The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

At a time when people were still naming airports after Ronald Reagan, few thinkers understood how tenacious identity politics had become. But the writer Paul Berman did. He made the bold suggestion in A Tale of Two Utopias that Western progressives not only had not gone down with the communist ship—they had emerged from the Cold War triumphant and even strengthened. Berman looked at the dissident circle around the Czech playwright (later president) Václav Havel. He found them to have been more inspired by rock musicians, by Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground, than by any Reaganite talk about the virtues of capitalism. Most countries shaken by student activism in 1968, he wrote, had undergone a “two-step evolution—from a dream of orthodox social revolution to a movement for personal liberation.” By the former Berman meant socialism; by the latter he meant civil rights. The politics of civil rights proved America’s most successful late-twentieth-century export. European political advisors who had attended American law schools, or were at least familiar with the American style of “rights talk,” sought to tap into its power. By the 1990s, Berman noted, virtually all the leaders of gay rights movements in non-Western countries had spent time in the West. The United States was still the rich countries’ rule maker and enforcer, as it had been during the Cold War. But now its diversity mission also gave it the Cold War role of the Soviet Comintern—as a repository of hope for m...