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The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

Christopher Caldwell

Conservative revisionist history

A provocative and influential conservative reinterpretation of American politics since the 1960s. Caldwell argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however noble in intent, effectively created a 'second constitution' — a regime of rights, agencies, and judicial power — that came into conflict with the original Constitution's liberties, and that the bitter divisions of American politics ever since are a contest between these two constitutional orders. A challenging, much-contested thesis essential to understanding the contemporary right.

About the author

American journalist and author (b. 1962), a longtime writer for The Weekly Standard, Financial Times, and Claremont Review of Books. A prominent conservative commentator on immigration, religion, and politics in Europe and America, Caldwell drew wide attention and controversy with The Age of Entitlement's reinterpretation of the 1960s.

Synopsis

Caldwell contends that the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rights revolution it inaugurated established a new, rival constitutional order — enforced through bureaucracy, litigation, and anti-discrimination law — that progressively overrode older freedoms of association, property, and speech. He reads the subsequent decades of American politics, culture, and debt as a struggle between this new order and the original Constitution, on race, sex, immigration, and more.

Core passage idea

Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted work

Caldwell argues that the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s created in effect a 'second constitution,' whose expanding regime of rights and enforcement came into lasting conflict with the freedoms of the original one.

By recasting the rights revolution as a rival constitution rather than a fulfilment of the first, Caldwell offers a framework many on the right use to explain America's culture wars — and that many others regard as a rationalization for resisting racial and social progress. Reading it critically is essential to understanding the debate.

To avoid a bubble

Pair with defenders of the civil-rights revolution (and Alexander's The New Jim Crow) who argue Caldwell understates persistent racism and recasts overdue justice as overreach, and judge carefully a thesis many find both illuminating and troubling.

Reading note

Read it as a key (and contested) text of the contemporary intellectual right, in direct dialogue with Michelle Alexander and the civil-rights tradition it reinterprets.

Best paired with

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites.

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