The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

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 French statesman Léon Gambetta had said. “Speak of it never.”) Polls and elections surely underestimated opposition to the broad changes of the last fifty years, but even so there were signs of how many Americans felt they had been made worse off. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey, 23 percent of those born in the Baby Boom generation and before believed America’s new diversity was a “change for the better”; 42 percent called it a “change for the worse.”