The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

If you looked at marriage the way the Goodridge case had, as a government program that is either fair or unfair, this was the sort of clear-cut injustice that could doom DOMA as unconstitutional. As Windsor’s lawyer put it, “If Thea had been ‘Theo,’ Edie would never have had to pay a penny of estate tax.”

While it used a rhetoric of exclusion traditionally deployed by downtrodden ethnic minorities, gay marriage was also the single cause that most united the richest and best-connected people on the planet. It united them politically more than either tax rates or financial regulation did.

Certainly, the question was worded in such a way as to disengage Americans’ moral sentiments about the reform. It assumed the legality of gay marriage rather than inquiring about it, in such a way as to add to the “pro” column those who disapproved on principle of breaking the law. (“Do you think marriages between same-sex couples should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?”) Still it measured something.

The new “capitalist” elite encouraged by Reagan had not overthrown the old statist elite he wrongly thought he was fighting; it had merged with it, multiplying the power of both. The Democrats were the party of these people, too. In the 2008 presidential election, voters in 19 of the 20 richest zip codes in the country gave the bulk of their campaign contributions to Barack Obama, most of them by landslide margins.

Media jobs in the old days had been spread nationwide and linked to the political cultures of their diverse readerships. “The Sioux Falls Argus Leader is stuck in South Dakota just as the owners of hydroelectric plants in the Rockies are stuck where they are,” Shafer and Doherty pointed out. But three quarters (73 percent) of twenty-first-century internet media jobs were either in the northeast corridor, on the West Coast, or in Chicago. Those places were rich and overwhelmingly Democratic: 90 percent of people working in the reconfigured news industry lived in a county that Democrats would win in the 2016 presidential election. Only rarely now did people at the top of society meet people who disagreed with them.

Supporters of gay marriage often viewed those who disagreed with them as corrupt and vicious. For Kaplan, DOMA was simply an “odious law.” Morally speaking, this was not an open-ended debate but the orderly and inevitable procession toward an already known civil rights “truth,” the only question being whether justices and activists, working together, should occasionally slow the pace of reform in order to avoid provoking a democratic “backlash.”

The unanimity of the One Percent meant that the main controversies surrounding gay marriage could be swatted away “blithely,” as the late Massachusetts justice Martha Sosman had seen early on, warning in her eloquent dissent in Goodridge that “this proffered change affects . . . a load-bearing wall of our social structure.” That was still true when Anthony Kennedy’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) made gay marriage the law of the land. Antonin Scalia’s dissent focused a bit on the inconsistencies in Kennedy’s reasoning: Whereas in Windsor Kennedy had invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act on the grounds that “the Federal Government, through our history, has deferred to state-law policy decisions with respect to domestic relations,” in Obergefell he had imposed a federal standard of marriage on all the states. But that was a decidedly minor aspect of Scalia’s dissent. More significant was his attack on the decision as undemocratic. Here, for the first time in a systematic way, emerged the critique that an elite had hijacked the language of civil rights and used it to alter the country in its essence. “A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers,” Scalia wrote, “does not deserve to be called a democracy.” He called the decision an upper-class “putsch,” noting that every single member of the Supreme Court had gone to either Harvard Law School or Yale Law School,

While asserting that gay marriage was gaining in popularity, Kennedy explicitly repudiated certain conceptions of democracy that had until recently been sacrosanct. “It is of no moment whether advocates of same-sex marriage now enjoy or lack momentum in the democratic process,” he wrote. Unless someone was expecting the Court to apologize for Brown v. Board of Education, this thwarting of majority rule in the name of civil rights was what the Supreme Court was for. Kennedy used the language of an affirmative action case, Schuette v. BAMN [By Any Means Necessary] (2014),

to assert “the right of the individual not to be injured by the unlawful exercise of governmental power.”

Again, for Kennedy and those who thought like him, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had not enhanced the Constitution as it had once been understood but had replaced it. This was turning into a constitutional problem of the profoundest kind.

Barack Obama was the first president to understand civil rights law this way, as a de facto constitution by which the de jure constitution could be bypassed, and to lead the country on that new constitutional basis. His second inaugural address in 2012, an explicitly Constitution-focused address in which he repeated “We the People . . . ,” honored “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” (i.e., women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights) as the great constitutional achievements of modern times, and extra-parliamentary protest and Supreme Court jurisprudence as the high roads that led there.

That standard of accountability would have made no sense unless there had been some real political system operating behind the scenes, while the fake one was being rattled around as a distraction in front of the public.

What was operating behind the scenes was, once more, civil rights. As enacted in 1964, civil rights had meant a partial repeal of the First Amendment. It had withdrawn the right to freedom of association long implicit in the freedom of assembly. But now, when authorities and judges hit difficulties or resistance in advancing civil rights, they were tempted to insist on ever-larger derogations of First Amendment rights, perhaps believing themselves to be working in the “spirit” of civil rights. Civil rights meant affirmative action. Civil rights meant political correctness. And in the wake of court-ordered gay

marriage, it quickly became apparent that civil rights would mean court-ordered a...

Civil rights had been devised for blacks. But its remedies proved useful to a widening circle of groups that, at the time of its passage, had not seemed similarly ill treated: First immigrants. Then women. Then gays. Then, in the Hobby Lobby case that came before the Supreme Court in 2014, Christians.

At some point in the half-century leading up to 2014, the United States had ceased to be a classic, open-ended democratic republic. It had taken on features of a “managed democracy” along European lines.

Blacks voted almost unanimously for the party of civil rights, giving Democrats 90, 88, 95, and 93 percent of their votes in presidential elections after 2000. The civil rights regime could also claim the overwhelming loyalty of other minorities, those non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual groups to which it had been extended. It reserved a special role for the country’s moneyed leadership class, too, providing a haven from unruly democracy that members of that class always seek. Finally, civil rights, more than any American political movement since Prohibition, rested on a conception of evil. It had a moralistic, even a religious, component that was a powerful weapon for building esprit de corps among insiders and intimidating and shaming outsiders. Its promoters saw their foes as evil incarnate.

Starting with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, whites were “racialized” in a way they never fully understood. They were the people whom American politics was not about. They were excluded—at least as claimants—under civil rights law. As civil rights spread to cover groups other than blacks, the term “people of color” marked whites off as the only people so excluded, and legitimized that exclusion. In this sense the United States had re-created the problem that it had passed the Civil Rights Act to resolve: It had two classes of citizens.

That was the civil rights project’s great Achilles’ heel. It eventually drove a critical mass of whites to conceive of themselves as a race, whether they wished to or not. The process through which most white Americans came to understand the dynamic of the system was not fast, but it was inexorable. It took fifty years, years that saw a steep decline in their social status and a degradation of their way of life.

This was a health emergency of maximum gravity, comparable to the outbreak of AIDS in the early 1980s. The tepid response had to do with how drugs were tied up with race and class. Since to be alarmed about heroin was to be alarmed on behalf of poor white people, Americans were hesitant—perhaps “frightened” would be a better word—to be seen to take account of it. Unlike blacks in the decades after the Vietnam War, twenty-first-century suburban and rural whites were not protagonists of the nation’s official moral narrative. Indeed, they barely figured in it.

The War on Drugs also provided a convenient, non-racial pretext for the militarized policing of black neighborhoods, drastically reducing inner-city crime and ironically doing more to promote racial integration than any other policy since the 1960s.

The commentator Fareed Zakaria compared America’s working-class whites to Russians after the Soviet collapse: “They were central to America’s economy, its society, indeed its very identity,” he wrote. “They are not anymore.” Paraphrasing a Princeton sociologist to the effect that white people were just complaining because they had been spoiled, he then contrasted them unfavorably with poor blacks and immigrants, who “do not assume that the system is set up for them.” But why shouldn’t the citizens of a republic assume that the system is set up for them? The Gettysburg Address said it was set up for them.White politicians began to convey that they weren’t oblivious to being spoken of this way.

At one point in 2015, the Washington Post called the black incendiary Ta-Nehisi Coates the country’s “foremost public intellectual”—and it was probably right, since race was getting to be the sum total of what the country’s intellectual life was about.

One now got the impression that racism and sexism must be hiding everywhere. Rooting them out enlisted the zeal of citizens in a way that resembled the hard-line anti-communism of the 1950s, but on a far larger scale. Now as then, the rarity of actual unmaskings was taken as evidence of the adversary’s guile. Unlike communism, which involved an actual organization with a membership list, racism had a flexible definition. Anyone might be accused of it.

misunderstandings in the mid-1970s, when certain radical civil rights policy makers had assumed that “any deviation from statistical parity could, and should, be interpreted as owing to unconstitutional discrimination.” All difference, all inequality, was becoming actionable. But now there need not even be difference or inequality at all. Racism was becoming an official narrative in newspapers, on television, and on the internet. Those who encountered that narrative took it to heart.

If America were only one-eighth black, then the obsessive way politicians and journalists spoke about race made no sense. The same was true of the way politicians and journalists spoke about gays. In the second decade of the century, Americans, on average, came to believe that the country was between 23 and 25 percent gay, bisexual, or transgender—about 1 in 4. Again, given the doggedness with which the president and the courts took up the cause of gay marriage, and the eagerness with which newspapers and television reported on every step of their progress, why should they have believed otherwise? Who would have guessed that gays, bisexuals, and transgender people together made up 3.8 percent of the population, closer to 1 in 25? Americans had a distorted view of social reality. Their language evolved to reflect it.

This led to a paradox: The word was needed by civil rights activists as a marker of white attitudes at a time when whites had not used it in its original sense in a long time. Now “nigger” was used more often by than of blacks, not to describe their own thoughts but to impute evil intentions to white people.

In an essay aimed at explaining the results of the 2016 election Ta-Nehisi Coates described it as, in part, a reaction to “an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform.” 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. The epithet “white supremacist” was being used five times as often as it had been in its previous heyday—which was not, incidentally, during the Jim Crow era but at the end of the 1960s.

Belonging to a racial minority conferred moral authority that no one must be allowed to counterfeit or compromise. Once we understand that, we can hazard a guess at why Seltzer decided to write as a minority gang member in the first place. 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.

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. Even if they sincerely believed there was no such thing as inherited race, white people seemed also to believe they were at risk of inheriting racism, and scrambled to separate not just themselves but their families, their bloodlines, from any taint of it.

And they were diverging in how they saw the law. 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. For most whites, until black crime fell, blacks would not have the standing to complain about equal justice. For most blacks, until there was equality in all walks of American life, whites would not have the standing to call all black misbehavior “crime.”

A judicious analyst would have borne in mind that the country now had over 300 million people, and, firearms being legal, more than a third of them had guns in their homes. Diversity, whatever its other effects, pushed together people of diverse folkways. Tens of millions of people living in the United States were new to the country’s laws. Under the circumstances, the country was policed well, and with an impressive fairness. It had become hard to say that publicly, though. A disproportionate number of the most serious offenses continued to be committed by blacks. In 2009, blacks, who made up 13 percent of the population, accounted for almost half the arrests (49.2 percent) for murder and more than half (55.5 percent) for robberies. The traditional explanation was that blacks commit about half of those crimes. But, applied to racial disparities, traditional explanations were coming into disrepute. Alan David Freeman’s “victims’ perspective” had triumphed here, too, and with it the idea that any disparity was the sign of an injustice. Like water poured into the corner of a tilted ice-cube tray, this idea had gradually tumbled into one compartment of American life after another, starting with public facilities and moving on through hiring to education.

Barack Obama’s second term happened to coincide with the moment in history when the victim’s perspective became the semi-official way of looking at crime and violence. Now the disproportionate incidence of black arrests was taken, in some quarters, as prima facie evidence of white racism.

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. It was an incendiary accusation: Who did Black Lives Matter believe these people were, indifferent to others’ lives, who had supposedly sprung up at a moment when the races had never been more equal or mixed?

Every radical movement is a rebirth of sorts, because political establishments are built on doctrines, and changing doctrines requires as much unlearning as learning. Radicals reconnect with wisdom that the existing regime, in order to prevail, has had to discard or suppress. 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. Ta-Nehisi Coates insisted on his own atheism, and Travis Gosa stressed that Black Lives Matter was “atheist or at least non-denominational.” Black Lives Matter arose amid a revival of the black power or even (in Coates’s case) the Black Panther tendency.

If Black Lives Matter was civil rights, then the country had a problem. Because, as we have noted, civil rights had become a de facto constitution. The various extensions that black and white progressives had successfully fought to attach to civil rights—above all affirmative action and political correctness—had ceased to be temporary expedients. They were essential parts of this new constitutional structure, meant to shore it up where it was impotent or self-contradictory, in the way that Chief Justice John Marshall’s invention of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison (1801) had been a shoring-up of the first constitution.

Without these innovations, the civil rights system was illogical and unstable. If you didn’t like affirmative action and political correctness, you didn’t like civil rights. For their part, politicians who claimed civil rights as a governing ideal grew uneasy when they saw a movement as truculent and implacable as Black Lives Matter speaking in its name. They called it “identity politics,” as if it were an aberration. It was not. It was a culmination.

Yale may have been an “intellectual space” under the old constitution. Under the new one, how could it be? Once Yale changed its rules to recruit minority students through affirmative action, as the law required it to, upholding purely meritocratic standards (as Kimball urged) would have been a contradiction in terms. Following rules of decorum (in which the Christakises placed so much faith) was only a roundabout route to the same disappointment. An institution could claim to be upholding its old standards—Yale did—but it could not actually uphold them. It had taken on political responsibilities that overrode its educational ones. The protesters were wise to this. Their incredulity at the Christakises’ failure to “understand” the real terms of their service at Yale was surely unfeigned.

For just under half of younger adults, the only workable basis for ethnic co-existence was a tabula rasa. There was something fittingly American about this. To say they believed in “new beginnings” and “dreaming big” was the usual way Americans liked to think of themselves. Another way to put it, though, was to say that Americans were given to razing and fleeing rather than to repairing and nurturing. So grand and noble were Americans’ “dreams” in their own sight that carrying them out became a special dispensation, an emergency in the face of which others had better get out of the way. As they moved inland in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Americans had obliterated whole cultures with a clean conscience, as if the continent were unpeopled. In the half-century after the mid-1960s, America’s leaders, still dreaming their big dreams, obliterated their own cultural institutions in a similar spirit.

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.”

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 help everyone but them, which is the same thing. 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 the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.

“Built this country”? Not so fast. An idea of Americans as something other than a people had begun to take hold of the political class: Ours was a “creedal” nation, a country united not by race or by history but by belief in certain ideas. This sounds like open-mindedness, but if not managed carefully, it can turn into the opposite. A country you can join by simply changing your mind is a country you can fall out of by doing the same. On literally dozens of occasions as president, 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 Ame...

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. The extra rights of protection and redress that minorities enjoyed were admissible as stopgaps—not as permanent parts of the Constitution. 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 thei...