The Age of Entitlement

 

Christopher Caldwell, “The Age of Entitlement: America Since The Sixties,” Simon and Schuster, 2020, 279 pp.

Caldwell is an American conservative intellectual.  In this book he attempts to make the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead  left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and led finally to Trump in the White House.  The author has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen and unintended consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. He shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas, two incompatible political systems, of what it means to play by the rules.  He maintains that changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core,” created “a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.” That new order, he argues, emerged from an alliance between traditionally marginalized groups on the one hand, and “judicial elites and civic educators” on the other. Left behind were “traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture.”

He goes on to argue that the “poisonous conflict” that infects today’s political culture took root during what he calls the “civil rights regime” of the 1960s, which precipitated the nation’s calamitous decline. Through that lens, Caldwell traces the origins of what, in his view, are today’s biggest problems, from same-sex marriage and Black Lives Matter to the persistent appeal of President Trump among non-elite whites.

My Notes:

Pg. 5:  U.S. anti-communist military adventures diminished once communism began to collapse in 1989; now the US assumed the role as the keeper of the whole world’s peace, as well as enforcer of ethical codes for a new international order, sometimes called the ‘global economy.’

Pg. 6:  The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution.  They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.  Much of what we have called ‘polarization’ or ‘incivility’ in recent years is something more grave—it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it, or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation. 

Pg. 8:  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was meant to deliver the coup de grace to Jim Crow, and to end the black marches and police crackdowns in Mississippi and Alabama.  The Act banned racial discrimination in voting booths (Title I); hotels, restaurants, and theaters (Title II); public facilities, from libraries to swimming pools to bathrooms (Title III); and public schools (Title IV).  It also empowered the federal government to reform and abolish certain institutions that stood in the way of racial equality and to establish new ones.  By expanding the federal Civil Rights Commission (Title V); by subjecting to bureaucratic scrutiny any company or institution  that received government money (Title VI); by laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees; by creating a new presidential agency the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), with the power to file lawsuits, conduct investigations, and order redress—by doing all these things, the act emboldened and incentivized bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and political agitators to become the eyes and ears of civil rights enforcement.

Pg. 9:  The grounds for finding someone guilty of discrimination expanded.  New civil rights acts—notably the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968—brought new rights for black citizens and new bureaucracies to enforce them.  Civil rights transformed the country not just constitutionally but also culturally and demographically. 

Pg. 32:  In 1965 President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 required that any private company with at least 51 employees set up an affirmative action program if it was going to seek government contracts.  The American anti-racist regime developed in such a way as to exclude the most obvious race-blind solution to prejudice: neutral civil service, college admission, and hiring exams.  In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the Supreme Court decided that aptitude tests could not be given if such tests disadvantaged blacks in any way. 

Pg. 34f:  The civil rights model of executive orders litigation and court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emergent idea of fairness against old traditions: the persistence of different roles for men and women, the moral standing of homosexuality, the welcome that is due to immigrants, the consideration benefitting wheelchair-bound people.  Civil rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted.  The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life, starting with the roles of men and women.

Pg. 53f:  Roe v. Wade (a 7-2 1973 ruling) was sloppily argued.  It rested on a right to privacy established in Griswold v. Connecticut that was only ever invoked for the ulterior purpose of defending abortion.  Roe pronounced on an issue on which Americans were divided and froze those divisions in place.  In the last poll Gallup took before Roe, in December 1972, 46 percent said they would favor a law permitting abortions during the first three months; 45 percent said they would oppose it. In 1967, three states had passed laws allowing abortion in the case of a permanent threat to the mother’s health.  By the time of Roe, half of the states with at least some abortion rights were south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Pg. 86:  The Baby Boom generation entered a US less diverse than any period in US history.  The 1970 census showed a foreign-born population 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).  There were only 760,000 Mexicans in the country.  This would dramatically change.  By 2010, there would be no European countries at all on the top ten list of immigrants.  The 2010 list in order is Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, Korea, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.

Pg. 103:  Lyndon Johnson thought the welfare programs he launched in the 1960s were in the spirit of Roosevelt’ dam-building and road-building and mural-painting.  They would stimulate the economy, but Johnson was wrong.  By the mid-1970s, unemployment and inflation were rising in tandem (Stagflation).  The first measures to scale back taxation and spending were passed by Carter in the 95^th 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 wrung inflation out of the economy starting in October 1979.  (Yet, the national debt tripled under Reagan, in spite of all the Conservative rhetoric).

Pg. 114f:  The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolished an earlier quota system based on national origin and established a new immigration policy based on reuniting immigrant families and attracting skilled labor to the United States.  Over the next four decades, the policies put into effect in 1965 would greatly change the demographic makeup of the American population, as immigrants entering the United States under the new legislation came increasingly from countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as opposed to Europe.  The US was eighty-five percent white in 1965, the nation’s population was one-third minority in 2009 and is on track for a nonwhite majority by 2042.

Pg. 138:  Congress in 1998 passed the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which banned the taxation of internet access.  This act has decimated retail businesses, such as bookstores, by conferring a tax advantage of as much as 7.5% on internet businesses.

Pg. 143fff:  Bakke: Diversity Modifies Affirmative Action quotas (1978):  University of California v. Bakke:   Diversity was introduced by the US Supreme Court almost accidentally in 1978.  Allan Bakke’s application to the medical school at the University of California, Davis, had been rejected twice.  The school blamed his age.  Bakke, who had served in Vietnam as a Marine captain, was 33 when he applied.  Bakke blamed the university’s ‘task force program,’ an affirmative action program that set aside spots for 16 minority students in every class of 100.  Bakke’s scores on the multi-part MCAT would normally have won him admission to even the most elite medical schools.  They were in the 96^th, 97^th, and 72 percentiles. The averages for Davis admittees were 69, 67, 82, and 72.  The averages for minorities admitted through the university’s set-aside program were 34, 30, 37, and 18.  When the case reached the US Supreme Court, eight of the nine justices voted to uphold Bakke’s admission.  But the court deadlocked on political lines when it came to the affirmative action program that had deprived him of admission.  Justice Powell wrote the decision and tried to accommodate the logic of his colleagues who found affirmative action appalling but voted with his colleagues who found it appealing.  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.’  (Effectively: quotas are condemned but not affirmative action).

Pg. 165fff:  Political correctness was a top-down reform.  It was enabled not by new public attitudes toward reactionary opinions but by new punishments that could be meted out against those who expressed them. The power of political correctness generally derived either directly or at one remove from the civil rights laws of the 1960s. Chief diversity officers and diversity compliance officers, working inside companies, carried out functions that resembled those of twentieth-century commissars.  They would be consulted about whether a board meeting or a company picnic was sufficiently diverse.  Only with the entrenchment of political correctness did it become clear what Americans had done in 1964: They had inadvertently voted themselves a second constitution without explicitly repealing the one they had.  Affirmative action and political correctness were the twin pillars of the second constitution. As long as Americans were frightened of speaking against civil rights legislation or, later, of being assailed as racists, sexists, homophobes, or xenophobes, their political representatives could resist nothing that presented itself in the name of ‘civil rights.’

Pg. 175:  NAFTA passed in 1993 and provided manufacturing operations to move across the border one stage of production at a time which aroused less disruption, suspicion, and controversy than moving it lock, stock, and barrel. 

Pg. 181:  By 2006, 46 percent of new homeowners were making no down payment at all on their houses, and banks had trillions of dollars in loans on their books that would never have been made, absent government pressure. The politicization of poor people’s mortgages in a single country brought the world to the brink of economic disaster.

 Pg. 195:  In 2013, Snowden revealed considerable detail about US spycraft in the ongoing war against Islamist radicalism.  The NSA used a technique called ‘method interdiction,’ intercepting ordinary digital data packages on their way to a user and infecting them with software that could trace the recipient’s every online move and execute malicious operations.  It tapped the phones of foreign leaders.  What made the story more serious was the revelation of how widely the spy agencies had cast their net domestically and how closely they worked with Silicon Valley.  A program called Prism gave the NSA access to information from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. 

 Pg. 201:  Alan David Freeman’s distinction between the ‘perpetrator’ perspective on civil rights (which seeks only to eliminate bias, and will leave things alone when bias cannot be proved) and the ‘victim’ perspective (which assumes bias, and seeks to eliminate the inequality associated with it).  For half a century the victim perspective had been imposed by courts, backed with the threat of criminal and civil penalties.  Indeed, it was evidence of bad faith to assert that inequality might ever result from something other than discrimination.

Pg. 211:  Obama governed as if democratic institutions were an obstacle to governing.  He bypassed Congress on controversial matters, especially guns.  He ruled by executive order, delaying by fiat the implementation of his signature Affordable Care Act.  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that he established in 2010 drew its funding from the semi-independent Federal Reserve, not from Congress, and then appointed the first director, Richard Cordray, through a recess appointment, bypassing Congress.  He sought to regularize the status of millions of illegal immigrants using his war-making authority, a move for which his defenders claimed the Emancipation Proclamation as a precedent. There was an impatience with democracy in the air.

Pg. 227:  Media jobs in the old days had been spread nationwide and linked to the political cultures of their diverse readerships.  Now 73% of twenty-first-century internet media jobs were either in the northeast corridor, on the West Coast, or in Chicago (mostly Democrat areas).  Only rarely now did people at the top of society meet people who disagreed with them.

Pg. 228:  Anthony Kennedy’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) made gay marriage the law of the land.  (I think this is much like Roe in that it interrupted a process the States were already pursuing, but, unlike Roe, it looks like there is a lot less dissent on this issue.  Some silly, like wedding cakes, bathrooms….).

Pg. 237:  By the end of Obama’s first term, race divided the parties more than anything else.  Democrats, by 84 to 12 percent, thought racism was a bigger problem than political correctness.  Republicans, by 80 to 17 percent, thought political correctness was a bigger problem than racism. 

Pg. 261:  Even though with 300 million people, the US is policed well, and with impressive fairness; yet it had become hard to say that publicly.  A disproportionate number of the most serious offenses continued to be committed by blacks.  In 2009, blacks, who made up 13 percent of the population, accounted for almost half the arrests (49.2 percent) for murder and more than half (55.5 percent) for robberies.  Now the disproportionate incidence of black arrests was taken, in some quarters, as prima facie evidence of white racism.