The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

If we think of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as a revolution, then all of the political energies of the 1970s had been counterrevolutionary. 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. Their discomfort was understandable. Bork had had misgivings about the constitutional basis for civil rights law, noting its potential to endanger First Amendment freedoms, and he had argued this case powerfully, not just in law reviews but in the pages of the New Republic. Also, as Richard Nixon’s solicitor general, he had fired the Watergate special prosecutor in 1973 when his superiors refused to. But the opposition to Bork sounded immoderate and unhinged, never more so than when Ted Kennedy opened the hearings on July 1 by casting Bork as a positively Satanic figure: Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut o...