The Age of Entitlement
America Since the Sixties
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- ¥1,900
Publisher Description
A major American intellectual and “one of the right’s most gifted and astute journalists” (The New York Times Book Review) makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House.
Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences and his conclusion is this: even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.
Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half-century, taking you on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycotin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules.
Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement “is an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight” (New York magazine) about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Civil rights law has become "a model for overthrowing every tradition in American life" according to this stimulating and contrarian rethink of modern politics. Former Weekly Standard editor Caldwell (Reflections on the Revolution in Europe) contends that the 1964 Civil Rights Act went beyond the project of ending Jim Crow to give government bureaucrats and courts vast powers to regulate business, education, and other institutions. As civil rights laws grew to address the grievances of feminists, homosexuals, and immigrants, they became a "second constitution," Caldwell argues, pursuing an agenda of minority preferments and social transformation while undermining democratic rule and the official Constitution's freedoms of speech and association. Caldwell charts this development through incisive accounts of legal battles including court-ordered busing, abortion rights, affirmative action, and gay marriage, as well as politically correct Twitter mobs and the right-wing backlash that now insists whites are an oppressed group. Caldwell's thesis is provocative, but not partisan he blames the Reagan administration for entrenching both the civil rights regime and a plutocracy of financial elites and shrewd in analyzing Americans' conflicted attitudes toward progressive initiatives. Liberals will find much to dispute, but Caldwell delivers the sharpest and most insightful conservative critique of mainstream politics in years.
