The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

In April 1969, a member of Progressive Labor, a Maoist anti-war group at Harvard, wrote a soul-searching indictment of the more fashionable Students for a Democratic Society, accusing SDS of drifting toward elitism but explaining that drift in terms of temptations common to the entire student left: On the one hand we were angry about the war, about racism, about the countless vicious acts we saw around us. But on the other hand, we viewed America as one great wasteland, a big, monstrous, mechanized, air-conditioned desert, a place without roots or feeling. We saw the main problem, really, as: THE PEOPLE—the ways they thought and acted towards each other. We imagined a great American desert, populated by millions of similar, crass, beer-drinking grains of sand, living in a waste of identical suburban no-places. What did this imagined “great pig-sty of TV watchers” correspond to in real life? As “middle-class” students we learned that this was the working class—the “racist, insensitive people.”

An enduring stereotype.