The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The reforms of the sixties, however, even the ones Americans loved best and came to draw part of their national identity from, came with costs that proved staggeringly high—in money, freedom, rights, and social stability. Those costs were spread most unevenly among social classes and generations. Many Americans were left worse off by the changes. Economic inequality reached levels not seen since the age of the nineteenth-century monopolists. The scope for action conferred on society’s leaders allowed elite power to multiply steadily and, we now see, dangerously, sweeping aside not just obstacles but also dissent.

The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible—and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out. Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave—it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation.

Today slavery is at the center of Americans’ official history, with race the central concept in the country’s official self-understanding. Never before the 1960s was this the case. For almost all of American history, racial conflict was understood as a set of episodes—some shameful, some glorious—set against a larger story about building a constitutional republic. After the 1960s, the constitutional republic was sometimes discussed as if it were a mere set of tools for resolving larger conflicts about race and human rights.

But that was not all it did. It also empowered the federal government to reform and abolish certain institutions that stood in the way of racial equality and to establish new ones. By expanding the federal Civil Rights Commission (Title V); by subjecting to bureaucratic scrutiny any company or institution that received government money (Title VI); by laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees; by creating

Civil rights transformed the country not just constitutionally but also culturally and demographically. In ways few people anticipated, it proved to be the mightiest instrument of domestic enforcement the country had ever seen. It can fairly be described as the largest undertaking of any kind in American history. Costing trillions upon trillions of dollars and spanning half a century, it rivals, in terms of energy invested, the peopling of the West, the building of transcontinental railways and highways, the maintenance of a Pax Americana for half a century after World War II, or, for that matter, any of the wars the country has fought, foreign or civil.

On top of those conflicts, the United States has had two massive domestic policy programs that mobilized public resources and sentiments so thoroughly that they were presented to the public as what the philosopher and psychologist William James called a “moral equivalent of war”: the War on Poverty

in the 1960s and the War on Drugs in the 1980s and ’90s. Both were mere battlefronts in a larger struggle over race relations. The reinterpretation of America’s entire history and purpose in light of its race probl...

What made the modern framers of civil rights different from the nineteenth-century ones was their conception of power and their genius for wielding it. They succeeded where their forebears had failed because they were confident in resorting to coercion, indifferent to imposing financial burdens on future generations, and willing to put existing constitutional freedoms at risk in order to secure new ones.

In an article published at the end of 1959, Harvard Law School professor Herbert Wechsler described Brown as “an opinion which is often read with less fidelity by those who praise it than by those by whom it is condemned”—the most circumlocutory way imaginable of saying that it was wrongly decided. Wechsler showed in devastating detail that Brown would have been impossible under any faithful reading of what the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment had meant by equality. He also argued that the Brown justices had blundered when they focused on equality in the first place. The “heart of the matter” with segregation was not equality but the conflicts it created with the implicit First Amendment right of freedom of association.

And once the Civil Rights Act introduced into the private sector this assumption that all separation was prima facie evidence of inequality, desegregation implied a revocation of the old freedom of association altogether. Just as assuming that two parallel lines can meet overturns much of Euclidean geometry, eliminating freedom of association from the U.S. Constitution changed everything.

Tempting though it might be to attack this discrimination at its root, the cure could wind up worse than the disease, Strauss warned: “The prohibition against every ‘discrimination’ would mean the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between the state and society, in a word, the destruction of liberal society.”

Crenshaw and her colleagues were right—that is indeed the most amazing thing about the civil rights revolution. Americans’ basically wrong assessment explains why problems emerged so soon after the passage of civil rights legislation. It may also explain why the legislation passed in the first place.

“The force of present-day Negro demands,” Glazer wrote, “is that the subcommunity, because it either protects privileges or creates inequality, has no right to exist.” Now government would set about destroying those subcommunities—eventually doing so in the name of “diversity,” although that is a story for another chapter.

The mostly Northern whites who legislated against Jim Crow saw themselves as making a grand and magnanimous gesture, cutting a heroic figure. They would affirm the moral principles on which the Constitution rested by extending its legal principles to a region where they had never really been applied. Black people, and the most zealous among the civil rights activists of all races, saw whites as having entered a guilty plea in the court of history, and thus as repudiating the moral posturing on which the good name and the good conscience of their constitutional republic had rested.

The civil rights movement was not precisely a movement of civil rights, in the sense of giving American blacks access to the ordinary rights of cives, or citizens. If it had been, the laws would not have required changing, only enforcing. Congress had thought in terms of citizenship when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. So had the Supreme Court when it tried the Civil Rights cases of 1883. The term “civil rights” survived even as the approach failed. What was being fought over in the 1960s was something different from civil rights. It was a conception of human rights that had arisen in the twentieth century.

Malcolm X urged sympathetic whites to turn the civil rights struggle into a struggle for human rights, which “opens the door for all of our brothers and sisters in Africa and Asia, who have their independence, to come to our rescue.”

Although many American whites did not realize it even many decades later, black civil rights leaders had turned down a different path. The problem was not just America’s exclusion of blacks. It was something deeper about American values.

Once its ostensible demands had been met, the civil rights movement did not disband. It grew. It turned into a lobby or political bloc seeking to remedy the problem according to what Freeman would call the victims’ view: “lack of jobs, lack of money, lack of housing.” The federal government made it a central part of its mission to procure those things for blacks. The results were disappointing on almost every front—naturally, since the country had never signed up for such a wide-ranging project.

York when black radicals bearing assault rifles rousted visiting parents out of bed on parents’ weekend in 1969 and demanded concessions from the university administration—which were granted, over the objections of the faculty. He left for the University of Toronto the following year. The indigestibility and the radicalism were two sides of the same coin, as Bloom saw it. “Cornell,” he wrote, “now had a large number of students who were manifestly unqualified and unprepared, and therefore it faced an inevitable choice: fail most of them or pass them without their having learned. . . . Black power, which hit the universities like a tidal wave at just that moment, provided a third way.”

One way to shelter one’s business from the government’s investigative zeal was to act in the spirit of voluntarism—to establish pre-emptively a government-approved affirmative action program, along lines laid out in Section 718 of the act. President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, promulgated in the same summer as the Voting Rights Act, had already required that any private company with at least 51 employees set up an affirmative action program if it was going to seek government contracts. There was nothing race-neutral about the system. In fact, the judges who interpreted it wound up explicitly repudiating race-neutral solutions.

Government could now disrupt and steer interactions that had been considered the private affairs of private citizens—their roles as businessmen or landlords or members of college admissions boards. It could interfere in matters of personal discretion. Yes, this was for a special purpose—to fight racism—but the Griggs decision made clear that the government was now authorized to act against racism even if there was no evidence of any racist intent. This was an opening to arbitrary power. And once arbitrary power is conferred, it matters little what it was conferred for.

Truth was among the first casualties of the affirmative action regime. At the simplest level the term “affirmative action” meant discarding prevailing notions of neutrality in order to redistribute educational and employment chances on the basis of race. The idea that it could be a permanent solution to the problem of racial prejudice required doublethink. “Affirmative action requires the use of race as a socially significant category of perception and representation,” as Kimberlé Crenshaw and her colleagues put it, “but the deepest elements of mainstream civil rights ideology had come to identify such race-consciousness as racism itself.” Just half a decade into the civil rights revolution, America had something it had never had at the federal level, something the overwhelming majority of its citizens would never have approved: an explicit system of racial preference.

Plainly the civil rights acts had wrought a change in the country’s constitutional culture. The innovations of the 1960s had given progressives control over the most important levers of government, control that would endure for as long as the public was afraid of being called racist. Not just excluded and exploited Southern blacks but all aggrieved minorities now sought to press their claims under this new model of progressive governance.

The new political style was not suited to every goal. It was designed for breaking traditional institutions, not building new ones. But it drove some observers to transports of speculation.

The civil rights movement was a template. The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life, starting with the roles of men and women.

The historian George Marsden recalled his 1950s childhood as a time when the United States “had been thrown into a position of world leadership.” “Thrown into”! Americans, like many victorious

peoples, mistook the fruits of conquest for the rewards of virtue. They repressed, for the most part, their memory of the Korean War, the deadly stalemate into which Truman had drawn them in 1950.

“Sexism,” Bird wrote, “is judging people by their sex where sex doesn’t matter.” It is an admirably simple definition, reminiscent of the definitions of racism that were current before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it reveals the perennial political difficulty of feminism, which is that sex often matters, and matters more than anything. It is fundamental in a way that race or class is not. Men don’t carry babies. Feminism had to contend not just against bigotry but also against nature.

People have always built their identities through choosing or, to use the old word, discriminating. On the one hand, feminism promised to give women access to the “higher” style of destiny-defining choices that men had seemed to monopolize, as heads of families and as swashbuckling soldiers, executives, and politicians. On the other hand, it threatened to drag both sexes down to a world in which petty, phony-baloney shopping decisions, carried out to the din of TV marketing pitches, were dressed up as matters of destiny and came to constitute the whole of one’s identity.

It was also a consequence. Workplace feminism exacerbated inequality. It increased the number of intra-class marriages, and it undermined the New Deal culture of the “family wage”—the common-sense assumption among Americans of all classes that a wage paid to a “working man” went to support his wife and children as well. In its imperfect way, the family wage had compensated the housewife for her unwaged work. Whether she got sufficient control over the part of the wage that she flat-out earned is a separate, intra-familial question and potentially a genuine feminist grievance. Still, at the time feminism arose, it wasn’t much of a grievance.

Feminism offered corporations an excuse (what the political philosopher Nancy Fraser called a “legitimation”) for breaking the implicit contract to pay any full-time worker a wage he could raise a family on.

By the time of Roe, half of the states with at least some abortion rights were south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The hope that traditional sexual morality could survive the introduction and destigmatization of abortion was a vain one. Abortion brought changes in morality because it suppressed certain basic anthropological conditions.

This reversal was a function of the new constitutional possibilities in the Civil Rights Act. The Democrats were the party of new, court-mandated rights—of all kinds. The habit spread to both parties—to Democrats earlier than to Republicans—of promoting judges not for their impartiality but for their political reliability, including on the federal appeals courts, which are the “farm system” of the Supreme Court. From time to time throughout American history, the Supreme Court had been threatened by those who would use it as a weapon of partisan politics—over-reaching decisions in the 1850s, court packing in the 1930s. But those pressures had been episodic. The pressure the Court faced after Roe was not. Within a decade-and-a-half, this small-looking problem would begin to erode the constitutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself, and the problem would turn critical in the following century.

There is a limit to how hard one can strain against a mythology. Sexuality, the font of human life, is fickle, mysterious, contingent. It is not always subject to will, to put it mildly, and sometimes seems to blow in like the weather. A mythology that moralizes sex may do something to shelter a delicate flame. It is hard to say exactly what, but there must be a reason that flourishing, fertile, creative societies tend to be conservative about sex.

The modern impulse to rationalize human relations undermined conservatism, and threatened to take the ground rules of sexual relations down with it. As early as the 1920s, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell had warned that the establishment of welfare states risked turning not just the economy but everything upside-down, because the state would replace the father as protector and provider. Breaking the traditional family structure might look rational, modern, and sensible.

The biggest ambition was to alter the U.S. Constitution itself. A proposed Equal Rights Amendment held, quite simply, that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Between 1972 and 1977, it was ratified by 35 of the 38 states necessary to amend the Constitution. Americans backed the ERA in polls, but their support was impressionistic and vague, broad but not deep. When state legislatures dragged their feet and five of them even rescinded their approval, no one particularly seemed to care. Despite a constitutionally dubious congressional extension of the term for ratification—from March 1979 to March 1982—the measure died.

The sudden collapse of support for the ERA shocked activists. Since the civil rights era, old understandings of the Constitution had seemed so antiquated and feeble that anyone speaking in the name of reform could knock them over with a breath. Now, it appeared, Americans didn’t want the Constitution tinkered with. They had found ways to resist. The ERA promised to feminize public space just as the civil rights acts had promised to desegregate it. People didn’t want that. As early as the spring of 1975, among those who blocked its passage, the reason most often cited was that “equal rights for women could eventually end up destroying the institution of marriage and family life.”

That same month, the Washington Post found that only 39 percent of Americans believed “our society discriminates against women.” Nonetheless, 58 percent favored giving them more rights. This was a common pattern with feminism, which looked in the light of certain polls like a solution in search of a problem.

The South Vietnamese government, by contrast, would have crumbled without U.S. support. Its troops were battle-shy, outnumbered, and outgunned by a domestic (i.e., South Vietnamese) guerrilla insurgency, the so-called Viet Cong, which drew on local discontent as well as imported materiel. Eighty percent of the 5 or 6 million tons of American bombs dropped in the war fell on the South, not the North. The United States, in fact, would drop more bombs on the territory of its putative ally than it had dropped on all its World War II enemies. And then it would go on to do something from which American culture has still not recovered: It would lose the war.

The historian Theodore Roszak, in works such as his 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture, described this way of thinking through oxymora like “mad rationality” and “lunatic realism.” Vietnam did not introduce such irrationality into American life. It exposed it. As the social critic Loren Baritz put it, “We are what went wrong in Vietnam.”

Johnson often claimed he feared Congress would use Vietnam as an excuse to underfund his Great Society programs. But he himself saw his two wars as complementary, not competitive. Since each took the same approach to an intractable reality, success in one was a warrant for success in the other. Johnson frequently described the war as a New Deal–style project and even launched a Mekong River Redevelopment Commission to industrialize, as far as possible, the vast, ramifying waterway that entered the South China Sea south of Saigon.

By the summer of 1966, it was evident that the two Johnson wars, on poverty and in Vietnam, were set to open up a vast deficit that would make inflation inevitable. Johnson, with his cabinet’s help, bought time with various accounting tricks and falsifications. A year later, McNamara, speaking privately to Tom Wicker of the New York Times, was unrepentant. “Do you really think,” McNamara asked, “that if I had estimated the cost of the war correctly, Congress would have given any more for schools and housing?” Such attitudes clarify the Vietnam War’s relation to the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s agenda. It was the war itself, and not the protests against it, that was the sister movement to the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society.

Those who were old enough (born in the late 1940s) and well connected enough (with an Ivy League education or the equivalent) would now take a grandiose role in national political life as tribunes of future generations. They would wag the American dog for the next half-century.

At Columbia University, SDS staged demonstrations against the building of a gymnasium in a nearby Harlem neighborhood. They morphed into larger protests against the Vietnam War and racial inequality, where police handled the kids roughly, too. “Part of the brutality,” wrote the historian Todd Gitlin, “. . . reflected a kind of class war SDS had not reckoned with: working-class cops’ resentment of the children of privilege.”

As civil rights had divided the country by region into those who were heroically fighting for equality and those who could justly be assigned to receive moral instruction, Vietnam did the same by class. The defenders of peace and justice were disproportionately to be found at rich men’s universities—and their innocence of military involvement would give them much more in common with those who came of age in the demilitarized decade or so that followed. The working class would wind up tainted by the popular culture’s portrayal of the military as burners of villages and marauders in free-fire zones. Who would hire such a person to run a corporate department? Who would elect such a person to Congress?

The novelist (later senator) James Webb wrote shortly after the war that America had shown itself “afraid to ask the men of Harvard to stand alongside the men of Harlem, same uniform, same obligation, same country.” Now young men who as grade-school students had gasped when they learned that the Northern rich had been able to pay substitutes to fight and die for them in the Civil War were themselves seeking to carve out, in the middle of the so-called century of the common man, a niche that was worthy for elites to live in.

corruption, it was not just the corporate world’s supermarkets and sitcoms and dandruff shampoos they resented. It was also Washington’s dams and highways, regulations and bureaucracy. Over time it would be Johnson’s Great Society, which expanded the welfare state to undreamed-of and undesired levels.

The Boomers’ demographic weight allowed them to seize control of, enforce, and re-orient the social transformation their elders had inaugurated. In a free-market democracy, population translates directly into political power, through votes. It translates indirectly into economic power, through market share. And it eventually translates into cultural power, because advertisers (and, less avowedly, artists) aim to titillate and flatter large audiences. From the get-go, no generation was more fussed over and pandered to.

Although the United States started from a much higher baseline than those other countries, its college enrollment more than quadrupled, too, from about 1.7 million in 1940 to 7.5 million at the end of the 1960s. Earlier generations would have wondered what kind of clean-hands work could be found for all those bookish people to do—and they would also have asked who would do the dirty work now that education had unsuited much of the population to it.