One of the problems of the book market post-2016 is that there are now only two kinds of books: books about Donald Trump, and books that pretend not to be about Donald Trump, but still are. Prestige fiction is about Trump. Poetry is about Trump. Children’s books are about Trump. If you are writing a book, try as you might, it will probably be about Trump.
A sub-genre of the Trump book phenomenon is the “how you got Trump” book, the careful (or not so careful) investigation of what drove the American electorate to make a fast-talking real estate developer from Queens the 45th President. The worst of these books makes the error of treating Trump as an aberration, a momentary lapse of judgement soon to be corrected by the triumph of one of the eight or nine hundred people seeking the Democratic nomination. The best, by contrast, have the wherewithal to imagine that Trump did not emerge out of the ether, but rather that his election is an expression of far deeper cultural and political forces.
It is perhaps odd to place The Age of Entitlement, the latest from erstwhile Weekly Standard writer and now Claremont Review of Books contributor Christopher Caldwell, in this latter category. This is not because the book merits derisive assignment to the bad “how you got Trump” sub-genre, but because Caldwell goes out of his way never to say the T-word at all. Trump’s presence is made apparent only by omission, his sweep into the White House reserved as the conclusion of a 50-year narrative. That said, make no mistake: The Age of Entitlement is the story of the polarization and discontent that has characterized the past half-decade.
As promised by its subtitle, The Age of Entitlement is a history of “America since the sixties.” More precisely, it is a history of the birth and subsequent rise to power of the social and political arrangement ushered in by the “long 1960s,” and in particular the ideas and legal structures which emerged out of the civil rights movement. The sum effect of these entities is, in Caldwell’s view, enough to label civil rights not merely a change to the preexisting order, but altogether a reconstitution. “The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution,” he writes. “They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.”
This transformation was a product of the unique socioeconomic conditions begat by America’s status as global hegemon post-World War II. “A moment of deceptively permanent-looking prosperity”—rising GDP, stable jobs, strong unions, exploding families—gave politicians the social leeway “to reform the United States along lines more just and humane,” because Americans (particularly white Americans, particularly men) had the socioeconomic wherewithal not to feel threatened by social upheaval.
The reconstitution began with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which extended the principles of non-discrimination from the public into the private sphere, with the goal of restoring the dignity denied by “separate but equal” arrangements at the school, the hotel, and the lunch counter. That transformation, Caldwell argues, necessarily entailed an upsetting of the pre-civil rights order because “rights cannot simply be ‘added’ to a social contract without changing it.” Actively preventing non-discrimination required an imposition on preexisting liberties, he argues, in particular freedom of association and freedom of property. After all, the freedom to associate implies the freedom not to associate, and the freedom to do as one pleases with one’s property implies the freedom not to let others use one’s property, including, in both cases, on the basis of racist preferences.
Caldwell spends a lot of time talking about these freedoms, but it is hard to see limits on them as a decisive break with the past. “Freedom of association” and “freedom of property” have never in American history been absolute. State and even Federal laws have at various times constrained them in the name of the public interest, and civil rights are, at least as originally constructed, almost definitionally in the public interest.
Where Caldwell is on stronger footing is in emphasizing the way that the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act, and much of the judge-made law that came after them, necessarily constrained local and state-level democracy. Federal civil rights enforcement operated under the assumption that if the southern states were allowed to govern themselves, racial injustice would continue indefinitely. They thus necessarily presumed the southern states incompetent to carry out the process of self-government, a state of affairs which had, with the exception of Reconstruction, never reigned in the country. (Caldwell’s invocation of C. Vann Woodward’s description of civil rights as a “second Reconstruction” is therefore apt.) America’s democratic self-determination, historically sacrosanct, came under presumed suspicion—a dynamic that would extend from the southern states to, eventually, much of the nation.
If we take Caldwell at his word that the Civil Rights Act inaugurated a new constitutional order, then the real tension between it and the “old” arrangement is less about laissez faire versus intrusion—the right to deny service versus the dignity of having service provided—and more about self-rule versus the guarantee of dignity, or what we might think about as means-oriented versus ends-oriented “justice.” The old Constitution upholds a political arrangement (a federation of sovereign states) agnostic to the outcomes of that governance. The “new” Constitution is concerned with guaranteeing certain just outcomes—equity along racial, gendered, and other lines—and is largely agnostic to the methods by which those outcomes are attained. In point of fact, Federal power is an obvious hammer to ensure dignity, assuming one sets aside state and local self-determination.
Top-down, ends-oriented government became the dominant paradigm within the narrow constraints of racial equity. But it brought with it a suite of political tools and metaphors that could be generalized beyond the particular struggles of black Americans. This, Caldwell argues, is more or less what begat the character of civil rights more broadly, leading to its extension from the narrow problem of securing rights for black Americans to the interests of women, immigrants, and eventually the whole “intersectional” coalition.
The changes pushed for in the interest of what would eventually be labeled “diversity” were, Caldwell argues throughout the book, rarely popular. For a time, that unpopularity was suppressed by continuing socioeconomic stability, financed by Reagan-era ballooning Federal debt. But that era also ushered in an elite whose power was premised as much on their display of diversity shibboleths as on government-backed prosperity.
When the Reagan “truce” finally ended in the 1990s and early 2000s, these same people continued to rake in the profits of globalization while looking down their noses at the—mostly white, often male—Americans who were culturally and economically left behind. The dogma of civil rights, Caldwell contends, became all-encompassing, and increasingly top-down in its enforcement. The work of modern bureaucrats and “nudge” theorists systematized the idea that impolite views render individuals incompetent to govern themselves: “the voice of the people is sovereign, once it has been cleared of the suspicion of bias.“
As a work of history, the foregoing is at the very least an incomplete picture of the past half-century. That is sort of necessary—fitting 60 years into 300 pages requires sacrificing some resolution. Doubtless, readers who have already decided to dislike the book will find inconsistencies and inaccuracies and descend upon them like vultures.
Such a reading would be as intellectually filling as the analogous carrion. A more useful approach is to understand The Age of Entitlement as the “how you got Trump” book Caldwell tacitly acknowledges it is. Within the terms of his means-ends dialectic, the 2016 election is an expression of bare democratic power, of a group of people largely excluded from or derided by the “new” constitutional order expressing their still-existing power under the “old” Constitution. There is little reason to believe this basic tension has gone away in the years since.
Faced with this tension, there are three responses. The first is the one likely to be taken by the bevy of critics who will, inevitably, dismiss Caldwell as a racist crank out of step with the times. To do so, they will more or less rehearse the arguments for the civil rights system against which Caldwell sets himself: America has a long history of bigotry, civil rights were and continue to be a necessary corrective to that history, and anyone who disagrees with that does not deserve to have his voice heard anyway. In other words, they will insist that the democracy half of the tension is not a problem, because democracy is only good insofar as it produces equity. This is the same sentiment that inspires think pieces arguing that voting for Trump is racist enough to violate the Constitution. The people can rule, but only once they are cleared of the suspicion of bias.
If The Age of Entitlement is anything, it is an argument that this attitude is precisely how you get Trump. Large majorities of Americans do not like political correctness, or being told that their voices only matter insofar as they assent to its mores. If Trump is the definitive breaker of polite rules, then his election is a signal that Americans do not like being told to be polite.
The second response to The Age of Entitlement is to insist that the civil rights revolution has largely been a charade, a farce designed to arrogate power to a select few in the name of “justice.” One suspects (although he does not explicitly say it) that this is the view Caldwell takes when he insists that Americans must choose between the old and new orders.
The problem with this view, to put it bluntly, is the history of America before the 1960s. The limiting of democratic self-determination was a direct response to centuries of racialized oppression, violence, and terror. It is similarly hard to conclude that other groups who have benefited from the civil rights revolution—women, LGBT people, immigrants—did not face particular hardships under the pre-1960s regime. When one remembers the substantive injustice that civil rights structures arose to counteract, it is hard to simply dismiss them as worthless.
This brings us to the third response to The Age of Entitlement, which is to take away from it the reality of the tension that Caldwell highlights, understanding the book as a diagnosis rather than a prescription. Notwithstanding past reconstitutions, America does seem to have made a definitive choice to address past substantive injustices, even at the expense of procedural freedoms. We suppressed that contradiction through free spending and debt, but that approach seems, at least for now, at the wayside.
The basic question The Age of Entitlement should leave the reader with, then, is: can we have both equity and self-rule, particularly in a post-industrial world? Can we have both liberalism and democracy? To the extent that our answer is “no,” Caldwell makes a compelling case that we will never be able to extract ourselves from our present political quagmire, that our polarization and tensions will only get worse. At the same time, to the extent our answer is “yes,” Caldwell’s dialectic offers valuable insight into resolving that political challenge.