The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The phrase “people of color,” which crept into vogue sometime during the Reagan administration, was a linguistic Rubicon. On the other side of it, an entirely new and harder-line spirit of civil rights would prevail. It is hard to say where it came from. Martin Luther King used the term “citizens of color” in his “I Have a Dream” speech, but it scarcely appeared in newspapers before 1990.

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...

In 1995, the economist George Borjas, writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, modeled the actual effects of immigration on Americans. He found that while immigration might have caused an increase in economic activity of $2.1 trillion, virtually all of those gains—98 percent—went to the immigrants themselves. When economists talk about “gains” from immigration to the receiving country, they are talking about the remaining 2 percent—about $50 billion. This $50 billion “surplus” disguises an extraordinary transfer of income and wealth: Native capitalists gain $566 billion. Native workers lose $516 billion.

One way of describing mass immigration is as a verdict on the pay structure that had arisen in the West by the 1970s: on trade unions, prevailing-wage laws, defined-benefit pension plans, long vacations, and the power workers had accumulated against their bosses more generally. These had long been, in most people’s minds, excellent things. But Republicans argued that private business, alas, could not afford them, and by the 1980s they had won the argument. Immigration, like outsourcing and tighter regulation of unions, allowed employers to pay less for many kinds of labor. But immigrants came with other huge costs: new schools, new roads, translation (formal and informal), and health care for those who could not afford it. Those externalities were absorbed by the public, not the businessmen who benefited from immigration.

Sending manufacturing jobs abroad offered consumers all the advantages of heavy industry and none of the pollution. Americans could now have blue herons plashing and pecking in their streams and hawks swooping off their rooftops as if the Industrial Revolution had never happened—and no one would have to give up the power mower in his garage. Pollution continued at the same rate, of course: It just involved deforesting Brazil instead of pouring bilge into Lake Erie. And it would be years before people began paying attention to the cost of permanent underemployment outside the country’s globalized cities.

At the time, the idea that anyone might look up to entrepreneurs and captains of industry sounded like a joke. If you asked before the Reagan administration who the greatest seers into the soul of mankind were, even a young man in business school would probably have replied: Poets. Or: Philosophers. The world’s moguls were unbalanced, insane, and unenviable. Who would want to be Howard Hughes or John Paul Getty? But in the 1980s, economic titans began to write autobiographies again, as if they had lessons to teach the public. They were mostly corporate executives, like Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch. One was a New York real estate developer who described his calling as “the art of the deal.” And some were bankers. Time magazine ran a notorious cover in February 1999 describing Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, his assistant, Lawrence Summers, and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan as the “Committee to Save the World.” Society took on a Roman aspect. The very rich were held to be cool (Steve Jobs), prophetic (George Soros), or saintly (Warren Buffett). Wealth has never been without its appeal and its power. But it was striking that, more than any generation for a century, and in sharp contrast to its own declared youthful values, the Baby Boom generation revered wealth.

At the start of the 1970s, homeowners—often in single-earner families—generally spent two-and-a-half years’ worth of their income when they bought a house. That number began to rise and rise. By 2010, it had nearly doubled. Buying a house now took almost four-and-a-half years of a family’s earnings. People could sense the deteriorating relative position of the working class even before it showed up in the statistics. Wealth was being more openly signaled, and consumers were warned that they were being sorted and tiered. A smugness that had been alien to American culture made a triumphant return. “All it takes is success,” ran an ad for the Gold MasterCard in 1987.

A culture of ambition and striving was developing. People learned from business gurus about how to take “power naps” and “power walks.” Businessmen wore two-toned, white-collared shirts (which they called “power shirts”) with pink, margarine-yellow, and salmon-orange ties (which they called “power ties”). What made those ties power ties was that they were effeminate. They displayed that the men who wore them were too high up the corporate or social pecking order to be safely snickered at.

Maybe this is why powdered wigs were popular in the 1700s.

The Reagan administration’s model of deficit financing was like the business deals that were going on at the same time. Leveraged buyouts, which spread across the business world in the 1980s, involved borrowing against the assets of a company you didn’t own in order to buy it—at which point the borrowed money could be paid back by a combination of superior efficiencies (which often did not materialize) and pitiless sell-offs (which always did). This meant that financiers had to become more like politicians. They had to tell a story to convince the public they were advancing progress, not stripping assets.

Corporations, too, began to campaign for themselves as politicians always had. Apple rolled out its IIc model in 1984 with a series of two-page magazine ads that were longer than the articles they interrupted. “The newest member of the Apple II family,” one began, “has its own reasons for being.” But such ads were now explicitly political, too. Increasingly they presented the company under discussion as being in the Making-the-World-a-Better-Place Business. “Barbie: The Doll Dreams Are Made of,” ran one 1986 ad showing the doll in an astronaut suit. It would be sexist not to buy it. Companies were even ready to do some of the regulatory work that had heretofore been thought government’s business. “Starting April 23,” announced one 1988 ad, “only Northwest Airlines will prohibit smoking on all flights starting in North America.” The ad ended with what, to the culture of ten years before, would have been a bizarre spectacle: a planeful of rich-looking businessmen with their power shirts and owl eyeglasses, applauding and guffawing as if they were people whom Americans might envy and emulate.

Political engagement and economic stratification came together in an almost official attitude known as snark, a sort of snobbery about other opinions that dismissed them as low-class without going to the trouble of refuting them. Why offer an argument when an eye roll would do? Snark existed before Reagan—it is visible in the mockery that intellectuals in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) aimed at their imaginary “Academy of the Overrated” (Gustav Mahler, Isak Dinesen, F. Scott Fitzgerald). And it existed after. A string of magazines in New York—Spy, Wigwag, Egg—embodied snark for a few months at the turn of the 1990s before folding.

Social media has made this 1000x worse.

John F. Kennedy was then promising to do considerably more by the end of the 1960s than put a man on the moon. In a graduation speech to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, then less than a decade old, the president announced to the young airmen a public-private initiative to build commercial jets that would move at twice the speed of sound: “Some of you will fly the fastest planes that have ever been built,” he said. “We are talking about a plane in the end of the ’60s that will move ahead at a speed faster than Mach 2 to all corners of the globe.” A year later, Lockheed was projecting a supersonic transport that would go at three times the speed of sound. That never happened. American capabilities in the area of transportation steadily declined. Great Britain and France collaborated on a short-lived experiment in supersonic flight, the Concorde, but fewer than two dozen were ever built. The United States, more focused on military applications, never participated. Its SR-71 “Blackbird” reconnaissance plane, developed in secret after 1964 in the Lockheed “skunk works” by engineer Kelly Johnson, set the world air speed record in 1976—a record that was still standing four decades later.

In the 1970s, corporations were casting about for readily marketable consumer gadgets. The Presto Meat Toaster, the Dymo Label Maker, the Hot Beverage Machine, the Hot Lather Machine: the decade seemed to promise some life-transforming invention that never appeared. The breakthrough, when it came, would arise from attempts by Western Electric and various phone companies after the 1960s at “crossing a telephone with a TV set.” The first harvest of innovation came from Japan, starting with the Panasonic Toot-a-Loop AM-radio-and-bracelet, and culminating in the Sony Walkman, the great bridge product from the industrial to the information economy, released in the final weeks of the 1970s.

Congress in 1998 passed a law cheekily called the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which banned the taxation of internet access, as well as special taxes on internet companies. Since state politicians were no more knowledgeable than anyone else about how to levy sales taxes on computerized transactions they never saw, the government had effectively conferred tax exemption on the new online book emporium Amazon, and with it a multi-percentage-point pricing advantage over brick-and-mortar stores that would allow the company to crush all of the country’s nationwide book chains and major independent stores within two decades.

As Americans’ new machines were recording reality with ever more precision, irrationality and even superstition were on the rise. This is not as paradoxical as it sounds. Acquired knowledge obeys a Malthusian logic: Each new fact brings a handful of new questions, which, when answered, bring a handful more. Facts grow arithmetically, but questions grow geometrically. The result is a deterioration of certitude. The closer we get to the truth, the less confident we are in our possession of it.

In 1980, the Häagen-Dazs ice cream company accused a competitor, Frusen Glädjé, of ripping off Häagen-Dazs’s “unique Scandinavian marketing theme.” One of the grounds for the suit was that Frusen Glädjé, like its older competitor, was “a two-word germanic-sounding name having an umlaut (¨) over the letter ‘a.’ ” At first glance that seemed a preposterous claim: A Scandinavian ice cream company stood accused of violating someone else’s copyright on being Scandinavian. Well, there was nothing authentically Scandinavian about Frusen Glädjé, it turned out, except the more or less Swedish-sounding name. The ice cream was made in Pennsylvania by a guy named Richard E. Smith. But it was still just as Scandinavian as Häagen-Dazs, which had been named with a Nordic-looking nonsense word by its founder, Reuben Mattus of Brooklyn, and was manufactured in New Jersey.

The astonishing growth in so-called self-storage facilities reflected an indecisiveness about moving house and throwing stuff out. Those huge rentable hangars with their rows of garage doors hadn’t even existed before 1964, when two friends in Odessa, Texas, opened A-1 U-Store-It U-Lock-It U-Carry-the-Key. By 2015, there were almost 50,000 of them, four times as many as there were Starbucks, adding up to 21 square feet of storage space for every American household.

Justice Lewis Powell wrote a decision that tried to reconcile the two sides. He accepted the logic of his colleagues who found affirmative action appalling but voted with his colleagues who found it appealing. He thought it was wrong to penalize an individual like Bakke as a means of “compensation for past discrimination.” He thought admitting people on the basis of racial quotas was wrong. But he thought it would be okay for UC Davis to achieve the same result by filling its slots the way Harvard’s undergraduate admissions program did—not through quotas but through a “new definition of diversity” that allowed administrators to use race as a “plus factor.”

Until then, most social thinkers in the Western tradition had considered diversity of the sort Powell contemplated not a condition of citizens’ rights but rather an obstacle to them: “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities,” wrote John Stuart Mill in his Considerations on Representative Government. Mill would have expected that the more loudly a country professed its commitment to diversity, the less tolerance it would have for actual dissent.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had permitted the federal government to withhold funding from school boards and other entities found to have discriminated. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (later the Department of Education) had been tasked with deciding when such cutoffs were justified. But within a decade it had invented a new task for itself that was at some remove from the one the statutes had given it. The OCR was now writing detailed standards for racial balance that courts accepted as grounds for ordering injunctive relief. Those standards were called quotas in 1970 and diversity after 1990. What is more, the OCR model was “cloned” in one federal agency after another. Since repairing race relations was taken as an emergency, the safeguards that had been in place to prevent abuses in regulation writing—from traditions of “notice and comment” to newer applications of the Administrative Procedure Act—were never applied. That innovation caused civil rights law to work in a very different way from laws in the past. For instance, no law required busing to desegregate schools, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act seemed to forbid it. But after 1966, the Justice Department’s OCR issued guidelines that set percentage targets for black student populations and opened the door to busing. Federal courts treated these guidelines as if they were law itself, and called on lower courts to follow future guidelines, which could onl...

When Ronald Reagan arrived in office, a handful of states had a holiday celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Many more had chosen not to have one. Reagan signed a federal King holiday into law in 1983. Glorious and tragic though King’s life was, the felt need to commemorate it was waning in the 1980s. The city council in San Diego had changed the name of Market Street to Martin Luther King Way in 1986, only to see voters reverse the change by a landslide margin in a referendum a year later.

For many white Americans, particularly outside the South, the King holiday did the opposite of what Eckstein said it would. It marked not the end but the beginning of shame, of an official culture that cast their country’s history as one of oppression, and its ideals of liberty as hypocrisies. The official understanding of the American race problem now came to resemble in almost every particular the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) through which Germans had for decades been confronting their responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust.

At the start of the 1987 baseball season, Ted Koppel, the host of ABC’s Nightline, invited Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis to discuss the fortieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s rookie season as the first black player in the major leagues. Perhaps Campanis was expecting a sleepy chat. Koppel confronted him with the question of why baseball had been so slow to hire blacks as managers and general managers. “I really can’t answer that question directly,” Campanis said. There were black managers, he explained, and perhaps the most prominent former players had found better opportunities elsewhere. “Baloney,” Koppel replied. “Is there still that much prejudice in baseball today?” Campanis suddenly found himself in an awkward position—defending his employers and his colleagues against a charge of bigotry. He responded with a string of clumsy answers. “They may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager,” he said. Then, perhaps as a way of parrying any sinister interpretation that might be put on the word “necessities,” he started blurting out his thoughts, which grew more and more tangled. “Why are black men not good swimmers?” he asked, before answering his own question. “Because they don’t have the buoyancy.” Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley tried to defend Campanis, but there was pointed rage from baseball hero Hank Aaron, the NAACP, the Urban League, and prominent black politicians in Los Angeles, including mayor T...

Such episodes showed the double-edged nature of civil rights. The major leagues established an affirmative action program within days of Campanis’s disgrace and hired a sociologist to lead an executive search. Retired first baseman Bill White became the first black president of the National League. The young ABC producer who had first booked Campanis, while admitting to feeling “slightly tinged by guilt,” consoled himself that all this activity on behalf of diversity was “not a bad legacy.” That is uncertain. The price of that legacy was a system of censorship. People resisted calling it by its name, but censorship it most certainly was—government censorship, adapted for an age in which all sorts of government functions, from troop provision to prison construction, were being outsourced to private entities. It worked through a civil court system that had seen its scope and punitive capacities enhanced by civil rights law. Litigation could make it embarrassing, expensive, and potentially fatal to an organization like the Los Angeles Dodgers or CBS to have anyone in their employ speculating, woolgathering, or talking off the cuff. It was an institutional innovation. It grew directly out of civil rights law. Just as affirmative action in universities and corporations had privatized the enforcement of integration, the fear of litigation privatized the suppression of disagreement, or even of speculation. The government would not need to punish directly the people who dissented ...

Of all the battles that pitted students against forces of order in 1968—from demonstrations against administrative high-handedness at Columbia University to clashes with police at the Chicago Democratic convention—the most consequential, in retrospect, was the five-month strike launched by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State University that fall. At the end of it, the university established the first ethnic studies departments in the United States. Thus began a process that would saturate the national culture with racial and gender politics. These ethnic studies departments, which had spread to virtually all universities by the end of the 1970s, aimed not so much at understanding power relations among ethnic groups as at transforming them. Another purpose was to provide a welcoming landing spot for students admitted under affirmative action programs. By the end of the 1980s, the spirit of “teach-ins” had taken over entire colleges. Antioch in Ohio instituted a policy, designed by a group called Womyn of Antioch, requiring explicit verbal assent at every stage of an escalating romantic encounter and establishing the on-campus position of “sexual offense advocate.” The Modern Language Association gave its academic conferences over to such panels as “The Muse of Masturbation.” At City College of New York, the Afrocentric scholar Leonard Jeffries laid out theories of how his own people (“sun people”) had invented virtually...

The goal of the civil rights laws, at least as they were understood by a sentimental public, was to short-circuit the sham democracies of the American South, to bring them into conformity with the Constitution. But it turned out to be harder than anticipated to distinguish between the South’s democracy and everybody else’s. If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, the letter of the law put the entire country—all its institutions—under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination.

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...

Republican National Committee chairman Rich Bond belittled a group of liberal protesters outside the Houston convention in the summer of 1992, saying “We are America! These other people are not America!” How disorienting the end of the Cold War must have been for people like Bond. Republicans would lose that election to Bill Clinton, who had spent his college years protesting Vietnam. The Republican party’s Cold Warriors would get nothing from their Cold War victory, nor would its culture warriors get anything from a decade of Reaganism. The Reagan era had in retrospect marked a consolidation, not a reversal, of the movements that began in the 1960s.

True, the “conservative” “hawks” had outlasted the “liberal” “doves” and the anti-communists the communists. And true, most of the groups now clamoring for rights and recognition had belonged, in one way or another, to the dovish side in that conflict. But that had been a matter of expedience. Campaigners for civil or women’s or gay rights had never had any particular affinity for Marxist ideas of economic organization and the Soviet state that defended them. Now, in fact, it was possible for people who had wanted a different racial or sexual order to demand it of the American system without incurring the suspicion that they were working against the country’s national security. To blacks and women, immigrants and gays, it was exhilarating. This minority coalition, pursuing a more or less unpopular set of programs, racked up victories as if it were a righteous majoritarian crusade. In the course of it, these minorities discovered, perhaps to their own surprise, that civil rights law gave them an iron grip on the levers of state power.