conflict between those two social orders, newly reactivated under conditions of curtailed resources.

Some people, the public rightly began to suspect, would have to surrender what they considered their rights and submit to a political order designed for others’ benefit.

Obama’s presidency extinguished an important illusion on which the consensus for civil rights laws had rested: the illusion that its more intrusive tools would be temporary.

If the more intrusive tools of civil rights were not a temporary set of measures, as Justice O’Connor assumed, but a permanent regime, then everything appeared in a different light. Then working-class white people were not engaged in any heroic enterprise of welcoming their black neighbors. They were being ousted, rather, on someone else’s say-so, from their niche in American life. They were not saints but suckers. Although Obama was the opposite of an incendiary politician, this interpretation of things, as it sank in, had an alarming effect on the public, especially when it was coupled with similar impressions they were forming about the economy.

Because the internet was measurable, it was authoritative. It defined morals around what behaviors really are, not vice versa. Any aspiration to see things from a perspective beyond that of day-to-day reality came to seem pointless and risible. Western religion in all its expressions was undermined.

the internet approach to data, and to reality, undermined all types of thinking aimed at understanding systems from the outside—not just religion but also science, political ideology, and deductive reasoning. Big Data worked by correlation, not by logic.

Big Data was a reassertion by powerful corporations of a right that had been stripped from other Americans: the right to stereotype.

The information-gathering capacities of the new internet firms brought them into both collusion and competition with government.

The problem was not the expansion of government until it crowded out the private sector—it was the expansion of the private sector until it became a kind of government.

Internet bosses often sought to absolve themselves of responsibility for this inequity by presenting it as a free-market transaction. But that was not true. The internet was no longer something one could take or leave. The problem was not that a new public square had been created but that the old public square had been destroyed.

a new phenomenon in American democracy: the illegitimate majority that, because it was on the wrong side of history, could justly be thwarted, constrained, or ignored.

Over time, the most attractive thing about a network may be simply that a large number of people have already chosen it. When a network reaches critical mass, competition becomes pointless. Yes, some other company might design a “better” network, but that wouldn’t necessarily make it a competitor.

Citizens had a “choice” whether or not to join the new networks cropping up, but it was actually a choice only for people middle-aged and older, who already had an economic or social status earned offline. For the youngest generation—those born in the last two decades of the twentieth century—opting out of the web meant opting out of society altogether.

the cyber world of tomorrow started to resemble the bigoted world of yesterday. Google showed its ads for high-paying jobs to men more often than to women. Arrest-related ads popped up when people searched for common black surnames

Problem was, they were.

It is worth again recalling Alan David Freeman’s distinction between the “perpetrator” perspective on civil rights (which seeks only to eliminate bias, and will leave things alone when bias cannot be proved) and the “victim” perspective (which assumes bias, and seeks to eliminate the inequality associated with it). The perpetrator way is punctilious and slow-moving; the victim way dramatic and disruptive. For half a century the victim perspective had been imposed by courts, backed with the threat of criminal and civil penalties. Eventually people lost the ability to tell the difference between inequality and racial discrimination. In almost all of the media coverage of the COMPAS controversy, the two terms were used as synonyms. Indeed, it was evidence of bad faith to assert that an inequality might ever result from something other than discrimination.

Though the contrast between the two perspectives was not new, computers put it into starker relief.

The country had taken Ayn Rand’s Reagan-era dream to heart, submitting to “inspirational” business leadership.

The fungible excellence that entitled one to rule could today be revealed not just on the stock market or factory floor but also on the big screen or the soundstage. Why shouldn’t Bono harangue the public on development aid or Angelina Jolie on family policy? Leadership was leadership. Rich people should be powerful people. And vice versa, politicians chimed in.

Over time, the law evolved so that “charitable gifts” were understood to include not just buying soup for the homeless but also “educating” the public

The most effective giving leveraged private fortunes into government power, and the most effective government power leaned more and more on private fortunes.

America’s elites rallied to the agenda of race and gender equality, and used the institutions it brought as a way of legitimating their own wealth.

these elite minorities were different from historically marginalized ones,

But both kinds of minority, elite ones and marginalized ones, live under threat from democratic majorities, and benefit in the same way from laws passed to constrain majority power.

rich people had more and more sway over government

Race to the Top

Diane Ravitch complained that education policy,

democracy, was now being made, top-down, by three powerful families:

Real political decisions were now being made by businessmen

“My Brother’s Keeper.” Friendly banks subject to government regulation (such as American Express) and foundations linked to military contractors (such as the Northrop Grumman Foundation) funded the program

The program was shrouded in a vagueness that was never dispelled—about whether it was designed to exclude whites, about whether it was a government program at all.

The administration used its ingenuity to fund programs without recourse to congressional appropriations.