The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

President Richard Nixon, through an ambitious program of internal polling, had already made a discovery of more general application: Americans were happy to run their mouths about all kinds of experimentation, but they did not much like it up close. In this political sense, women’s lib was very much like civil rights. Whenever you personalized the issue, rather than speaking in lofty abstractions, people got suspicious. Whatever pieties they might spout about helping the unfortunate, two thirds of Americans were outraged that “women getting welfare money are having illegitimate babies to increase the money they get.” And although they said they liked the ERA, they had little respect for the people who were bringing it about. By the spring of 1977, Americans agreed (42 percent) as much as disagreed (42 percent) with the hard proposition that “advocates of the Equal Rights Amendment are mainly women’s libbers who would totally change the traditional role of women, and that is wrong.” They had come to identify the constitution-changers as a class—a new elite that had been formed in the crucible of protest against the Vietnam War.