The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

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.