The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

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President Obama’s policies were sometimes popular, sometimes not—but he often spoke as if the normal give-and-take of society’s democratic institutions were an obstacle to governing rightly.

Intellectuals and pundits egged him on. They recommended lines of policy that would only recently have been thought autocratic.

Nudge, which used behavioral economics to justify an activist state.

But Sunstein was leaving out the first and most important step. What is good for people, at least for free people, depends on their priorities. The question becomes empirical only once a priority has been set. The important political matter is who gets to set it. Thaler and Sunstein were disguising the arrogant project of setting priorities as a modest and commonsensical project of measuring outcomes. 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 as persons.

Democracy is the system in which the voice of the people is sovereign and beyond appeal. Nudge puts conditions on that sovereignty. In this sense its principles are those of civil rights law, in which the voice of the people is sovereign, once it has been cleared of the suspicion of bias.

Once bias is held to be part of the “unconscious,” of human nature, there are no areas of human life in which the state’s vigilance is not called for.

When gays began to sue over visitation and other matters, they discovered that judges looked more indulgently on their demands than the general public did.

gay marriage did carry a threat, because, as we have said, it overturned the understanding that marriage was something antecedent to government. On that antecedence rested the inviolability of marriages and families, the convention that what they did, how they built their little micro-community of love, was none of the government’s business. Overturning this understanding did not immediately damage any heterosexual marriages. But it diminished and threatened marriage as an institution.

The lawsuits out of which gay marriage law was built were almost never launched by couples who had just decided they were fed up and stormed into City Hall. They were carefully designed—one could say scripted—by tax-exempt foundations, public interest law firms, and Manhattan and Washington corporate lawyers working pro bono.

Were courts still really operating as courts when private parties could write the script the courts would follow?

Pipe dream though gay marriage had seemed at the turn of the century, unstable though its support appeared in opinion polls, it was now next to impossible to find a member of the so-called One Percent who had anything bad or even skeptical to say about it. There was an interlocking of directorates in journalism, the foundation world, the legal profession, and the bench.

Nationwide public opposition had never been a reason to give up. The reforms of the 1960s had created mechanisms for forcing social change even against the democratically expressed wishes of the electorate.

Americans had been told what to think by judges, bureaucrats, and journalists, and, rather than rebel against official presumption, most had seemed to conform to it,

In the 2008 presidential election, voters in 19 of the 20 richest zip codes in the country gave the bulk of their campaign contributions to Barack Obama, most of them by landslide margins.

At the same time, the internet was stripping the media industry of both geographical and ideological diversity,

90 percent of people working in the reconfigured news industry lived in a county that Democrats would win in the 2016 presidential election.

“A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers,” Scalia wrote, “does not deserve to be called a democracy.” He called the decision an upper-class “putsch,” noting that every single member of the Supreme Court had gone to either Harvard Law School or Yale Law School,

Barack Obama was the first president to understand civil rights law this way, as a de facto constitution by which the de jure constitution could be bypassed, and to lead the country on that new constitutional basis.

What was operating behind the scenes was, once more, civil rights. As enacted in 1964, civil rights had meant a partial repeal of the First Amendment. It had withdrawn the right to freedom of association long implicit in the freedom of assembly. But now, when authorities and judges hit difficulties or resistance in advancing civil rights, they were tempted to insist on ever-larger derogations of First Amendment rights, perhaps believing themselves to be working in the “spirit” of civil rights. Civil rights meant affirmative action. Civil rights meant political correctness. And in the wake of court-ordered gay marriage, it quickly became apparent that civil rights would mean court-ordered approval of gay marriage.

And now civil rights, like other constitutional traditions before it, was fated to see its protections, its prerogatives, and its logic claimed by people once excluded from it. Civil rights had been devised for blacks. But its remedies proved useful to a widening circle of groups that, at the time of its passage, had not seemed similarly ill treated: First immigrants. Then women. Then gays. Then, in the Hobby Lobby case that came before the Supreme Court in 2014, Christians.

it became clear that the members of any group that felt itself despised and degraded could defend its interests this way. Even whites.

The Tea Party movement emerged in Barack Obama’s first month in office. The Americans who belonged to it had come to believe that they had been hoodwinked out of their country. They never came to an explicit consensus on how or by whom. Sometimes their complaints concerned health care, sometimes states’ rights, sometimes political correctness. This was not, however, a reason to dismiss them.

It was a pessimistic philosophy, rooted in Patrick Buchanan’s Republican and Ross Perot’s third-party campaigns of 1992, both of them dissents from Reaganism.

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central was his diagnosis that the West’s democracies had already turned illiberal themselves, and the problem had begun with American-style doctrines about rights.

At some point in the half-century leading up to 2014, the United States had ceased to be a classic, open-ended democratic republic. It had taken on features of...

civil rights was well and securely anchored. It had won the loyalty of those it was intended to empower.

It reserved a special role for the country’s moneyed leadership class, too, providing a haven from unruly democracy that members of that class always seek.

Finally, civil rights, more than any American political movement since Prohibition, rested on a conception of evil. It had a moralistic, even a religious, component that was a powerful weapon for building esprit de corps among insiders and intimidating and shaming outsiders. Its promoters saw their foes as evil incarnate.

Americans who were not activists in this way had learned to duck and dissemble.

Democrats, by 84 to 12 percent, thought racism was a bigger problem than political correctness. Republicans, by 80 to 17 percent, thought political correctness was a bigger problem than racism. This polarization around civil rights resembled the polarization around slavery that emerged into public view only with the vote on the Wilmot Proviso in 1846. Similar questions of affiliation and identity were emerging.

Starting with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, whites were “racialized” in a way they never fully understood. They were the people whom American politics was not about. They were excluded—at least as claimants—under civil rights law. As civil rights spread to cover groups other than blacks, the term “people of color” marked whites off as the only people so excluded, and legitimized that exclusion. In this sense the United States had re-created the problem that it had passed the Civil Rights Act to resolve: It had two classes of citizens.

when race rather than citizenship becomes the structure through which people accede to their rights, one must have a race, willy-nilly. And under the law, whites were “raceless.” That was the civil rights project’s great Achilles’ heel. It eventually drove a critical mass of whites to conceive of themselves as a race, whether they wished to or not.

The immigration wave at the turn of the twenty-first century was different.

the migration really did change the country racially.

They were not a fillip to an advancing population but the replacement of a shriveling one.

continuing rise in life expectancy for all non-white groups and a sharp drop for whites,

By the time of the 2016 election, which it did much to decide, the opioid epidemic that had begun with OxyContin was killing not 1.5 or 2 but 20 Americans per 100,000. In New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania it was killing almost 40 per 100,000, and in West Virginia it was killing 50. Yet until the Republican candidate began to mention it, the airwaves were

The tepid response had to do with how drugs were tied up with race and class. Since to be alarmed about heroin was to be alarmed on behalf of poor white people, Americans were hesitant—perhaps “frightened” would be a better word—to be seen to take account of it.

between the previous economic peak, in November 2007, and the closing months of 2016, a period roughly coincident with the Obama administration.

had gained almost 10 million jobs over those years, while whites had lost 700,000.

Whites lived disproportionately in small towns and rural areas at a time when growth ...

A Tomorrow-Belongs-to-Me tone crept into many descriptions of American demographic change. The torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans, who had a message to convey to their elders. The message was: Die.

Far from suppressing the Southern obsession with race and “blood,” civil rights conveyed it to every nook and cranny of the country. The entire culture—all journalism, all art, all books—was suffused with it.

race was getting to be the sum total of what the country’s intellectual life was about.

One now got the impression that racism and sexism must be hiding everywhere. Rooting them out enlisted the zeal of citizens in a way that resembled the hard-line anti-communism of the 1950s, but on a far larger scale.

Unlike communism, which involved an actual organization with a membership list, racism had a flexible definition. Anyone might be accused of it.

The overestimation of black people’s part in contemporary society was extraordinary.

the average American believed 33 percent of Americans were black,