The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The prospects for government were, if anything, worse. It was not only that Richard Nixon had been forced from office in a scandal. The three great progressive endeavors of the preceding decades—civil rights, women’s liberation, the attempt to impose a liberal order on the world militarily—had all been resoundingly repudiated by the public. Post–Civil Rights Act, violent crime and drug abuse in inner cities were at record highs. Post–Ms. magazine, legislatures were rescinding the ERA ratifications they had only recently passed. Post–Vietnam War, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan and revolutionary governments came to power in Nicaragua and Iran.

The mood was one of nostalgia and failure. The American public had come to see the political project of the 1960s as dangerously utopian. They brought California governor Ronald Reagan to power to put an end to it. Instead, in ways that neither his supporters nor his detractors have ever fully understood, he rescued it.

Reaganism was a style of policy making, built out of Reagan’s own sunny Midwestern persona, that would protect the rich and narrow the scope of politics well into the twenty-first century.

The return of power to communities that Reagan promised never happened. On the contrary, the world that his supposedly conservative presidency left behind was more indulgent of the anti-conservative impulse to “cut the past away,” provided the cutting were done heedlessly by businessmen rather than purposefully by bureaucrats. American conservatism was something Reagan tapped rather than embodied. His version of it was oratorical, not constitutional. And conservatism’s lack of a worked-out constitutional dimension would create the crisis out of which, decades later, a harder-edged “Tea Party” populism grew.

Like Taft, Reagan changed the country’s political mood for a while, but left its structures untouched. Once he left office, Reagan’s adversaries and bogeymen recovered their ambitious projects from receivership. His supporters were left outside to warm themselves by the embers of Reaganite rhetoric. It was as if the conservative political wave of the late 1970s and early ’80s had never happened. Indeed, Reagan raises the perennial question of whether conservatism is possible at all in a political culture that has the “pursuit of happiness” written into its founding documents.

“The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called Moral Majority and sundry other TV religionists,” she said, pausing to acknowledge applause, “who are struggling, apparently with his approval, to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.”

In 1967, as governor of California, he signed the furthest-reaching liberalization of abortion in American history. In 1969 he introduced no-fault divorce statewide with his Family Law Act. By the time of his campaign for the presidency in 1980, it would have been fair to say Reagan had done more than any politician of either party to build up the institutions of post-feminist sexual liberation. Reagan’s stress on “family values”—a strange term that was being used twice as frequently by the end of his term as it had been at the beginning—disguised his acquiescence to modern ways. Values were presented as equivalent to institutions, but they were not.

Reagan’s libertarian vision had as much of Martin Luther King’s “dream” in it as it did of Ayn Rand’s capitalism. It was sunny and it was progressive. It assumed that an untrammeled thriving was possible, if only a few hardened sticks-in-the-mud and pessimists could be kept from undermining it. Skepticism was the equivalent of oppression. Bearers of bad news were indistinguishable from enemies of the people. This vision did not appeal to all minds, but it seemed to strike a chord in all hearts. That is why Reagan won every state but Minnesota when he ran for re-election in 1984.

The problem came from how he managed it. In social life, questioning limits means not bowing down to anything. In economics, questioning limits means not paying for anything. At first, the American Baby Boomers appeared to be doing with little effort what other generations had only managed to do by the sweat of their brow. But that was an illusion. What they were doing was using their generation’s voting power to arrogate future generations’ labor, and trading it to other nations and peoples for labor now. Reaganism meant Reaganomics. Reaganomics meant debt.

Reagan’s economic advisors claimed to be skeptical of the “Keynesian” framework of economic policy that governments had been pursuing since Roosevelt’s New Deal. Under that earlier dispensation, Washington had fought unemployment by spending money on roads, dams, and other infrastructure programs, and in so doing had rescued the country from the Great Depression, or so the country believed. Lyndon Johnson thought the welfare programs he launched in the 1960s were in the spirit of Roo- sevelt’s dam-building and road-building and mural-painting. They would pump money into the economy just as effectively, and stimulate things.

Keynesian economists had believed that higher taxes could make the economy not only fairer but also more efficient. Rich people tended to sock their money away as savings. A progressive government could dislodge it via taxes and invest it in big projects, pumping up demand as it did. But this argument became harder to defend after FDR’s infrastructural state gave way to LBJ’s welfare state. “Supply-side” economists now argued, with considerable cogency, that when government collected too much from “the rich,” potentially productive concentrations of investment capital were eroded, and spooned back into society in bites of welfare too small to be used for anything but immediate consumption.

The “Laffer Curve” was not terribly rigorous. Its origins in a restaurant rather than a classroom are evident from the napkin itself, which is now in the possession of the National Museum of American History. It shows the independent variable—the tax rate—on the y, not the x, axis, as would be normal in academic economics. But if it was even remotely plausible that tax cuts might unleash enough economic activity to “pay for themselves,” then Laffer had discovered the political equivalent of a magic lamp.

With the toastmaster’s language that was his trademark, he argued in 1976 that Republicans kept losing elections because Democrats forced them to “embrace the role of Scrooge,” while Democrats played the role of Santa Claus. “The first rule of successful politics,” he wrote, “is Never Shoot Santa Claus.” Democrats had claimed an identity as the party that generously offered benefits and security, leaving Republicans the responsibility of announcing which taxes they would raise to keep the budget balanced. Wanniski was alerting Republicans who stood behind the Reagan revolution that they could play this trick in reverse. They could bring the good news of tax cuts and let Democrats scramble to announce what services they planned to trim. His article was widely read on Capitol Hill.

Reagan’s tax cuts never forced Congress to balance the budget. The supply-side windfall never happened, either. By the autumn of Reagan’s first year in office, it was evident the government was growing apace, and the deficit along with it. “We cut the government’s rate of growth nearly in half,” he told Congress, but it was a weak boast—for it was the size of government, not the velocity of its growth, that he had promised to reduce. Government would continue to grow by 2.5 percent a year throughout his administration.

demand-side stimulus of his predecessors, Reagan wound up presiding over nearly a decade of full-throttle stimulus himself, along with the overheated private-sector economy and large annual deficits that are its hallmark.

Today Reagan’s defenders credit him with having prepared the country for the competitive conditions of the global economy. He did, but that was no part of his vision. A former spokesman for General Electric, Reagan did not win two elections by promising to close more plants, outsource more jobs, and lay off more industrial workers. The Reagan administration, according to his aide William A. Niskanen, erected “more trade barriers than any administration since Hoover.” Reagan’s critics, for their part, saw a redistribution from the poor to the rich. That may have been a long-term consequence, but at first the transfer was not from one social class to another but from one government program to another. The transfers went, according to Niskanen, “from discretionary domestic spending to defense, entitlements and interest payments.” Reagan took money from bridge building, park tidying, and arts funding and used it to pay for a military buildup and the very Great Society programs he had come to office promising to dismantle. That required borrowing.

The borrowing power of the Baby Boom generation was invested in avoiding the choices that the confrontations of the 1960s had placed before the country. What the debt paid for was social peace, which had come to be understood as synonymous with the various Great Society programs launched by Lyndon Johnson in the two years after the Kennedy assassination. We should understand the Great Society as the institutional form into which the civil rights impulse hardened, a transfer from whites to blacks of the resources necessary to make desegregation viable. Desegregation was, as we have said, the most massive undertaking of any kind in the history of the United States. Like any massive undertaking, it required endurance, patience, and prohibitive expense. Almost everyone who did not benefit from it was going to be made poorer by it. Now it was being presented to the public as the merest down payment on what Americans owed.

In retrospect, we can see that by acquiescing in the ouster of Nixon after the previous landslide, those who voted for him had lost their chance to moderate the pace of that change. With the impeachment of Nixon, promoters of the Great Society had bought the time necessary to defend it against “backlash,” as democratic opposition to social change was coming to be called. In the near-decade that elapsed between Nixon and Reagan, entire subpopulations had become dependent on the Great Society. Those programs were now too big to fail.

They were, as we have said, gigantic. Once debt was used as a means to keep the social peace, it would quickly run into the trillions. One of Johnson’s lower-profile initiatives from 1965, the Higher Education Act, created the so-called Pell Grants to help “underprivileged” youth go to college. Their cost had risen to $7 billion by the time Reagan came to Washington. Although their effectiveness was disputed, there was an iron coalition of educational administrators and student advocates behind them. So Reagan didn’t touch them. They would swell to $39 billion by 2010. And they were not the whole story of federal support for education. According to one sympathetic account, federal grants and loans to college students, adjusted for inflation, were $800 million in 1963–64, $15 billion in 1973–74, and $157 billion in 2010–11.

the largest collector of Pell Grant tuition would be the University of Phoenix, a nationwide open-enrollment “university” founded in 1976. Its students owed $35 billion in taxpayer-backed federal loans. Their default rate was higher than their graduation rate. More and more the vaunted Reaganite “private sector” was coming to operate this way. It was a catchment area set up to receive government funds—usually by someone well enough connected to know before the public did how and where government funds would be directed.

Reagan stinted on none of the resources required to construct Johnson’s new order. Having promised for years that he would undo affirmative action “with the stroke of a pen,” lop the payments that LBJ’s Great Society lavished on “welfare queens,” and abolish Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education, he discovered, once he became president, that to do any of those things would have struck at the very foundations of desegregation. So he didn’t—although Democrats and Republicans managed to agitate and inspire their voting and fundraising bases for decades by pretending he had. Meanwhile, his tax cuts provided a golden parachute for the white middle class, allowing it, for one deluded generation, to re-create with private resources a Potemkin version of the old order.

Those losing out had to be compensated. Consider affirmative action—unconstitutional under the traditional order, compulsory under the new—which exacted a steep price from white incumbents in the jobs they held, in the prospects of career advancement for their children, in their status as citizens. Such a program could be made palatable to white voters only if they could be offered compensating advantages. A government that was going to make an overwhelming majority of voters pay the cost of affirmative action had to keep unemployment low, home values rising, and living standards high. Reaganomics was just a name for governing under a merciless contradiction that no o...

Ronald Reagan saved the Great Society in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt is credited by his admirers with having “saved capitalism.” That is, he tamed some of its very worst excesses and found the resources to protect his own angry voters from consequences they would otherwise have found intolerable. That is what the tax cuts were for. Each of the two sides that emerged from the battles of the 1960s could comport itself as if it had won. There was no need to raise the taxes of a suburban entrepreneur in order to hire more civil rights enforcement officers at the Department of Education. There was no need to lease out oil-drilling rights in a national park in order to pay for an aircraft carrier. Failing to win a consensus for the revolutions of the 1960s, Washington instead bought off through tax cuts those who stood to lose from them. Americans would delude themselves for decades that there was something natural about this arrangement. It was an age of entitlement.

These liabilities are difficult to quantify. Mass immigration can help a confident, growing society undertake large projects—the settlement of the Great Plains, for instance, or the industrialization of America’s cities after the Civil War. But for a mature, settled society, mass immigration can be a poor choice, to the extent that it is a choice at all. Reagan was tasked by voters with undoing those post-1960s changes deemed unsustainable. Mass immigration was one of them, and it stands perhaps as his emblematic failure. Reagan flung open the gates to immigration while stirringly proclaiming a determination to slam them shut. Almost all of Reaganism was like that.

Once the bill passed, Johnson summoned the Congress to a signing ceremony hundreds of miles away at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, an extravaganza at odds with his soft-pedaling of its importance. “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” he said. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.” He did protest too much. The Hart-Celler bill would alter the demography of the United States. It would also alter the country’s culture, committing the government to cut the link that had made Americans think of themselves for three centuries as, basically, a nation of transplanted Europeans.

“The American Nation returns to the finest of its traditions today,” Johnson said. “The days of unlimited immigration are past.” In fact, those days were past only because of the restrictive laws of 1924—which Johnson was now striking from the books. Johnson’s new attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, shared the president’s naïveté. Katzenbach had claimed, more likely from innumeracy than from any intent to deceive, that the new kind of migration would account for precisely “two one-hundredths of one percent” of future population growth. “Without injury or cost,” he proclaimed, “we can now infuse justice into our immigration policy.”

There was something disquieting about this level of intrusion into the decisions of business owners, even if it had precedents in the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration and in the Civil Rights Act, particularly in affirmative action, which had by then been up and running for more than a decade. That turned out to be the core of the problem. The parts of the law that encouraged immigration—the amnesty, the processing of working papers—were unpopular, but their introduction went smoothly. They were real. The parts that retarded immigration—the border controls, the employer sanctions—were popular, but they proved impossible to enforce. They were fake. Opponents of mass immigration were inclined to see IRCA as an outright fraud perpetrated on the public. The truth was more complicated. It had to do with a change in the country’s constitutional culture.

In late amendments, the 1986 IRCA bill was filled with language stressing that an employer could be held liable for discriminating on account of national origin. This looked like window dressing, but in the new, post–Civil Rights Act judicial climate, it became the heart of the bill. It turned inside-out the penalties against employers for hiring illegal immigrants. However harsh the “employer sanctions” had originally looked on paper, they required employers to act in ways that civil rights law forbade. An American boss now had more to fear from obeying the immigration law than from flouting it. An INS official sent in 1987 to investigate a factory on Long Island suspected of using illegal labor stressed that he was there “to explain the new immigration law’s provisions on employer sanctions, ‘not enforce them.’ ” As housing secretary three years later, Jack Kemp sought a waiver that would permit the city of Costa Mesa, California, to offer welfare benefits to the newly arrived, circumventing a legal ban.

In policy terms IRCA is usually described as a mix of successes and failures. In constitutional terms it was a calamity. Presented as a means of getting immigration under control, IRCA wound up mixing explicit incentives to immigrate (via amnesty) with implicit ones (via anti-discrimination law). It provided courts and federal civil rights agencies—both of them staffed with law school graduates and other highly credentialed professionals at the very apex of the American social pyramid—with new grounds for overruling and overriding legislatures and voters on any question that could be cast as a matter of discrimination. That was coming to mean all questions. Every law was turning into an expansion of civil rights law.

In a 1994 referendum, 5 million Californians sought to deny welfare benefits to illegal immigrants, giving the state’s Proposition 187 an 18-point landslide at the polls. But district court judge Mariana Pfaelzer decided they were wrong—on the grounds that limiting state welfare payments amounted to setting immigration policy, which was a ...

But even when it was working best, immigration introduced tensions into the system being built up around civil rights. For one, the success of new immigrants, Nathan Glazer noted, provoked “unspoken (and sometimes spoken) criticism” of blacks for their relative slowness to rise. For another, the new migrants were being shepherded into the civil rights system as potential victims of discrimination, not as potential perpetrators of it. Illegal immigrants were attractive to employers because they had fewer rights in the workplace. They were unattractive to the general public because they had more rights in the courtroom. Immigrants’ American-born children would have not only citizenship but also privileges that white natives’ children lacked. They would be “people of color.”

“People of color” was a harbinger of what later came to be called “intersectionality,” a philosophical-sounding term for the political strategy of bundling different minorities into a coalition. Almost everyone other than white heterosexual males could benefit in some way from civil rights laws. Vast, hitherto unenvisioned coalitions, perhaps even electoral majorities, could be formed by rallying other non-white groups.

But although no one had voted to make it so, the social changes of Reagan’s late 1980s were all suddenly going with the grain of the Johnson revolution. The waning of a conservative quarter-century was clear by 1987, when the newly arrived Democratic majority in the Senate rejected the Yale Law School professor Robert Bork, a towering figure in American legal philosophy, for a seat on the Supreme Court.

While Kennedy’s oratory still has the whiff of sulfur about it, it is clear in retrospect that he understood the stakes of the Bork nomination better than his more moderate Senate colleagues did. The Supreme Court would now be fought over with the same rancor and no-holds-barred partisanship that once marked democratic politics, because, since the legislative revolution of 1965, the courts and the bureaucracy had replaced democratic politics.

In 1995, the economist George Borjas, writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, modeled the actual effects of immigration on Americans. He found that while immigration might have caused an increase in economic activity of $2.1 trillion, virtually all of those gains—98 percent—went to the immigrants themselves. When economists talk about “gains” from immigration to the receiving country, they are talking about the remaining 2 percent—about $50 billion. This $50 billion “surplus” disguises an extraordinary transfer of income and wealth: Native capitalists gain $566 billion. Native workers lose $516 billion.

But Republicans argued that private business, alas, could not afford them, and by the 1980s they had won the argument. Immigration, like outsourcing and tighter regulation of unions, allowed employers to pay less for many kinds of labor. But immigrants came with other huge costs: new schools, new roads, translation (formal and informal), and health care for those who could not afford it. Those externalities were absorbed by the public, not the businessmen who benefited from immigration.

If we were judging open immigration and outsourcing not as economic policies but as U.S. aid programs for the world’s poor, we might consider them successes. But we are not. The cultural change, the race-based constitutional demotion of natives relative to newcomers, the weakening democratic grip of the public on its government as power disappeared into back rooms and courtrooms, the staggeringly large redistributions of wealth—all these things ensured that immigration would poison American politics right down until the presidential election of 2016.

It is common to lament that no means has been found to restore American laborers to the advantageous position they occupied in the 1960s. But talking workers into surrendering the advantageous redoubts they once occupied was the whole point of post-1960s economic reforms, at least for politicians, the businessmen who funded them, and the economists who advised them. Working-class prerogatives constrained innovation, it was held. They were also incompatible with government efforts to use civil rights law to reshape the labor market from above.

This was not the glorious role white Americans had envisioned for themselves when they came bearing what they saw as the gift of civil rights in 1964. And to look at the evidence from the Bakke opinion, the case that they were systematically denying opportunities to black people seemed weak. A white man rejected with scores in the 97th percentile while minorities got admitted with scores in the 18th! The range of things that had to be explained away was broadening considerably. It would have been futile to admit blacks to college, and to prestigious jobs, on easier terms than whites if people were free to say that, for instance, the degree of a black woman admitted to Princeton in the Bakke era did not measure the same things as the degrees of her white classmates, impressive though that woman might be on her own terms. Or if people were free to ask why it was that immigrants who had spent their early-childhood years hunted by the Khmer Rouge were outperforming American blacks in schools.

If people were permitted to take positions like Glazer’s, to argue that any part of the difference in outcomes between the races was attributable to anything other than racism, the entire logic of civil rights law would break down. So now the government got into the business of promulgating attitudes about race.

Now, though, it was a different world. Immigration was beginning to create a country with several races, not two. King’s vision of desegregation had been one in which his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” The institutions of desegregation set up by the courts rejected that approach. They took account of race as never before.

People whose contentment has been disturbed are not usually grateful. For many white Americans, particularly outside the South, the King holiday did the opposite of what Eckstein said it would. It marked not the end but the beginning of shame, of an official culture that cast their country’s history as one of oppression, and its ideals of liberty as hypocrisies. The official understanding of the American race problem now came to resemble in almost every particular the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) through which Germans had for decades been confronting their responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust.

Discouraging or disciplining racist attitudes was no longer enough—it had become necessary to destroy the life and livelihood of anyone even suspected of harboring them.

It was an institutional innovation. It grew directly out of civil rights law. Just as affirmative action in universities and corporations had privatized the enforcement of integration, the fear of litigation privatized the suppression of disagreement, or even of speculation. The government would not need to punish directly the people who dissented from its doctrines. Boards of directors and boards of trustees, fearing lawsuits, would do that.

Because there was no statutory “smoking gun” behind it, this new system of censorship was easily mistaken for a change in the public mood, although it remained a mystery how a mood so minoritarian could be so authoritative. The system itself came to be called political correctness.

Never did a movement seem more assured of history’s derision. Political correctness, or P.C., as it was called by everyone except its adherents, was a grab bag of political stances descended from queer theory, critical race theory, critical legal studies, post-colonial studies, and various other new academic schools of thought. It aimed at the redesign of institutions and philosophies so that they might recognize, accept, vindicate, validate, and console groups deemed disadvantaged: blacks, women, gays, immigrants. The intellectual signature of P.C., wherever it appeared, was an unwillingness to distinguish between institutions (which could be oppressive) and opinions (which could only be misguided).

We have discussed this before: The goal of the civil rights laws, at least as they were understood by a sentimental public, was to short-circuit the sham democracies of the American South, to bring them into conformity with the Constitution. But it turned out to be harder than anticipated to distinguish between the South’s democracy and everybody else’s. If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, the letter of the law put the entire country—all its institutions—under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination.

At a time when people were still naming airports after Ronald Reagan, few thinkers understood how tenacious identity politics had become. But the writer Paul Berman did. He made the bold suggestion in A Tale of Two Utopias that Western progressives not only had not gone down with the communist ship—they had emerged from the Cold War triumphant and even strengthened.

Political correctness was not a joke after all. It was the most comprehensive ideological capture of institutional power in the history of the United States.

Now, in fact, it was possible for people who had wanted a different racial or sexual order to demand it of the American system without incurring the suspicion that they were working against the country’s national security. To blacks and women, immigrants and gays, it was exhilarating. This minority coalition, pursuing a more or less unpopular set of programs, racked up victories as if it were a righteous majoritarian crusade. In the course of it, these minorities discovered, perhaps to their own surprise, that civil rights law gave them an iron grip on the levers of state power.