The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell
I wonder if Christopher Caldwell, author of Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, had the same trouble titling his book as I did with this review. The most precise, encompassing title I can think of is, “How the Civil Rights Act Ruined America,” but I’m worried that even putting that phrase at the top of a blog post will forever label me a Richard Spencer-style racist, so like hypothetical Caldwell, I played it safe.
Caldwell’s problem with the Civil Rights Act isn’t racial, but legal. By his interpretation, and supposedly the interpretations of lots of prominent legal scholars and judges prior to the modern era of PC dominance, the Civil Rights Act tore a fatal wound in the Constitution which has only festered over the last half-century. The core principle of the American Founding Fathers – not structural racism, but legal equality – was flipped on its head by a novel collection of legal precedents that formed a new “de facto Constitution.” The result over the last sixty years has been a ballooning federal government, the erosion of individual rights (as opposed to “civil rights”), a “racialization” of the population, and a deepening cultural malaise for all Americans who aren’t part of the “ascendant” coalition of wealthy liberal elites and their minority allies (which is not all minorities), at least until Trump.
Ok, that previous paragraph will definitely read as barely concealed alt-right racist bloviating to a lot of people. But I don’t get the sense that Caldwell (not to be confused with actual racist, Christopher Cantwell) is a white supremacist or anything like that. Caldwell doesn’t actually blame minorities or really anyone for the errors of the sixties. He portrays the Civil Rights Act, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, etc. as being pushed by a bunch of well-intentioned but short-sighted activists who tried to make America better, and arguably did so for a significant portion of the country, but who also accidentally triggering a whole bunch of unintended consequences that made America worse as a whole. This doesn’t mean that Caldwell wants to bring back segregation, send women back to the kitchen, and send gays into the closet, etc. Rather, he wishes these liberations were achieved in a more judicious manner with fewer second-order effects. The whole book reminds me of a really good Reddit post you might find on r/bestof or r/themotte. It’s well-written, elegant, proposes lots of fascinating ideas and trends, but it also reads a lot like storytelling. On a big Reddit post it’s generally accepted to throw out a bunch of conjecture for the sake of discussion, and it’s usually fine to not cite much research or data since you’re just having fun with ideas and want to see how they bounce off other Redditors. But Age of Entitlement seems to take this approach for the entire book. Caldwell makes massive sweeping assessments of the general political and cultural mood of the country, and usually doesn’t offer more than quotes from key figures and occasional survey data to back them up. He also makes lots of huge causal leaps between disparate political and cultural trends, often with little attempt to justify the connections beyond just-so reasoning.
Age of Entitlement offers a radically different interpretation of the last sixty years of American history than the mainstream view I learned in school. By my evaluation, Caldwell’s story is plausible though I am by no means committed to it. At the very least, I think the book offers a better explanation for a few key trends than the conventional historical telling, including:
1. The breakdown of Constitutional authority from the bedrock of American law to mere argument fodder 2. The highly ambiguous impact of the Civil Rights Act, and the massive taboo around even suggesting that it had drawbacks or unintended negative consequences 3. The current (bad) state of American race relations 4. The ever-increasing size of the government, especially government spending 5. The accepted reality of the court system operating as an unofficial legislative body 6. The polarization of politics and society
This review is my best attempt to state Caldwell’s position. I’d estimate that about 70% of the explanation comes straight from Caldwell, while the other 30% consists of my additions to glue the explanation together.
I.
Unifying Force
According to Caldwell (I’m going to be using this phrase a lot), all countries need a unifying force. For most, that force is some combination of ethnicity, language, religion, and shared history. But due to its fractious immigrant population, the United States can’t use most of these tools. Instead, the US is one of the very few countries in the world that is primarily unified by ideology. In lieu of a common bloodline or ancient history, we found our bonds in the American Revolution and the Enlightenment ideas upon which it was based. The ultimate personification of this ideological unifier was, and still is, the Constitution, the fundamental legal and existential bedrock of the United States.
What are these Enlightenment ideas? They’re notoriously hard to summarize, but I’d call them a tendency towards negative individual rights on a classical liberal basis. Meaning, all individuals have the right to live their lives as they see fit without interference from anyone else, including the government. That is, except when the government needs to do something super important for the continuity of the country. So the government can’t tell me what not to say, can’t tell me who I can’t associate with, can’t imprison me unless I have committed a crime, can’t force me to quarter soldiers, etc. The government can tax me to maintain the army and roads to keep the country protected and operational, but not to finance a religion, or support an industry, or for economic redistribution, etc.
But the Constitution is not perfect at enumerating these ideas, nor were the Founding Fathers by any means unified on them. The Constitution was born out of compromises between the federalist and antifederalist wings of the Founding Fathers which debated the optimal degree of centralization in the American government. Over almost two hundred prosperous but tumultuous years, America struggled to figure out how to stabilize the government obligations and citizen duties described in the Constitution. The nation fought over taxation, national banking, imperialism, and more direly, slavery. But, according to Caldwell, there was always an underlying deference to the fundamental Enlightenment principles of the Founding Fathers. It was always the federalists vs. the antifederalists, albeit with different names over time.
In 1887, a severe drought hit Texas and wiped out the prosperous cattle industry. Congress convened and passed the Texas Seed Bill to provide $10,000 to struggling farmers. President Grover Cleveland vetoed the bailout, and wrote to Congress:
“I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”
More than 30 years later, President Herbert Hoover held the line against government welfare during the greatest economic panic in American history. Both presidents resisted breaking political traditions for the sake of momentary expedience and relief, even in the face of enormous populist pressure.
Such principled stands for Enlightenment values and Constitutional governance died with Hoover. The Progressive Movement and then FDR’s New Deal argued for the government to take on new roles which fundamentally altered the relationship between the government and the individual. In the 1930s, FDR introduced taxpayer-funded social security and unemployment benefits which obligated the government to provide money to its citizens. Now Americans were given material benefits from the government rather than just protections. This new trend pushed the US government towards positive rights, which Caldwell calls entitlements. Such measures were not entirely unprecedented in American history, nor did they constitute a significant component of government responsibilities, nor of the American economy. To Caldwell, they were just more awkward, contradictory chunks of American governance held up by the underlying Founding Fathers principles.
However, everything would change in the 1950s when the civil rights movement would lean on these contradictions until the foundations beneath them collapsed.
The Worst Court Case in American History
In 1951, civil rights leaders threw their weight behind Brown v. Board of Education, a class lawsuit by representatives of twenty black children and their parents in Topeka, Kansas against a public school enforcing racial segregation.
Yes, according to Caldwell, Brown v. Board of Ed is the worst court case in American history. No, he doesn’t think that because he’s a massive racist who wants to segregate black children. He thinks that because, according to Caldwell, the Brown decision was not made in accordance with fair-and-balanced legal proceedings. It was made by politically motivated judges with the support of a public manipulated by a crafty PR machine intending to circumvent proper legislative procedures to push a radical agenda. Brown was the first major successful salvo from the civil rights movement, and it created the breach through which the whole movement would charge through and destroy the Constitution.
It’s All In the Game
In elementary school I was taught that Rosa Parks was a kindly old lady who wanted to sit at the front of the bus after a long, hard day at work. She was asked to move to the back of the bus to free up the best seats for white people, but she was so tired that she refused. Her mistreatment at the hands of the Montgomery bus system and ensuing arrest so incensed the public that it triggered a massive bus boycott and pushed America a step closer to ending segregation.
What I learned years later was that Rosa Parks had been a political activist for almost fifteen years prior to the famous bus incident. When she refused to get up from her bus seat in 1955, she was acting as an agent of the NAACP in the first stage of a planned city-wide boycott and lawsuit. Parks was specifically chosen for the task because she was a little old lady who would garner sympathy from the public and thereby put pressure on the powers-that-be to oppose segregation.
Of course, this doesn’t invalidate Parks’s cause, nor her bravery (it may even buttress it). But it does make the famous arrest feel a bit… inauthentic. It shifts a spontaneous thrust for justice into a calculated, coordinated campaign with a public relations focus. The public was being sold something, even if it didn’t know it.
According to Caldwell, this was the civil rights movement’s modus operandi. Sympathetic figures didn’t arise organically, rather, they were orchestrated, or at least carefully selected.
Orchestrating sympathy for the sake of PR in a broader culture war isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. After all, there surely were countless black people regularly demeaned by racist segregation laws and policies across the South, just like Rosa Parks. It didn’t hurt anyone to create a story that minimized complications and maximized sympathy for the just moral goal of ending segregation.
What troubles Caldwell about this strategy is its use in the justice system. According to Caldwell, prior to the civil rights movement’s heyday in the 1950s, this orchestration strategy was considered extremely bad form by judges and juries. It was seen as a purposeful manipulation of the legal system. Judges are supposed to be objective and focus on the letter of the law, but everyone knows they can be swayed by public opinion and personal characteristics of plaintiffs and defendants. Orchestrating a case wasn’t illegal, but it cynically went against the spirit of objective justice for which the legal system should be striving. Oddly enough, Caldwell either doesn’t bring up or doesn’t know that Plessy v. Ferguson used the orchestration strategy. Plessy was the first judicial attempt to outlaw segregation, but it tragically backfired and created the “separate but equal” clause. But Plessy happened all the way back in 1896, when civil rights and its associated movement arguably weren’t a thing. Maybe the Supreme Court was too conservative during the following fifty years to use the orchestration strategy again? I don’t know.
Either way, Brown was the first major modern civil rights case to use the orchestration strategy and set the precedent that judges were ok with manufacturing cases, even in the highest court in the land. Brown’s lawyers had combed the country for the perfect case against segregation, and they settled on literal poster children with minimized blemishes and maximized poise to elicit public sympathy… and it worked. Brown overturned an almost 60 year old ruling which had served as a lynchpin for pro-segregation law. In turn, nearly all of the major civil rights court cases – Griggs v. Duke Power, the Parks-based Browder v. Gayle, etc. – were based on highly selected or outright orchestrated representatives to sway judges and juries
The Soft Underbelly of the US Government
So what if clever civil rights activists used orchestrated sympathetic cases to boost their odds of winning lawsuits? Ending segregation was a worthy goal. Even if the means were a little phony, all is fair in love and war and stopping literal systematic racism, right?
No, not according to Caldwell. Because the prosecution of Brown was based on a broader civil rights strategy to achieve policy goals in a historically unprecedented and unconstitutional manner, thereby eroding the very basis of American law.
Prior to Brown, the civil rights movement had been trying for decades to fight segregation legislatively in Congress, but never found success. The support for segregation was far too entrenched in the South, and the rest of the country was too apathetic to throw serious political capital behind it.
In the 1950s, civil rights leaders shifted to another strategy – targeting the courts. Getting Congress to pass new laws required tremendous lobbying, political gamesmanship, and swaying the entire American electorate towards a view. But winning in the courts only required one good case. One good case could break a law painstakingly passed by Congress, or, better yet, create a legal precedent that steered countless more laws. Hence, the judicial system was the backdoor into American governance.
Of course, there was one massive obstacle to this strategy – the Constitution. The whole original purpose of the judicial branch of government was just to read laws and decide whether they abided by America’s founding legal document. The best cases and lawyers in the world wouldn’t change a law via the courts if they supported unconstitutional objectives.
That is until the rise of the legal philosophy of judicial activism. Under the old standard of judicial restraint, the Constitution was treated as a fixed set of ideas against which novel laws could easily bounce off and die. But under the theory of judicial activism, the Constitution became a living document that needed to be adapted to the times. This allowed for more and more liberal interpretations of the Constitution and potential for major shifts in the accepted constitutionality of laws.
Fortunately for the civil rights movement, the Warren Court (1953-1969) was the most liberal, judicially active Supreme Court in American history and thus created a perfect setting for the movement to spawn cases and take shots at long-standing legislation and legal precedents. Enter Brown v. Board of Ed. Prior to the case, segregation had been declared legal by the “separate but equal” doctrine in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. The 14th Amendment had declared legal equality for all classes of citizens in the US, but Plessy argued that segregating races didn’t necessarily make them legally unequal, only… you know, separated. The Supreme Court ruled that this interpretation of the Constitution was accurate, regardless of one’s feelings about racial equality.
Brown’s 1954 decision, decided by the Warren Court, overturned Plessy and rendered all government-instituted segregation unconstitutional. Which sounds great! Everyone today agrees that segregation is wrong, and even diehard libertarians don’t think the government has the right to discriminate based on race. So why would Caldwell have a problem with Brown? Because according to Caldwell, the Plessy decision was correct and the Brown decision was incorrect from a strictly Constitutional perspective. “Separate but equal” is perfectly fine from a literalist (ie. accurate) reading of the Constitution. That doesn’t mean segregation is morally good, it just means it’s constitutional.
According to Caldwell, Brown’s side in the case was trounced by any reasonable legal standard. Yet Brown won because… well, the Warren Court wanted them to win. The extremely liberal, anti-segregationist Warren Court was severely biased against Brown’s opponents, so they wrote up a bullshit legal justification to give Brown the win and judicially overturn segregation legislation.
Going outside Caldwell for a bit, it’s difficult to understate how shocking Brown was to much of the US. I’d say the decision was akin to the Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage in 1995. There was a general sense of societal movement away from segregation, but likewise there was a sizeable reactionary minority of the population which had tightened its grip on the institution over recent years. When government segregation was outlawed overnight, the South’s response was maybe a degree below armed revolt, with states indefinitely shutting down public schools and governors ordering the national guard to enforce segregation.
I most certainly don’t have the legal knowledge to evaluate Caldwell’s claim, but some Googling and Wikipediaing indicates that it’s plausible. At the time of Brown especially, there seems to have been a strong backlash against the decision from the legal field. From the Wikipedia entries on Brown and the Warren Court:
William Rehnquist wrote a memo titled "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" when he was a law clerk for Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In his memo, Rehnquist argued: "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed."
Chief Justice Warren's reasoning was broadly criticized by contemporary legal academics with Judge Learned Hand decrying that the Supreme Court had "assumed the role of a third legislative chamber" and Herbert Wechsler finding Brown impossible to justify based on neutral principles.
Some Constitutional originalists, notably Raoul Berger in his influential 1977 book "Government by Judiciary," make the case that Brown cannot be defended by reference to the original understanding of the 14th Amendment. They support this reading of the 14th Amendment by noting that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 did not ban segregated schools and that the same Congress that passed the 14th Amendment also voted to segregate schools in the District of Columbia.
[Richard] Fallon says that, “Some thrilled to the approach of the Warren Court. Many law professors were perplexed, often sympathetic to the Court's results but skeptical of the soundness of its constitutional reasoning. And some of course were horrified."
If the Brown decision was blatantly unconstitutional, then it was essentially a power grab by the civil rights movement. A power grab with a morally good objective, but a power grab nonetheless.
Remember, to Caldwell the Constitution had been the unifying force of the United States since its creation. By callously ignoring the Constitution, the civil rights movement was striking at the very bedrock of the US government, culture, and sense of civic unity. With Brown, the civil rights movement won a victory, but at what cost?
The New Constitution
If Brown tore a hole in the constitution, the 1964 Civil Rights Act tore it in half. This one piece of legislation changed America more than literally any other bill in history.
Yes, I just said that the civil rights movement always failed in the legislature and thus shifted to a judicial strategy, but Caldwell argues that the Civil Rights Act was the exception that proved the rule. The bill only passed because civil rights were being championed by America’s beloved, young, handsome, charismatic president, John F. Kennedy, who then took a bullet to the head in front of his wife and garnered an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy from the public (I’m told my Irish Catholic grandmother literally built a shrine to JFK in her living room). Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson was a notoriously smooth political operator who capitalized on the national mood to push the Civil Rights Act through Congress in Kennedy’s name.
Brown only ended segregation in government institutions. The Civil Rights Act was a massive pile of new laws and regulations which sought to end segregation in private institutions. As any good libertarian will tell you, there’s a world of difference between those two goals. The public schools targeted by the Brown case were using taxpayer funds to force students to abide by racist rules at an institution they were forced to attend. But the racist segregation rules maintained by thousands of restaurants, cafes, stores, social clubs, etc., were instituted on private property by American citizens. And in America, private property is sacred; the government isn’t supposed to be able to force someone to surrender, alter, or use their private property in a particular way, except for the sake of the literal continuity of the nation.
Even if the Brown decision was Constitutionally unfounded, at least the ruling only negated a precedent derived from a post-Civil War Amendment. But the Civil Rights Act was a direct assault on the 1st Amendment, or at least some of the earliest and most well-founded precedents that the American judicial system derived from it. The 1st Amendment textually guarantees Americans the right to not have their speech censored by the government, not to be prohibited from practicing a religion, and not to be prohibited from assembling. But a long-understood implication of the amendment was the right to free association. That is, Americans can speak, meet, and interact with whomever they want, or avoid interacting with whomever they don’t want to.
There was no way around it: the Civil Rights Act violated the right of free association. Its laws gave the government the power to force individuals to associate with people they didn’t want to. A store owner couldn’t choose who he sold to, a country club couldn’t choose its membership, a vendor couldn’t choose its supplier, etc. Again, the motives were good (to end systematic racism), but to Caldwell, the US government had never engaged in such a direct violation of individual rights outside of wartime.
One point Caldwell repeatedly hammers home is that nobody understood what they were getting with civil rights. Nobody even really knew what the term meant. Ending segregation was a noble goal, but seemingly neither the voters, politicians, nor even the civil rights advocates understood what the government would need to do to achieve that end.
Consider the 1971 case of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., which I’m pretty sure Caldwell thinks is the second-worst American court case of all time. For decades, Duke’s black employees had only worked in the company's low-paid labor department. It’s not clear, to my knowledge, if this was due to actual racial bias or simply a coincidence. In 1955, Duke added a requirement that employees must have a high school diploma to work outside the labor department.
In 1965, the Civil Rights Act passed, and one of its many laws prohibited racial discrimination in hiring. The bill also had a provision that if a company gated jobs with tests or requirements (such as needing to have a high school diploma), the government could challenge the company to prove the requirements are “reasonably related” to the job.
Not wanting to get sued into oblivion, Duke hedged its employment structure by adding two tests to the application for non-labor department jobs: a mechanical aptitude test and the Wonderlick test (a form of IQ test).
Nevertheless, Duke got sued for hiring discrimination. From Wikipedia:
Blacks were almost ten times less likely than whites to meet these new employment and transfer requirements. According to the 1960 Census, while 34% of white males in North Carolina had high-school diplomas, only 18% of blacks did. The disparities of aptitude tests were far greater; with the cutoffs set at the median for high-school graduates, 58% of whites passed, compared to 6% of blacks.
Again, it’s not clear if the Duke executives really were racists trying to keep blacks confined to menial labor, or if they were just trying to put employees where they were best suited and tried to avoid a lawsuit with the new tests.
Either way, Duke lost the lawsuit. Once again, Caldwell thinks this was a clear case of motivated judges ignoring textual law for a preferred outcome. Duke argued that having a high school diploma and sufficiently high scores on a mechanical aptitude test and IQ test were “reasonably related” to working as an executive, accountant, or engineer at a power plant. The Supreme Court’s judgement compared this argument to the Fox and Stork Aesop’s Fable, where a fox and stork attempt to drink from the same vase, but its narrow opening only allows the stork through.
The Griggs decision represented a massive shifting of civil rights goal posts. The Civil Rights Act already placed the burden on employers and business owners to prove they weren’t racist. But now even providing objectively equal opportunities to all races wasn’t enough to prove non-racism. An employer also had to guarantee that outcomes of its sales or employment were racially equal, regardless of how that might adversely impact the very function of the entity (ie. putting unqualified individuals into engineering positions) or impose costs on the entity (ie. forcing Duke to expend resources to search for qualified black engineers).
To Caldwell, the Civil Rights Act itself was just the beginning. A string of major Supreme Court cases over the following decade (most of which used the orchestration strategy) would expand and cement the bill’s power. Griggs was was just one of many cases that imposed radical new rules on the American legal system and trampled the old conception of individual rights. Eventually, this network of laws, regulations, and judicial precedence amassed to become a new “de facto Constitution,” which replaced the old “de jure Constitution.”
The old de jure Constitution was based on the Enlightenment-based individual negative rights conceived by the Founding Fathers. The new de facto Constitution was based on progressive positive civil rights and their resulting entitlements conceived by the civil rights movement.
Reconstruction 2.0 - The Largest Undertaking in the History of the American Government
According to Caldwell, desegregation and the civil rights project was the largest undertaking in the history of the American government.
He doesn’t say that flippantly or hyperbolically, he means it literally. He believes desegregation, or Reconstruction 2.0, was a bigger marshaling of resources and execution of policy than the first Reconstruction, the New Deal, or fighting the Civil War, World War I, or World War II.
Granted, Caldwell conceptualizes “desegregation” a bit differently than most people. He argues that it started with Brown, exploded with the Civil Rights Act, entrenched with ensuing court cases, and then continued with affirmative action, the Great Society, the War on Drugs, the increasing government regulatory burden on the economy, rapidly expanding national debt, and the government-encouraged ballooning of financial credit.
To take a step back – civil rights activists told a whiggish historical story of America starting as a noble ideal of equality muddied by systematic racism and sexism. But over time, America had shed its ignorance and slowly raised more of its population to full rights-bearing citizenship. The civil rights movement positioned itself as the next giant thrust in this story – the end of de jure racism and the bringing of America’s black population up to equal status with whites.
To achieve racial equality, the movement needed the support of non-Southern whites to use federal power to force civil rights on the South. But in Slate Star Codex terms, Southern blacks were a far group to non-Southern whites. These whites sympathized with blacks and their struggle against oppression, but this injustice was happening on the far side of the country where everything was weird and culturally different anyway. Northern whites didn’t understand in any deep, meaningful sense what segregation was or what would happen when it ended. Most assumed that ending segregation would just stop police officers from smashing black people over the head with batons in the street, and stop racist restaurant owners from enforcing their petty service discrimination.
But Caldwell these Northern whites were well-intentioned, but short-sighted.
An analogy - when ending slavery was debated in mid-19th century America, one of the main points of contention was what would happen to slaves once they were freed. Yes, they’d be free, and that was great, but then what? Through the worst form of systematic oppression, 4 million ex-slaves would start their free lives undereducated and impoverished. Could they survive on the labor market? Would they be paid a fair wage? Would they turn to criminality? Reconstruction was an attempt to solve these problems and start free blacks on a stable footing, but a largely unsuccessful one.
Caldwell’s argument follows a similar line of reasoning. The oppression of blacks under Jim Crow wasn’t as bad as slavery, but American blacks were still massively disproportionately undereducated, impoverished, and now in the penal system. Only outlawing segregation, as the white electorate thought they were doing with the Civil Rights Act, would be the equivalent of liberating slaves and then leaving them to their own devices.
In other words, the Civil Rights Act needed a Reconstruction 2.0 – a set of laws and aggressive policy initiatives to support liberated blacks.
However, there is a fundamental difference between the Reconstruction of the 1860s-80s, and the Reconstruction 2.0 of the 1960s-present. The first was based on legal protection, the second was based on civil protection.
By the 1960s, the gains blacks could make legally were at their end. With the Brown decision, which said that the government couldn't racially discriminate, blacks had attained full de jure legal equality with whites. Private actors could still discriminate, but only within the confines of their own property rights. But clearly the country was not enjoying racial equality in 1954. Even if Brown was fully enforced on state and local governments (it wasn’t), there was still a non-governmental regime of segregation across the South making society de facto racially unequal, regardless of de jure laws.
In other words, civil rights advocates had gone as far as they could toward achieving racial equality through traditional legal rights. If they wanted to push for more equality, they had to go past the law and into civil society. That is, they had to figure out a way to change social structures rather than just government laws and their enforcement.
Thus the Civil Rights Act and the ensuing Reconstruction 2.0 project was a series of attempts by the government to use the power of the state to take control of civil society. It was no longer enough for the government to make laws based on protecting people’s old-fashioned rights of property and safety; now the government was obligated to provide people with entitlements. Specifically, racial minorities were given entitlements (affirmative action, welfare, etc.) meant to boost their social status to close the racial gap.
One of the first major entitlements the Civil Rights Act created was the right to service and employment from private parties. The Act made discrimination illegal even within all other proper legal boundaries, like one’s private property. And with the Griggs decision, even non-discriminatory actions were illegal if their result resembled theoretically discriminatory actions. The old right of an individual to use his property as he saw fit was trumped by the new entitlement of other individuals to derive benefits from someone else’s property regardless of the wishes of the owner.
The Great Society and the War on Drugs were the next stages in the government’s attempts to steer civil society after the Civil Rights Act. The Great Society was framed as a “war on poverty,” but of all the groups in America, which was most impoverished? Blacks. The introduction of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security expansion, and a huge increase in domestic wealth transfers were all intended to improve the material conditions of blacks to get them closer to racial equality. Plus Medicare “spurred the racial integration of thousands of waiting rooms, hospital floors, and physician practices by making payments to health care providers conditional on desegregation.” The War on Drugs was a moren even more misguided effort, but nonetheless was a well-intentioned attempt to rid black communities of a menace connected to poverty, crime, and undereducation.
The idea that these massive welfare programs were really a form of racial reparations might seem like a big stretch. According to Caldwell, pretty much every major domestic policy the federal government conducted after the Civil Rights Act all the way up to the present day has been an attempt to bring American blacks up to the level of American whites, or a consequence of it.
This is one of many areas where Caldwell gets very fuzzy and doesn’t do a great job drawing the causal arrows. But by my understanding: Of course neither the Great Society nor War on Drugs were explicitly targeted at blacks in the way the Civil Rights Act was. And Caldwell doesn’t suggest there was some sort of conspiracy to trick the American people into giving their tax dollars to blacks, or anything like that. Rather, he frames it as something like a difference between de jure rights and national focus.
Prior to the Civil Rights Act, only white Americans had full political rights, and therefore had full national focus, or the attention of the government. The American poverty rate was fairly low, especially if you only counted whites. Black poverty rates had been declining at least since WW2, and quite quickly at that, but were still 4X higher than white rates by the Civil Rights Act.
Once blacks were given full political rights by Brown and the Civil Rights Act, there was suddenly a huge new portion of the American polity living in abject poverty. The rate of poverty amongst active participants in the political process spiked even though white poverty rates hadn’t changed. This gave far greater impetus to the American electorate’s default concern for poverty, and therefore inspired the passage of the welfare programs in the Great Society. A similar argument could be made about the (perceived) impact of drug use on black vs. white communities and the War on Drugs.
The Great Society, War on Drugs, and a host of other minor domestic initiatives would have been unthinkable before the 1960s. America was the last major Western nation to adopt government welfare programs, and only did so on a small scale in the depths of the Great Depression. But by the 1960s, the federal government was running a large wealth redistribution system despite a booming economy and the country's emergence as the preeminent global power.
Once again, Caldwell describes these policy shifts as the creation of entitlements. Americans no longer expected the federal government to merely fund a military and court system on 3% of GDP. Rather, Americans became entitled to unemployment insurance, social security, medical insurance, food stamps, drug-free neighborhoods, and eventually cheap credit.
Putting aside the national mood and contextual circumstances, the most fundamental reason why America never had a Great Society, War on Drugs, or Civil Rights Act before the 1960s was that they would be considered unconstitutional. I don’t just mean that in the legal sense, but in the broader spirit sense. These policies went against the principles of the Founding Fathers and Enlightenment-based negative rights. Only a blatant reinterpretation of the Founding Fathers and a philosophical turn towards positive rights and entitlements could permit them. But that’s exactly what the civil rights movement did – it ended the age of rights protection and began the age of entitlement.
Caldwell asserts that this fundamental restructuring of American rights was not the intention of the American electorate in the 1960s and onward. It may have been the intention of civil rights leaders and some political elite allies, but Caldwell is unclear on that. Though he doesn’t use the term, slippery slope seems most apt. Americans were on board with giving blacks legal rights, but once blacks were full citizens, they had to be compensated for injustices, and materially provided for, and protected from harmful drugs, and so on. This resulted in countless massive legislative projects and court cases running through the system which irrevocably reshaping the United States. No one drove this whole process, it just happened once the ball got rolling.
The False Prophet
According to the orthodox political understanding of American history, the hippies took over America in the 1960s and the US went from the austere WW2 mindset of the 1940s and 50s to the free-loving, soft governance of civil rights, welfare, and entitlements. But after this euphoria broke down into malaise in the 70s, Ronald Reagan rallied conservatives across the country, especially the long-suffering middle-class everymen of the “moral majority,” and closed the door on all that hippy nonsense with his presidency in the 80s. Reagan made people proud to be American again as he stood up to the Soviets, cut taxes, brought capitalism back, and halted (though didn’t reverse) the ever-radicalizing social goals of progressives.
Caldwell claims this view of Reagan is half right and half completely inverted. Reagan did indeed lead a coalition of conservatives against the progressive tide, and he got them some genuine wins in government, but in doing so, Reagan actually entrenched the civil rights movement and Reconstruction 2.0 while further undermining the Constitution and the original American vision.
According to Caldwell, it’s possible that Reagan and his advisers really did try to roll back many of the reforms of the 1960s, at least at first. They didn’t try to end the Civil Rights Act (the American people had accepted it fully by the 80s), but they may have tried to cut the ever-expanding budget deficit, cut the Great Society programs, and scale back economic regulations. There were even attempts to halt affirmative action and some of the more over-reaching aspects of anti-discrimination laws by appointing conservative judges.
However, Reagan soon discovered an intractable law of political science – it’s vastly easier to create an entitlement than end one. After fewer than two decades, Medicare, Medicaid, and the other welfare enhancements were thoroughly entrenched in the economy. Taking money away from poor people was a political non-starter. Going after affirmative action, even through the courts, was equally fruitless in the early days of political correctness. But Reagan had to give his constituents something. He couldn’t stop the entitlements of the progressives like he promised but he could give the conservatives their own entitlements.
Thus Reagan pushed the first significant tax cuts since the end of World War II. But the difference between these tax cuts and pretty much every other tax cut in American history up to that point was that they weren’t matched by spending cuts. On the contrary, spending increased significantly (from 20.1% of GDP on average in the 1970s to over 21% in the 80s despite a rapidly expanding GDP) while revenue net-stagnated across Reagan's terms. The result (from Reagan's Wikipedia):
During Reagan's presidency, the federal debt held by the public nearly tripled in nominal terms, from $738 billion to $2.1 trillion. This led to the U.S. moving from the world's largest international creditor to the world's largest debtor nation. Reagan described the new debt as the "greatest disappointment" of his presidency.
Reagan was letting the American people have their cake and eat it too. They could have a safety net and massive military, but also low taxes and a roaring economy. Everybody wins! Except whoever has to pay for all this stuff in the future.
Thus to Caldwell, Reagan’s reforms were an extension of the age of entitlement. His novel addition was the creation of entitlement to a high-spending government without having to pay for it with taxes. And like all entitlements, this policy was super easy to implement and virtually impossible to stop, hence almost every regime since Reagan’s has increased its deficit spending, and there is no end in sight to the fiscal irresponsibility.
Reagan’s worst crime of all was that he may have permanently cemented the age of entitlement into the American government and culture. Essentially, the Reagan reforms signed a peace treaty between progressives and non-progressives. The treaty said (in an abstract, unwritten manner) that progressives could keep all their civil rights reforms and welfare as long as they gave everyone else tax cuts and pro-American rhetoric. Reagan’s regime was the last, best hope to halt the perpetual undermining of the Constitution in America, but instead he made peace with the enemy and reinforced their errors.
This peace treaty more-or-less held up until the disgruntled masses were so pissed off by collaborating elites and the illusion of choice that they thrust a certain populist demagogue into the most powerful office on earth.
Pandora’s Box
Everything above this point explains Caldwell’s central thesis with a lot of my own framing and arguments acting as the mortar between points. Basically, the civil rights movement expanded political consideration to blacks, and this triggered a fundamental restructuring of the American foundation for political rights which promoted 50+ years of increasing entitlements for the American people. But I don’t want to give the impression that Caldwell’s analysis focuses only on American blacks. They were the focal point of the Civil Rights Act and Caldwell seems to believe they are still the focal point of progressivism today, but he argues that a similar trend occurred with other groups, especially women, gays, and immigrants.
I won’t go into these trends too much, but the basic idea is that these groups used the ideological breach forged by the civil rights movement to first gain their own political status, and then push the government to try to steer civil society to their own ends.
By my reading, a lot of these causal chains are even fuzzier than Caldwell’s connections between the civil rights movement and individual Reconstruction 2.0 policies. All three groups utilized the anti-discrimination framework created by the Civil Rights Act and its ensuing court cases for their own benefits. Women especially used a lot of the same rhetoric as blacks in the civil rights era to increase their power in civil society. Immigrants got their big push with liberalization in the 1980s as part of Reagan’s compromise. And gays copied the best practices of the successful civil rights campaigns of blacks, women, and immigrants to craft their own uber-efficient civil rights effort in the 90s and 2000s.
These smaller civil rights movements all forced the government to give these groups their own array of entitlements. Women attained gains in abortion and divorce settlement. Immigrants got multiple amnesty rounds. Gays are the most recent and haven’t gained as much as the others, though Caldwell makes an interesting (if somewhat conspiratorial) argument that gay marriage was primarily driven by wealthy gays trying to avoid inheritance taxes. All three groups got considerable anti-discrimination support from the courts, and are now considered protected classes.
II.
The Costs of Entitlement
Let’s say you’re not a hardcore classical liberal or libertarian, and you think sacrificing or reinterpreting the Constitution for the sake of giving blacks, women, immigrants, and gays equal rights is a worthy trade-off. And further, you think a welfare state and anti-discrimination laws are essential parts of modern governance, and not some weird, anomalous attempt by the government to forcibly reshape society that causes untold negative second-order effects. Given that the vast majority of Americans fall into this camp, why does Caldwell’s analysis hold any water? Why should we care that legal norms conceived over 200 years ago have changed for the sake of equality?
According to Caldwell, you should care because this change has basically caused every major domestic problem in America over the past 50 years. The legal system, culture, economy, and lifestyle of America has been permanently damaged to everyone's detriment. Before I describe how that’s the case, I want to throw out the massive caveat that Caldwell isn’t in favor of rewinding America back to the 1950s, and especially not to its segregationist regime. In fact, Caldwell has a whole chapter about how much he hates the 1950s not just for its racism, but for sort of militarizing America and priming it for failure. Age of Entitlement is a critique without proposed solutions. I’ll try to list and summarize the cursed legacy of the 1960s. As with the above, this is a mixture of Caldwell’s arguments and my own extrapolations of them, at about a 70-30 ratio.
Racialization
One of the worst consequences of the age of entitlement is what Caldwell calls racialization. Essentially, Americans are highly aware of race in a political and civil sense, and have become ever more so since the 1960s to the point of obsession.
Caldwell claims that pre-1960s America was set on a trend of declining race consciousness. This seems hard to believe with the Southern segregationist regimes in full force, but it’s plausible in the rest of the country where blacks had had far longer to integrate into normal society. Then in the 1950s, the civil rights movement purposefully raised race consciousness for blacks and whites alike to draw attention to the injustice blacks suffered. Whites who bought this message assumed that race consciousness would decline again after the Civil Rights Act as blacks were raised to equal status with whites, but instead the opposite occurred. The Act, its court cases, the Great Society, the Drug War, and all the other components of Reconstruction 2.0 rose in concert with race consciousness, though it’s not clear which direction the causal arrow went.
This is a point that has been hashed out ad nauseum in anti-SJW circles, but it doesn’t seem societally healthy to maintain high race consciousness. The entire point of the original civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s arguments in particular were that whites and blacks were not fundamentally different and therefore should be treated the same. But cultural racialization ensures an obsessive focus on race which only serves to highlight evermore minute differences. As a result, what progress has been made in achieving civil racial equality is marginalized as goalposts are constantly shifted and new benchmarkers made. To be clear, this is by no means entirely the fault of the civil rights movement and progressives. The reactionaries who opposed the civil rights movement most certainly fanned the flames of racialization and encouraged racial minorities to adopt id-pol stances. I think Caldwell actually downplays this a bit, and doesn’t talk enough about the very strong, very real backlash to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s and its enduring effects. I think we can even reframe part of Caldwell’s thesis as the civil rights movement kicked the hornets nest too hard with no tangible objective. And that’s how we end up with our confused, chaotic, exhausting present racial-sphere. There is no endgame. No solution. No compromise. There are just ever more racial battlefields to pit Americans against one another.
White Malaise
A more recent unintended consequence of racialization is white malaise.
According to Caldwell, the white electorate has always been vaguely aware that the Civil Rights Act and its ensuing court cases gave non-white Americans a de jure and de facto advantage in the American legal system. For instance, we all know that a white-owned restaurant throwing out a black patron would attract vastly more scrutiny and ire than if the races were reversed. And affirmative action is a form of literal institutionalized racism, both in its private use that’s protected by the courts, and its use in public institutions.
Supposedly, this direct legal inequality was tolerated by whites because of a perceived inverted civil inequality. Whites had higher per capita incomes, lower poverty rates, more education, and less criminality, so letting blacks have special privileges in the legal system seemed like an ok compromise.
But over the last decade, that perceived paradigm has faltered. Yes, all those racial wealth metrics still hold when abstracted to the entire country, but a significant portion of the white population isn’t feeling that advantage anymore. For the first time in pretty much ever, white American life expectancy is declining. The days of the crack epidemic in black inner-cities are behind us, and now we fear the white rural opioid epidemic. Deindustrialization has robbed huge swaths of the white rural countryside of its economic vitality. White labor force participation rates have plateaued.
Yes, the black population continues to struggle with poverty, undereducation, and criminality as much as ever in the aggregate, but there’s a pervasive sense among many Americans that the national focus is still pointed at blacks at the expense of whites. Affirmative action is still permitted, and racial minorities get lots of special protections in the courts that whites don’t. All the civil society intrusions created to promote blacks to racial equality remain while no reciprocated assistance is offered to mainstream whites despite their decline.
To massively compound this problem, political correctness and social justice have become deeply entrenched in mainstream American culture, particularly the media, entertainment, and academia. This phenomenon is a radicalized cultural outgrowth of the civil rights movement and Reconstruction 2.0. It has picked up where the court cases, Great Society, and Drug War have left off to enforce sweeping changes into civil society ostensibly for the sake of racial equality. But while state institutions are at worst ignoring the decline of white middle America, the SJW movement is exacerbating it by pushing American law and civil society into higher racial consciousness and more anti-white attitudes.
Caldwell does frame the white reaction to Reconstruction 2.0 and SJWism as a growing sense of white racial consciousness. But he portrays it as less of a simmering anger and more of a malaise. He sees a broad resentment growing in the white population, but not against blacks or other racial minorities, but rather against the coastal elites who harnessed the political and cultural trends started by the civil rights movement to entrench themselves as elites. The most extreme manifestations of PC we’ve seen in the universities and media is emblematic of this divide. Impoverished, undereducated, overincarcerated inner-city blacks aren’t trying to get people fired for telling jokes, and they aren’t whining about safe spaces. That’s the domain of individuals of all races at Ivy League schools and powerful tech companies.
Supposedly that’s why America got President Donald Trump. The white majority didn’t elect a bona fide racist or daring revolutionary, but an obnoxious troll. There is no real resentment of minorities, so the white majority doesn’t want to overturn society and its dominant socio-political trends of the last 50 years. They just want to break the elite which has ossified and exacerbated the worst manifestations of these trends.
Granted, this is a whole lot of speculative trend-building conjecture on Caldwell’s part. Many people could read the preceding paragraphs and declare it to be a delusional inversion of a reality wherein America has grown progressively more racist in reaction to rising black status, and Trump is the ultimate manifestation of white people's rage at losing their place at the top of the social hierarchy.
I slightly lean towards Caldwell’s take, though I’d guess that both sides assign far more socio-political coherency than there really is in reality.
Judicial Politicization
Earlier I described how the civil rights movement pioneered a practice of manufacturing or highly selecting incidents to be used for court cases to curry sympathy from the public. This strategy might sound familiar to anyone who knows the 2005 case, Kelo v. City of New London, or anything the Institute for Justice does. IJ isn’t a civil rights group, but an organization that uses the civil rights movement’s judicial strategy for libertarian policy goals. The Institute scours the country for maximally sympathetic individuals wronged by government regulations and sues on their behalf in the hopes of using the particulars of the case to sway public opinion to their side. For instance, they’ve defended private hair braiders and florists from obstructionist bureaucrats trying to stop dangerous maniacs from touching hair and arranging flowers without licenses.
I personally think the Institute for Justice is doing great work. But Caldwell would point to it as evidence that the entire judicial system has been hopelessly politicized. The civil rights movement moved much of the legislature’s lawmaking power to the court system, established orchestrated case-building as an accepted norm, and entrenched the judicial system as a backdoor to American governance. As a result, the judicial system has been reorganized around PR battles backed by powerful special interest groups dumping money behind particular cases for their own ends. So now all sides of the political spectrum battle for control over the courts, from libertarians like the Institute for Justice to religious organizations grabbing their own anti-discrimination victories. Witness the perpetual war over appointing justices to the Supreme Court. Legal issues as big as the legalization of abortion have been entirely ceded by Congress to the courts, so the right and left must fight and die on the judicial hill at every opportunity. Indeed, Caldwell considered Roe v. Wade the final death blow to judicial impartiality.
According to Caldwell, prior to the 1960s, judges were appointed by the same criteria as sheriffs in Wild West frontier towns in movies. They were supposed to be stern, incorruptible, honorable, honest men who abided by their sworn duty of upholding the Constitution. The idea of a politician appointing a judge because of his ideology or politics was considered a soft form of corruption.
I have no idea if that’s true; it sounds vastly over-idealized to me. But still, there’s probably a kernel of truth to it. Do we really want the judicial system to be a weird pseudo-legislative body where lawyers backed by special interests try to convince clueless juries and politically appointed judges to make our laws?
Financial Time Bomb
Caldwell argues that Reagan threw America into a dangerous cycle of deficit spending for the sake of maintaining the civil rights movement’s social programs while cutting taxes to appease his conservative constituents. But Caldwell’s causal arrow from Reconstruction 2.0 to ruining America doesn’t stop there. Because how does America pay for deficit spending? By borrowing and the Federal Reserve’s production of cheap credit.
The perpetual flood of cheap money hot off the Fed’s brrrrrring money printer fundamentally reshaped the American economy into a hyper-leveraged debt-ridden house of cards which has ushered in a new age of booms and busts that America was supposed to have left behind 100 years ago. After a mild recession in the early 90s, we had the collapse of the dot-com bubble, then the epic Great Recession, and now (as of writing this) we might be staring into another economic precipice as the corona virus grounds the global economy to a halt. To Caldwell, this can all be reframed as America handing the country’s economic reigns to the cowboys of Wall Street, just so the government can have cheap credit to finance deficit spending on entitlement programs we can’t afford all while building towards the greatest debt crisis in human history. The scariest part of all is that there is no solution. No president or Congress is going to get elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility. No one is going to slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the three expenditure items that take up about 2/3rds of the federal budget unless they have some sort of political kamikaze death wish.
Cutting budgets is always hard for the government, but the US federal government did successfully cut a significant portion of its expenditure after the Civil War, World War I, and to a lesser extent, World War II. But the US has never successfully cut its budget during the age of entitlement. It doesn’t matter how good or bad the economy is, or whether the US is waging a war, expenditure simply won’t go down anymore. Unless the US government is some sort of economic reality-warping anomaly that can borrow evermore money forever, all these unfunded liabilities will have to be paid for eventually, either by higher taxes, inflation, or something even more extreme. And to Caldwell, this dire end will be a direct consequence of the age of entitlement.
Coming Apart
The greatest impact of the 1960s on America is hard to explain, and Caldwell doesn’t even attempt to summarize it succinctly. By my best conceptualization, Cadwell believes that the civil rights movement undermined the longstanding unifying cultural forces that tied the racially, ethnically, ideologically diverse American population together. The result is an American culture that is more polarized, divisive, and melancholic than ever before. Basically, now everyone hates each other.
One of the great things about Enlightenment-based negative individual rights is that everyone can have them without conflict. “My rights end where your rights begin,” as the saying goes. But the same is not true of entitlements. If one American is entitled to a welfare check, then another American is forced to pay it. If one American is entitled to a job, then another American is forced to provide it. Thus, legal rights and civil society have become a zero-sum game. And as in all zero-sum games, people fight over finite resources. Or in this case, Americans fight over finite entitlements.
This is why America's political system has descended into polarization. There is no unifying basis or goal for American governance anymore. Protection of individual rights isn’t the ultimate objective, but at best a right-wing talking point. The screaming pundits on Fox and MSNBC are symptoms, not causes. They constantly shout and insult because all their side can do is claim their piece of the entitlement pie and desperately fight off the other side. This fight extends beyond the political sphere and deep into civil society where all culture is political. All Twitter users can wield mobs or be crushed by them based on the right or wrong utterances. All Netflix tv shows make political statements with the racial composition of their casts.
This is an America addicted to entitlements: a divided, enraged, ever-fighting America. The fights occur along racial, class, ideological, and many more lines, but most importantly everyone needs to fight. Because if you’re not winning entitlements, you’re paying for them.
III.
An Alcoholic Aside
Without going too much into a tangent, I find the case study of substance prohibition to be an interesting parallel to Caldwell’s arguments which he unfortunately doesn’t address.
Various drugs had endured a wide variety of legal classifications in America throughout the 19th century, but enforcement on restrictions or bans were always lax. Americans just didn’t seem to care enough about substance abuse to do anything about it.
That is until the rise of the Progressives in early 20th century America. The temperance movement aggressively campaigned against the evils of alcohol consumption, which supposedly (and not unreasonably) caused unemployment, crime, spousal/child abuse, sickness, and premature death. In 1920, the Progressives achieved an enormous and unprecedented victory by successfully outlawing the sale of alcohol in the United States. According to Caldwell’s world view, this would constitute a massive violation of the fundamental principles of the Founding Fathers and individual rights.
However, unlike the blatantly unconstitutional Civil Rights Act and its supporting court cases (at least in Caldwell’s view) the massive restriction on liberty instituted by alcohol prohibition was achieved by a legitimate Constitutional process. The Progressives couldn’t pass a law as blatantly unconstitutional as alcohol prohibition, nor could they brute force their way through the courts without support from wild activist judges. Instead, they went through the correct process and changed the Constitution itself with the passage of the 18th Amendment via 2/3rds majority in Congress.
Though alcohol consumption rates fell surprisingly steeply, drinking was still widespread, and 1920s America gained a culture of notable licentiousness and debauchery known as the “roaring 20s.” Respect for the rule of law plummeted as speakeasies sprung up to supply the newly elicit substance. Organized crime boomed and gave birth to the American Mafia.
Many Americans considered prohibition to be a noble experiment, but with crime ballooning and drink rates creeping back to the pre-prohibition levels, public sentiment decisively turned against the policy. In 1933, alcohol prohibition was ended through Constitutional means with the passage of the 21st Amendment. So, a minority of Americans wanted to introduce a massive change to society which would directly violate contemporary law. This minority got enough other Americans onboard with their plan to enact their dream policy through the righteous, approved legal channel ordained by the country’s founding document. Americans found that they didn’t like the policy, and went through the same legal channel to end the policy.
I believe this is what Caldwell wishes the civil rights movement had done. If the Civil Rights Act, or some alternative form of it, had been passed via a Constitutional Amendment, then it would have required a larger degree of support from the voting population. As a result, it would have been less radical, and wouldn’t have carried the array of expansionary court cases with it. Plus if the American people decided they didn’t like all or part of the Amendment, they would have a clear pathway to reversing it with another Constitutional Amendment, rather than having to slay the hydra of a million court precedents and legislatively-imposed regulations.
I’m curious if there are any other issues or policies where the US people and government went through a similar arc. I’m not sure.
IV.
Priors Adjustment
As I said all the way at the start of this essay, I don’t know if I buy much of the story in Age of Entitlement. Caldwell makes a lot of huge claims which would take a dozen more books on legal history, legal theory, and political science to thoroughly prove, and he doesn’t really put much effort into demonstrating the causal chains himself.
Nevertheless, I found Age of Entitlement fascinating. The main effect it had on me was to lower my confidence in basic, foundational history that I learned all the way back in grade school and haven’t seriously thought about since. Caldwell doesn’t present a ton of evidence, but he tells a compelling story; and in retrospect, the level of evidence and storytelling is about the same as what I was taught in school prior to college.
The book also made me further reevaluate the ideological priors of my understanding of the standard historical orthodoxy. Now more than ever, I get the sense that a lot of historical analysis, especially social analysis, is done at the level of Caldwell or modern political pundits, with lots of conjecture and storytelling used to tie together distant data points with strands built from ideological preconceptions.
I’m sure Caldwell is wrong about a lot, but he’s spot-on about how the 1960s era is understood and taught in America. His descriptions of textbooks and teachers closely mirrored my own experiences. It’s easy to see how predominant social norms surrounding race, welfare, and the legacy of civil rights could make a historical explanation like Caldwell’s completely radioactive in any American school. Even considering such ideas would bring down a deluge of accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.
Maybe that’s what all history is: weaving together data points with ideology. Whatever ideology has dominance in a particular setting gets its story told.