The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

between 23 and 25 percent gay, bisexual, or transgender—about

prohibitions against saying “the N-word,” as it came to be called, were applied with deadly earnest.

The word, which had once frightened black people, was now used primarily to frighten white people.

The development of two separate language codes, one for whites and one for blacks, was ominous. The rules of American public decorum now resembled medieval strictures that permitted only noblemen to carry weapons or ride horses, or laws that forbade certain classes of citizens to address others by a certain name.

The expression “white supremacy” underwent a similarly paradoxical boom: The less it existed, the more it was invoked. By the turn of the century it was being used more frequently than it ever had been in American history.

“Margaret Jones” was the invented identity of a 33-year-old, white, middle-class suburbanite named Margaret Seltzer,

The reaction was pitiless.

Seltzer had done something terrible: Belonging to a racial minority conferred moral authority that no one must be allowed to counterfeit or compromise.

She was doing the same thing that immigrants had done a century before when they changed their names from Svensson to Swanson or from Bellini to Bell. She was bartering away a bit of her identity in exchange for moral authority and belonging. She was concealing, as best she could, her membership in a low-prestige ethnic group in order that she might participate in the national conversation on a firmer footing.

Rachel Dolezal, was revealed by her fundamentalist Christian parents to be white—Czech,

she was both disciplined and publicly shamed. She lost her job

In the prevailing culture, whiteness was a lower spiritual state, associated with moral unfitness and shame, and it was hereditary. Whiteness was a “bloody heirloom,” as Coates wrote.

It turns out to be a difficult and unnatural thing to replace a system of prejudice with a system of real equality and respect. It’s a lot to ask of people. As Friedrich Nietzsche understood, it is far easier, for both former perpetrators and former victims alike, simply to transvalue the prejudices—so you wind up with the old world turned upside down.

The Rodney King riots were the first act of domestic unrest that influential observers described not as a riot but as a rebellion. One man’s hoodlum was another man’s freedom fighter.

The murder trial of O. J. Simpson in 1995 hardened this division.

Now the disproportionate incidence of black arrests was taken, in some quarters, as prima facie evidence of white racism.

On detail after detail, in multiple interrogations, Wilson’s account matched that of the material evidence. A mythological account spread nonetheless.

The country’s official culture was now squarely on the side of the protests, even if any neutral reading of the evidence showed that Brown’s killer, Wilson, should have gone unpunished.

The very name Black Lives Matter, once it changed from a hashtag to a political movement, implied that there was a group of people in American society who did not believe in the right to life of a significant part of the population.

But why were they getting to a boiling point now? It was improbable that police departments would be turning into nests of white vigilantism at a juncture when all the urban ones had been integrated, when blacks were (measured by population percentages) over-represented in some of them, including that of Washington, D.C., and when police officers of all races were being more closely surveilled.

Black Lives Matter had some of the traits of an official protest movement. The White House would serve as an activist clearinghouse

Black Lives Matter was building bridges to a variety of other groups—but they were almost exclusively the communities that made up the Democratic party’s electoral and fundraising base.

Black Lives Matter reconnected to certain realities of the 1960s civil rights movement that had been buried under official celebrations of the movement as pacifistic, harmonious, and Christian.

great, almost unanimous misunderstanding about the reforms of the 1960s. White Americans wanted to believe that the new constitution tended toward race-neutrality and toward freedom, just as the old one had. To the contrary, as those who administered it understood almost immediately, it tended toward race-consciousness and government direction. But the ideal of colorblindness was tenacious. So stirring were its resonances with the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, so necessary had it been to public acceptance of civil rights in the first place, that it became a sort of official fiction.

an often repeated paradox of civil rights: The faster racism and privilege are dismantled, the greater the psychological need to point to racism and privilege.

The events at Yale were another sign that the great constitutional innovation of the civil rights era—the proxy exercise by private institutions of governmental power—had turned into a formidable instrument of discipline. On American and British campuses, so-called no-platforming—the move to “deny fascists, organized racists and other haters the freedom to spread their poison”—was on the rise.

Americans were certainly content with the achievements of civil rights. What it promised and delivered—a rough kind of racial equality in the states that had lacked it—was an extraordinary achievement. There were unexpected collateral blessings, too, beyond a freer life for many blacks: the lifting of a burden of guilt from certain whites, scope for working women, a less anguished life for gays. What the reforms aspired and failed to do—produce “harmony” between the races or peace between the sexes—may have been beyond the power of any government reform to achieve.

But the costs of civil rights were high. New inequalities arose. Fewer things were decided democratically. Free speech was suppressed. By the election year of 2016, Americans would be so scared to speak their mind on matters even tangential to civil rights that their political mood was essentially unreadable.

Americans’ grievances against diversity were now bottled up, in a way that was reminiscent of French people’s late-nineteenth-century obsession with reconquering Alsace and Lorraine. (“Think of it always,” the nineteenth-century ...

American politics had re-sorted itself around that question—which came down to the question of whether one had benefited from or lost by the transfers of rights, goods, and privileges carried out under the new constitutional dispensation that began in 1964. The Democrats were the party of those who benefited:

not just racial minorities but sexual minorities, immigrants, women, government employees, lawyers—and all people sophisticated enough to be in a position to design, run, or analyze new systems. This collection of minorities could, with discipline, be bundled into an electoral majority, but that was not, strictly speaking, necessary. The hierarchies of government, the judiciary, and the corporate world were Democratic in their orientations. Sympathetic regulators, judges, and attorneys took up the task of transferring as many prerogatives as possible from the majority to various minorities.

Once the heavily Democratic universities, and the nonprofit sector more broadly, began to drive the economy and the culture and to command the only remaining large pool of secure, high-paying jobs, the drift toward the new, minoritarian constitution gathered momentum, even when the Democrats were out of power.

Isolated from the innovative, well-connected, and savvy populations of the top universities, Republicans, even when they were in an electoral majority, lost their ability to influence the system. It was only a matter of time before they lost their ability even to understand the logic of it.

Those who lost most from the new rights-based politics were white men. The laws of the 1960s may not have been designed explicitly to harm them, but they were gradually altered to...

Whites suffered because they occupied this uniquely disadvantaged status under the civil rights laws, because their strongest asset in the constitutional system—their overwhelming preponderance in the electorate—was slowly shrinking, because their electoral victories could be overruled in courtrooms and by regulatory boards where necessary, and because the moral narrative of civil rights required that they be cast as the villains of their country’s history. They fell asleep thinking of themselves as...

Barack Obama described highly specific political opinions, always those of his own party, as expressing “who we are” as Americans. Not since the McCarthy era had Americans been told that to disagree with the authorities was to forfeit one’s membership in the American nation. Obama always seemed to enjoy playing with fire that way.

There are, however, great problems with shame as a means of governing. For one thing, opposition does not disappear but only becomes unspeakable, making the public even less knowable to its rulers. For another, shame as a government weapon works only on people capable of feeling shame. It thus purges high-minded people from the opposition and ensures that, when the now-mysterious public does throw up an opposition, it will be led by shameless people and take a shameless form.

Civil rights never became self-regenerating as the Americans of 1964 had hoped it would. The legitimacy of civil rights legislation rested on the belief that it would be a transitional measure, leading to a stable, racially mixed society. Professing to oppose racial distinctions in the South, while introducing them on a nationwide basis via affirmative action and other programs, would have been illogical, hypocritical, and unjust if done on a permanent basis.

Permanent, though, is what they became. In a world in which no one was able to say what he really thought, American politics turned into a bizarre tacit bargain, like an embarrassing family secret kept among 300 million people. White people were supposed to console themselves that their superior economic standing somehow “compensated” them for their inferior status as citizens. As their economic standing eroded, though, the consolation rang hollow and the compromise grew unstable.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was, as we have noted, a legislative repeal of the First Amendment’s implied right to freedom of association. Over decades it polarized the political parties and turned them into something like secret societies, each of them loyal to a different constitutional understanding.

Democrats, loyal to the post-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that they owed their ascendancy to a rollback of the basic constitutional freedoms Americans cherished most. Republicans, loyal to the pre-1964 constitution, 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. The combination was a ...

The stifling of public discussion could calm things for only so long. The system required more than the majority’s silence; i...

Civil rights has always been what William James called a “moral equivalent of war,” to return to a phrase we used earlier. At its outset in the 1960s, middle-class Americans were prosperous, exuberant, enraged at the death of their president, and certain they had the resources to wage such a war. They were wrong about that.

Ronald Reagan,

merely averted the social confrontation to which events had been building in the 1970s by devising a new system for financing those projects. That is what today’s national debt is.

The financial collapse of 2008 was a sign that the government had exhausted the resources of the not-yet-born and would now need to tap the resources of the living. Whether it could manage this was impossible to say. Meanwhile, the country’s economic and political leaders were more isolated from ordinary citizens than they had been for more than a century. The American people were a closed book to them.