The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

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. He mused aloud about bypassing Congress on controversial matters, especially guns, and then did so. He ruled by executive order, delaying by fiat the implementation of his signature Affordable Care Act. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that he established in 2010 drew its funding from the semi-independent Federal Reserve, not from Congress. Obama appointed the CFPB’s first director, Richard Cordray, through a recess appointment, bypassing Congress in that way, too. He sought to regularize the status of millions of illegal immigrants using his war-making authority, a move for which his defenders claimed the Emancipation Proclamation as a precedent.