The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The sudden victory of Ho Chi Minh’s troops over the French in 1954 had led to a UN partition of the country into a communist North and a pro-American South. But Vietnam was never as divided as it looked. Ho’s Communists would likely have won the national election that the peace accords called for, had the United States permitted one. Ho drew on broad nationalist and anti-colonial sentiments, however big the eventual role of the Soviet Union in supplying weaponry (especially MiG fighters and anti-aircraft systems) and of China in supplying personnel (including troops after 1965) might have been. The South Vietnamese government, by contrast, would have crumbled without U.S. support. Its troops were battle-shy, outnumbered, and outgunned by a domestic (i.e., South Vietnamese) guerrilla insurgency, the so-called Viet Cong, which drew on local discontent as well as imported materiel. Eighty percent of the 5 or 6 million tons of American bombs dropped in the war fell on the South, not the North. The United States, in fact, would drop more bombs on the territory of its putative ally than it had dropped on all its World War II enemies. And then it would go on to do something from which American culture has still not recovered: It would lose the war.

The top managers and “leading experts” were on the war’s side. The war’s prosecution had been placed in their hands, and for understandable reasons. For two decades America’s bureaucratic and corporate experts had met every challenge they had been set, from a two-front war against Germany and Japan to the construction of an interstate highway system. Much as Johnson had revived Kennedy’s stalled civil rights initiatives and turned them into a massive constitutional reform, he took Kennedy’s inchoate plans to make a manly anti-communist stand somewhere in Southeast Asia (Laos had been the first country on which Kennedy’s whimsy landed) and turned them into a focused military campaign. President Kennedy had recruited Robert McNamara, the president of the Ford Motor Company, to be his secretary of defense. McNamara had won the esteem of the country’s leaders, and the authority to manage its now-nuclearized armed forces, on the strength of his corporate career. McNamara was not a sadistic military strategist, like William Tecumseh Sherman; he was a true believer in “systems management,” like, in a later era, Mark Zuckerberg. He took certain techniques useful for managing corporations and grievously misapplied them.

They used statistics to convince themselves that they were winning. They claimed the percentage of the South Vietnamese population under control of the Viet Cong guerrillas had fallen from 60 percent to 40 percent. It was true, too—but only because U.S. bombing and search-and-destroy raids had depopulated the countryside. To this way of looking at the world, there was no difference between winning people’s allegiance and turning them into refugees.

The sociologist and Johnson advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan was eager to use the military draft as an engine of upward mobility for blacks and the poor. By the summer of 1966, it was evident that the two Johnson wars, on poverty and in Vietnam, were set to open up a vast deficit that would make inflation inevitable. Johnson, with his cabinet’s help, bought time with various accounting tricks and falsifications.

In 1950, Harry S. Truman, using a UN Security Council resolution as a substitute for declaring war, had committed the United States to defend the southern part of that nation, divided at the 38th parallel, after an invasion from the Communist North. He wound up paying for it with his presidency. General Douglas MacArthur swiftly recovered almost the entire country, South and North, from North Korean forces in a campaign of tactical mastery, but when he had driven the North Koreans almost to the Yalu River along the Chinese border, China entered the war with hundreds of thousands of troops. The Chinese and North Korean counterattack drove U.S. forces back to the other end of the peninsula and took tens of thousands of lives. The war ended in a stalemate, with a demilitarized zone back at the 38th parallel.

Vietnam was another partitioned, peninsular Asian country with a Chinese border, in which the United States was trying to use offshore bases (Japan in the case of Korea, the Philippines in that of Vietnam) to create a defensible southern enclave. It was a project that China could turn into a bloodbath at a time of its choosing.

An inward suspicion that the war was unwinnable, along with an inability to avow it, put Americans in a strange psychological state. Throughout the war, they proved comfortable with an escalation of violence, whether or not it was related to the war effort. When reports emerged in late 1969 that U.S. forces had massacred women and children in the villages of Songmy and My Lai, only 24 percent of Americans thought the soldiers should be punished, versus 48 percent who thought they should not. The mining of Vietnam’s harbors in the spring of 1972 was approved of by a solid 59 percent majority. A slim majority approved of the all-out bombing of North Vietnamese cities at Christmas of that year. When Chicago police battered student anti-war protesters at the Democratic National Convention at the end of August 1968, 56 percent of Americans approved, versus just 31 percent who objected.

The bloody Tet Offensive, an all-out surprise attack by Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces against southern cities earlier that year, had been a turning point. Though the American and South Vietnamese counterattack had crippled the Communist forces, the battle had raised the price of the war beyond what Americans back home were willing to pay. Two thirds (64 percent) were now willing to stop the bombing of North Vietnam “if there is any kind of sign whatsoever from North Vietnam that they are willing to reduce the fighting.” Any kind of sign

In December 1972, on the eve of the signing of the Paris peace accords, Nixon’s internal polling showed that Americans—66 percent of them—would insist on the return of the country’s POWs. It was an unusual worry. The return of captives is generally an essential part of a peace treaty. But the suspicion that some had been left behind would roil conservative politics for decades. By contrast, Americans seemed wholly indifferent to the lofty freedom-fighting rhetoric that had drawn the country into Vietnam a decade earlier. Only 7 percent wanted to insist on a removal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam, only 5 percent on free elections in the South. What the United States was doing was surrendering.

The top-selling single of 1966, according to Billboard magazine, was neither “You Can’t Hurry Love” by the Supremes (which came in at number 8), nor the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” (number 24) or the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (number 33), nor anything by Simon and Garfunkel, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, or Bob Dylan. It was Barry Sadler’s martial “Ballad of the Green Berets.”

In a diary he kept in 1966, the Harvard undergraduate Steven Kelman recorded the misgivings of a friend, who had said: I’m against the war, I guess, but I wouldn’t want to fight in any war. . . . My brother had a friend who tried to get a four-F by eating a lot of sugar two days before he went for his physical and not pissing—so they’d think he had diabetes. They gave him the four-F, but that afternoon he fell into a sugar coma and died. . . . I could try freaking out—you know, coming in high on pot or doing the homo routine. But they put that kind of rejection on your record, and that can screw you up for life.

Canada isn't that bad.

As civil rights had divided the country by region into those who were heroically fighting for equality and those who could justly be assigned to receive moral instruction, Vietnam did the same by class. The defenders of peace and justice were disproportionately to be found at rich men’s universities—and their innocence of military involvement would give them much more in common with those who came of age in the demilitarized decade or so that followed. The working class would wind up tainted by the popular culture’s portrayal of the military as burners of villages and marauders in free-fire zones. Who would hire such a person to run a corporate department? Who would elect such a person to Congress?

The same “white proles of Boston” Fallows described would be subjected to the most high-handed carrying out of federal law in the decade to follow: the court-ordered “desegregation” of Boston’s public schools, starting in 1974. The word desegregation belongs in quotation marks because most of the schools affected were within white ethnic (mostly Irish-American and Italian-American) neighborhoods. There had never been any black people there to segregate. The process involved two-way busing, transporting white students into poor and violent Boston neighborhoods and replacing them with bused-in black students. When the whites of South Boston and Charlestown protested, their neighborhoods were put under military occupation. “Southie” had a curfew and laws against public assembly, enforced by 1,600 police officers, 100 federal marshals, 50 FBI agents, and 600 National Guard troops. Whites made up 60 percent of the public school system on the eve of busing, less than 20 percent when it had finally done its work, little more than a decade later.

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.

For decades, reinvigorating Western religion and philosophy with a dose of Asian spiritualism had been a favorite project of Western intellectuals: Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, F.S.C. Northrop, the Beat novelists and poets. The generations that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s were, in this sense, religious. Until 1975 religion, measured by both professed belief and church attendance, had been falling off, but it then began a steep rise that would last two decades. The Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam classified the period as another in a series of what American historians call “great awakenings.” Fundamentalism and evangelical Christianity would shape American politics, starting in 1976 with the election to the presidency of Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, himself a “born-again” Christian. It was a revival led by young people, not a remnant composed of a few geezers.

A certain cultural environmentalism was the natural accompaniment of this rural hankering. It was not the mix of science, ethics, and politics that we call environmentalism today and which, back then, was only just emerging under the name of “ecology.” It was more a Romantic way of life, in the sense that William Wordsworth (“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her”) was Romantic. Drawing from Western culture’s deep well of ideas about simplicity and authenticity, it was, while it lasted, something you could partake of even in a truck or on a motorcycle. It meant natural ingredients (author and dietician Euell Gibbons), home cooking (chef Alice Waters), family values as defined in some past era (not just Happy Days and other 1950s nostalgia but also The Waltons, a colossally successful 1970s television series about the Depression in Appalachia, almost never re-aired in the decades that followed), folk and country music, all kinds of crafts (macramé, latch-hook rugs, Quaker furniture), the grumpy novels of Edward Abbey, backpacking, and The Whole Earth Catalog.

The United States had a population below 140 million when World War II ended in 1945. It would add more than 70 million babies before 1964. At war’s end there had been only one year in the nation’s history when as many as 3 million babies were born. By the early 1950s, annual births were over 4 million and they kept rising into the 1960s. It was not as big a leap in fertility as people often imagine. Sexuality had not been “pent up.” Birth rates had been rising steadily during the war—since 1933, in fact. But over time, high fertility gave those born after the war an extraordinary preponderance. In the first years of the twenty-first century, there were about 80 million Baby Boomers in the United States. For a generation, they made up 37 or 38 percent of the voting population. By contrast, the generation born between 1930 and 1945 peaked at about 18 percent of the electorate. It produced no presidents. The Boomers’ demographic weight allowed them to seize control of, enforce, and re-orient the social transformation their elders had inaugurated. In a free-market democracy, population translates directly into political power, through votes. It translates indirectly into economic power, through market share. And it eventually translates into cultural power, because advertisers (and, less avowedly, artists) aim to titillate and flatter large audiences. From the get-go, no generation was more fussed over and pandered to.

Certain events cut a razor-sharp border between the experience of Baby Boomers and that of the generations before and after. Consider the difference between the pre–Baby Boom birth year of 1943, which included Vietnam War hero (later protester) and 2004 presidential candidate (later secretary of state) John Kerry; and the first Baby Boom cohort of 1946, which included onetime Texas governor George W. Bush, who defeated Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. (It is probably not a coincidence that 1946 is the only year in American history to have seen the birth of three presidents, all three, in fact, born in the summer months of that year.) In 1966, when 22-year-old Kerry got out of Yale, the war in Vietnam was still at an early stage. It was not yet unthinkable that the wealthy and privileged should serve in the military, and Kerry enlisted in the Navy. By the time the three future presidents finished college just two years later, the war had heated up, the Summer of Love had intervened, and better-off Americans were desperately seeking ways to avoid active service. None of the three went to Vietnam, though Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard.

For three quarters of a century, other generations would be forced to share the preoccupations of their fellow citizens born in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The country was always “about” these older Boomers. It was built around carousing and sexuality in the 1960s and ’70s and around “family values” and the acquisition of wealth in the 1980s and ’90s. In the first decades of the new century, it was built around protecting the interests and fortunes of those who had prospered in decades past, according to rules they themselves had written—and around protecting the institutions and companies they themselves had established.

The Baby Boom generation was the most culturally stable (or as we would say today, the “least diverse”) generation in American history. The 1970 census, the first in which all the Boomers were present, was the only one since the founding of the republic two centuries before in which the foreign-born population was below 5 percent. Immigration still came largely from Europe. The three largest sources of foreign-born were Italy (1,009,000), Germany (833,000), and Canada (812,000). Twenty-first-century readers, accustomed to much higher numbers, might need to be told that those were total resident populations, not annual arrivals. There were only 760,000 Mexicans in the country, slightly more than the number of people from the United Kingdom, Poland, or the Soviet Union. Mexico and Cuba were the only non-European countries in the top ten. By 2010, there would be no European countries at all on the top ten list. Here it is: Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, Korea, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.

The years from roughly 1968 to 1971, when, as noted, the American population was less “diverse” than at any time in its history, were also the high-water mark of the country’s post-war culture, certainly of its popular music. In the four-and-a-half months of 1970 that separate the albums Workingman’s Dead (June) and American Beauty (November), the Grateful Dead alone cranked out a dozen songs that have endured through the generations. It was an impermanent flourishing, a transition. The rock ’n’ roll stars of the 1960s and (to a degree) the 1970s had been trained to the old culture. They had mastered instruments and become real musicians, if only to play piano for guests in their parents’ living rooms, or the organ on Sunday at church. Once rock was established, however, aspiring rock stars began modeling themselves on rock musicians, or even non-musicians. Paul Cook, the drummer for the pioneering punk band the Sex Pistols, recalled the early punk music periodicals that came out after 1976. “In one of the fanzines,” he wrote, “there’s even a diagram showing you how to play three chords—C, D and A—with the caption, ‘Here’s the chords. Now go and start a band!’ ” Similar things were said by Rod Stewart and the musicians of Bachman–Turner Overdrive. The countercultural culture that lasted for a decade or two after the 1960s can seem a progressive reworking of old values, a drawing out of new possibilities. Or it can appear a mere looting of the old culture, a decadence, a sp...

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.

After squeaking into the presidency in 1968, Richard Nixon had governed in such a way as to turn his 1972 re-election campaign into a referendum on the Great Society. His vice president, former Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, specialized in erudite, alliterative, bomb-throwing oratory, much of it crafted by a crew of speechwriters that included the future columnists Patrick J. Buchanan and William Safire.

Buchanan still carries a torch for Nixon 50 years later.

The return of power to communities that Reagan promised never happened. On the contrary, the world that his supposedly conservative presidency left behind was more indulgent of the anti-conservative impulse to “cut the past away,” provided the cutting were done heedlessly by businessmen rather than purposefully by bureaucrats. American conservatism was something Reagan tapped rather than embodied. His version of it was oratorical, not constitutional. And conservatism’s lack of a worked-out constitutional dimension would create the crisis out of which, decades later, a harder-edged “Tea Party” populism grew.

The literary critic Lionel Trilling had written in his introduction to The Liberal Imagination (1950): In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

The mid-1970s saw a craze for citizens band radio, which allowed long-haul truck drivers to communicate the whereabouts of state police speed traps and evade enforcement of the 55-mile-an-hour speed limits imposed in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. It was by CB that truckers communicated when, in December of that year, J. W. “River Rat” Edwards started a nationwide “blockade” outside Lamar, Pennsylvania, to protest gas prices and highway regulation. The slang the truckers used to disguise their identities (for they were breaking the law) was romanticized in the film Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and in songs so numerous that there were whole LP-length anthologies of them.

C. W. McCall’s country gag song “Convoy,” which climaxed with a band of truckers smashing through a tollbooth in New Jersey, became the best-selling single in the country just before Christmas 1975. That was the year President Gerald Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act, pledging considerable funding and all the powers of the federal government to the project of converting Americans from English measures to the more sensible-sounding decimal system of meters and liters and grams. In England itself, “metrication” had been going on for a decade, with only mild grumbling. Americans met it with scorn and non-compliance. The measure was soon abandoned.

But by the middle of the Reagan administration, the romance had gone out of that kind of law-breaking and resistance. A program launched in Boston in 1983 urged citizens to inform on any suspicious-looking neighbors. They might, after all, be drug dealers. “Drop a dime, stop a crime,” the billboards read, a dime being what it cost to make a call to the local police station from a public phone booth.

50 years from now, if history books are still being written and I'm still alive to read them, I wonder if I'll open one to find a similar note about 2020 and COVID-19.

That he learned to sound certain conservative notes about sex in the 1970s, and even gave a barn-burning speech against abortion in 1983, should not distract from his pre-eminence as a sexual progressive. In 1967, as governor of California, he signed the furthest-reaching liberalization of abortion in American history. In 1969 he introduced no-fault divorce statewide with his Family Law Act. By the time of his campaign for the presidency in 1980, it would have been fair to say Reagan had done more than any politician of either party to build up the institutions of post-feminist sexual liberation.

The expression “American Dream” is not an ancient one and has had its ups and downs. It was invented only in 1931 by the historian James Truslow Adams and caught on a bit in that decade, only to fall out of fashion in the 1940s. It owes its near-omnipresence in today’s political discourse to two periods when it was very much in fashion. In the seven years between 1963 (the year King gave his “I have a dream” speech and the first Baby Boomers left high school) and the end of the decade, its usage more than doubled. In the seven years between 1986 (the year the last Baby Boomers left college) and 1993 (the year Bill Clinton, the first Baby Boom president, took office after twelve years of Reaganism), its usage went up by nearly 50 percent.

Lyndon Johnson thought the welfare programs he launched in the 1960s were in the spirit of Roo- sevelt’s dam-building and road-building and mural-painting. They would pump money into the economy just as effectively, and stimulate things. But Johnson was wrong. By the mid-1970s, unemployment and inflation were rising in tandem, confounding familiar models. Economists who had cheered LBJ’s welfare experiments, such as Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith, lost the ear of elected officials. Skeptics, such as Milton Friedman, came into vogue. The first measures to scale back taxation and spending were passed under Democratic president Jimmy Carter in the 95th Congress, in which Democrats held over two thirds of House seats, and it was Carter’s appointee to head the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, who determined to wring inflation out of the economy by pitilessly tightening the money supply, starting in October 1979.

Keynesian economists had believed that higher taxes could make the economy not only fairer but also more efficient. Rich people tended to sock their money away as savings. A progressive government could dislodge it via taxes and invest it in big projects, pumping up demand as it did. But this argument became harder to defend after FDR’s infrastructural state gave way to LBJ’s welfare state. “Supply-side” economists now argued, with considerable cogency, that when government collected too much from “the rich,” potentially productive concentrations of investment capital were eroded, and spooned back into society in bites of welfare too small to be used for anything but immediate consumption.

In 1978, Wanniski came out with The Way the World Works, a global history focused single-mindedly on marginal tax rates and entrepreneurship. It was high taxes that caused the fall of Rome, tax moderation that President Warren Harding was talking about when he promised a “Return to Normalcy,” and tax cuts that spurred Japan’s post-war boom. The book sparkles with aphorisms, but scarcely a page passes in which the reader does not feel a pang of doubt about whether Wanniski knows what he is talking about.

Wanniski’s ideas were at odds with those of most economists, both liberal and conservative, as well as most historians. Economies throughout history had grown rich and remained stable without necessarily licensing the very richest to make money hand over fist. But the Wanniski vision jibed with the have-it-all culture at large. By this time, he had won over Jack Kemp. Beloved in the suburbs of Buffalo as the longtime quarterback of the American Football League’s Buffalo Bills, Kemp won a congressional seat there in 1976, campaigning on a version of supply-side economics he had been teaching himself since his retirement from football. Faced with the prospect that Kemp might make tax cuts the centerpiece of a rival presidential campaign, Reagan endorsed the cuts Kemp had championed.

Reagan’s critics, for their part, saw a redistribution from the poor to the rich. That may have been a long-term consequence, but at first the transfer was not from one social class to another but from one government program to another. The transfers went, according to Niskanen, “from discretionary domestic spending to defense, entitlements and interest payments.” Reagan took money from bridge building, park tidying, and arts funding and used it to pay for a military buildup and the very Great Society programs he had come to office promising to dismantle. That required borrowing.

The borrowing power of the Baby Boom generation was invested in avoiding the choices that the confrontations of the 1960s had placed before the country. What the debt paid for was social peace, which had come to be understood as synonymous with the various Great Society programs launched by Lyndon Johnson in the two years after the Kennedy assassination. We should understand the Great Society as the institutional form into which the civil rights impulse hardened, a transfer from whites to blacks of the resources necessary to make desegregation viable. Desegregation was, as we have said, the most massive undertaking of any kind in the history of the United States. Like any massive undertaking, it required endurance, patience, and prohibitive expense. Almost everyone who did not benefit from it was going to be made poorer by it.

In retrospect, we can see that by acquiescing in the ouster of Nixon after the previous landslide, those who voted for him had lost their chance to moderate the pace of that change. With the impeachment of Nixon, promoters of the Great Society had bought the time necessary to defend it against “backlash,” as democratic opposition to social change was coming to be called. In the near-decade that elapsed between Nixon and Reagan, entire subpopulations had become dependent on the Great Society. Those programs were now too big to fail.

In the twenty-first century, the largest collector of Pell Grant tuition would be the University of Phoenix, a nationwide open-enrollment “university” founded in 1976. Its students owed $35 billion in taxpayer-backed federal loans. Their default rate was higher than their graduation rate. More and more the vaunted Reaganite “private sector” was coming to operate this way. It was a catchment area set up to receive government funds—usually by someone well enough connected to know before the public did how and where government funds would be directed.

Reagan stinted on none of the resources required to construct Johnson’s new order. Having promised for years that he would undo affirmative action “with the stroke of a pen,” lop the payments that LBJ’s Great Society lavished on “welfare queens,” and abolish Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education, he discovered, once he became president, that to do any of those things would have struck at the very foundations of desegregation. So he didn’t—although Democrats and Republicans managed to agitate and inspire their voting and fundraising bases for decades by pretending he had. Meanwhile, his tax cuts provided a golden parachute for the white middle class, allowing it, for one deluded generation, to re-create with private resources a Potemkin version of the old order.

Reagan permitted Americans to live under two social orders, two constitutional orders, at the same time. There was a pre–Great Society one and a post–Great Society one. Paying for both soon got expensive. The cost can be measured roughly by the growth of the debt, public and private, over the decades after Reagan’s arrival in the White House. By 1989, the year Reagan left office, according to an estimate by the economist Roy H. Webb of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, the government’s unfunded liabilities (mostly for Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits) had reached $4–5 trillion, and would rise exponentially if nothing were done. Nothing was done. By the time of the 2016 election, a calculation of those liabilities similar to Webb’s ran to at least $135 trillion.

Ronald Reagan saved the Great Society in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt is credited by his admirers with having “saved capitalism.” That is, he tamed some of its very worst excesses and found the resources to protect his own angry voters from consequences they would otherwise have found intolerable. That is what the tax cuts were for. Each of the two sides that emerged from the battles of the 1960s could comport itself as if it had won. There was no need to raise the taxes of a suburban entrepreneur in order to hire more civil rights enforcement officers at the Department of Education. There was no need to lease out oil-drilling rights in a national park in order to pay for an aircraft carrier. Failing to win a consensus for the revolutions of the 1960s, Washington instead bought off through tax cuts those who stood to lose from them. Americans would delude themselves for decades that there was something natural about this arrangement. It was an age of entitlement.

At last I understand the title. In a twist, the age was the '80s, not the '60s.

Collectively, American Baby Boomers cashed out of the economy their forebears had built, shifting the costs of running it not just to different generations but to different parts of the world, through outsourcing and immigration. These, too, are a form of borrowing. Low-wage immigrants subsidize the rich countries they migrate to, and this is especially true of illegal immigrants. They are low-wage precisely because they are outside the legal system. Ultimately, natives pay some kind of “bill” for such labor. Either they invite the laborers into their society, and the costs to natives take the form of overburdened institutions, rapid cultural change, and diluted political power; or they exclude the laborers, and the costs take the form of exploitation, government repression, and bad conscience. Until that bill comes due, immigration must be counted among a country’s “off-balance-sheet liabilities.”

As a second-generation immigrant (my parents are from India), I find this moving. The struggle between either the whites socially excluding me or me economically overpowering the whites has defined my whole professional and personal life.

The Hart-Celler immigration reform of 1965 is sometimes overlooked amid the tidal wave of legislation that flowed through Congress that year. It overturned the “national origins” system, passed under the Immigration Act of 1924 and reaffirmed in 1952, that had aimed to keep the ethnic composition of the United States roughly what it was. Even in the mid-1960s, immigrants from Britain and Germany made up more than half of national “quota” immigration—and those countries plus Ireland, Italy, and Poland accounted for almost three quarters. It is hard to say exactly what the bill’s backers believed they were doing. On one hand, they sang of an America that was triumphing over its historic racism. On the other, they promised even more ardently and solemnly that doing away with national-origin quotas would do nothing to change the American ethnic mix. “Quota immigration under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European,” said its House sponsor, Emanuel Celler.

Once the bill passed, Johnson summoned the Congress to a signing ceremony hundreds of miles away at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, an extravaganza at odds with his soft-pedaling of its importance. “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” he said. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.” He did protest too much. The Hart-Celler bill would alter the demography of the United States. It would also alter the country’s culture, committing the government to cut the link that had made Americans think of themselves for three centuries as, basically, a nation of transplanted Europeans.

In the three-and-a-half centuries between its discovery and 1965, the United States had received 43 million newcomers (including a quarter-million slaves). In the half-century that followed Hart-Celler, it would get 59 million.

Low-volume European migration had not required a vast rural and border enforcement apparatus, but by the mid-1970s a new kind of immigration was under way. Roughly 3 million illegal immigrants, most of them Latin American agricultural workers in the Southwest, were overburdening public services and making natives uncomfortable.

Natives?

In the waning days of the Carter administration, Kennedy proposed a Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, chose Notre Dame president Father Theodore Hesburgh to head it, and selected the reading materials that would guide it. Two of the Kennedy commission’s members, Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Democratic congressman Romano Mazzoli of Kentucky, sponsored the legislation that would become the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Simpson-Mazzoli aimed at a bold compromise. It legalized and offered American citizenship to illegal immigrants who could prove they had been resident in the United States for even the briefest of stays. A Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) program gave permanent residency to workers who could show they had done 60 days of farm work between May 1985 and May 1986, regardless of whether they knew any English or had any understanding of American civics. A quarter-million were estimated to be eligible for the program, but the documentation and testimonials it required were easily counterfeited: 1.3 million wound up using it. Those admitted came to well over 3 million in total.

In June 1986, those who wanted less immigration outnumbered those who wanted more of it by 7 to 1 (49 to 7 percent).

As late as 1975, the Los Angeles Times could still report on economic competition from immigrants, headlining a story “Employers Prefer Workers Who Can Be Exploited, Paid Minuscule Wages, US Officials Say.” That year, 47 percent of news stories about immigration mentioned its dampening effect on wages. By the turn of the century, only 8 percent did. In 1976, the Texas Democrat Ann Richards reportedly said, in the course of a campaign for the Travis County commissioners court, “If it takes a man to hire non-union labor, cross picket lines and work wetbacks then I say thank God for a woman or anyone else who is willing to take over.” It was a sentiment that most Texas liberals of the time would have been proud to avow. By 1990, when Richards made a successful run for governor, “wetback” was an inadmissible slur and the report of the old speech jeopardized her campaign.

In late amendments, the 1986 IRCA bill was filled with language stressing that an employer could be held liable for discriminating on account of national origin. This looked like window dressing, but in the new, post–Civil Rights Act judicial climate, it became the heart of the bill. It turned inside-out the penalties against employers for hiring illegal immigrants. However harsh the “employer sanctions” had originally looked on paper, they required employers to act in ways that civil rights law forbade. An American boss now had more to fear from obeying the immigration law than from flouting it. An INS official sent in 1987 to investigate a factory on Long Island suspected of using illegal labor stressed that he was there “to explain the new immigration law’s provisions on employer sanctions, ‘not enforce them.’ ”