Christopher Caldwell’s stock in trade has always been defending positions beyond the pale of the liberal consensus — opposition to Muslim immigration into Europe, resistance to gay marriage in America, and admiration for Viktor Orban — in prose so pithy and well-tempered that he alone wins a hearing for them. His new book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, is a defiant resignation letter from the vocation of clubbable reactionary, presenting a Caldwell radicalized by the earthquake of 2016. The book manages to be at once an exemplary instance of the literature of Trumpism and of Trumpist literature, toggling between the intelligently diagnostic and the usefully symptomatic, sometimes in the same paragraph. What this book attempts, where it succeeds (for it succeeds in an important dimension of what it attempts), how it ultimately fails, and what it all portends, is something that conservatives and liberals alike should all be puzzling through.
Caldwell succeeds above all in mustering a maximally articulate registration of the antagonisms and resentments that President Trump catalyzed into his electoral victory. He provides an overarching framework for understanding the political conflict that emerged in 2016 and a compelling portrait of the besieged psychology of the Trumpist — at times illuminating it, at other times merely indulging in it. His book strikes at the root of what post-1960s American liberalism holds most sacred: its commitment to racial and other forms of equality.
Caldwell intends to be shocking. In reply to the progressives and liberals who portray Trump’s victory as a recrudescence of racism and sexism, he argues that, in fact, the 2016 election was an uprising of those who adhere to what he calls “the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it,” against those committed to what he calls “the Second Constitution” founded by the Civil Rights Act 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.”
Whether you think this distinction is one with a difference, or merely a re-description of the progressive view in terms more favorable to Trump, will determine your attitude toward The Age of Entitlement. It will not be lost on Caldwell’s progressive and liberal interlocutors that he invokes the Constitution as it stood before the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, which abolished slavery, established birthright citizenship, and provided the guarantee of equal protection before the laws to all citizens. For it is the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection that a class of legal mandarins has used to conjure into being the “rights revolution,” which has conferred new status on an ever-proliferating cascade of protected groups (women, gays, the disabled, noncitizens, and now, transgender people), often through nonlegislative means that deliberately circumvent the democratic will of the public.
The provocation of this thesis is central to Caldwell’s project — a declaration that in 2020, he’ll be taking his stand, without apology or equivocation, not in defense of segregation (which he joins all other civilized people in deploring), but in opposition to what desegregation eventually became: “the model for an entire new system of constantly churning political reform” that functioned, in effect, as “a repeal of the First Amendment’s implied right to freedom of association.” This model, in Caldwell’s account, would eventually go on to both defeat its own stated purposes and adopt an endlessly expansive set of new ones, which would come with a price tag “that proved staggeringly high — in money, freedom, rights, and social stability.”
Rather than “normalize American culture and cure the gothic paranoia of the Southern racial imagination” as intended, Caldwell writes that the civil rights constitution “has instead wound up nationalizing Southerners’ obsession with race and violence.” And it would eventually wind up both destroying freedom of association (which Caldwell, with a perhaps unintended resonance, calls the “master freedom — the freedom without which political freedom cannot be effectively exercised”) and serving as the pretext for restraining freedom of speech for America’s white majority. This, in turn, would have a role in ending that white majority, by placing restrictions on immigration beyond the pale of what might be legitimately sought within the political process.
Caldwell’s schema of the two constitutions is on one level merely an erudite restatement of the basic opposition at the center of all right-wing populism, which posits an alliance of educated elites, who derive their moral legitimacy and the warrant for expanding their power from their role as champions of the marginalized, and the various marginalized groups that serve as their clients — top and bottom against the great, implicitly white, middle. “The scope for action conferred on society’s leaders allowed elite power to multiply steadily and, we now see, dangerously, sweeping aside not just obstacles but also dissent.”
But in designating the rights revolution as a distinct constitution, Caldwell emphasizes the vast scale of the countervailing action that would have been necessary to alter it. Eventually, he bluntly concludes that “the only way back to the free country of [Republicans’] ideals was through the repeal of the civil rights laws.” He deplores what he has come to regard as the failure of the Reagan revolution, which rose to power on the energy of those who sought exactly that. Reagan instead struck a grand bargain permitting the two constitutions to coexist, at the cost of a debt-fueled spending spree.
The Age of Entitlement crosses over from the literature of Trumpism to simple Trumpist literature during its final third, as it becomes what it ultimately is at heart: a narrative of white male victimization. It retells the history stretching from 1964 to the present as one of white enfeeblement and decline at the hands of elitist liberal rule, in which white Americans “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.” It is the saga of the Baby Boom generation, born as the single-most homogenous in American history, now entering its retirement years in a country whose population is as foreign-born as it has ever been and in which whites will lose their majority sometime around 2043.
What Caldwell fails to do is to substantiate the claim that the massive exertions of the civil rights state did that much to either help black people (as opposed to upper-middle-class women and gays) or materially harm white people. He argues mostly through grand assertions written from 1,000 feet away: “In 1975, rural America had meant banjos, bait shops, and cornbread. By the election of 2016, it meant SNAP cards, internet pornography, and OxyContin.” He conflates everything he dislikes: Our military adventures abroad, the peculiar form of hypercapitalism that has enriched America’s cities at the expense of its rural and formerly industrial regions, and even the global financial crisis of 2008-09 are depicted as the work of a unitary elite drawing its power and legitimacy from the civil rights movement. And despite characterizing civil rights as a massive transfer of resources from whites to blacks, he does not contend with the fact that the black-white wealth gap remains enormous.
This last fact might have served as the basis of a very different sort of conservative critique of the affirmative action and welfare state: that an elite-driven civil rights politics that relies on fractionating the world into identity categories for the courts and administrative agencies to confer rights upon does little to help the great mass of minorities on whose behalf it claims to act. There are, after all, black conservatives who believe that affirmative action and welfare have done to black people in the course of trying to help them exactly what Caldwell believes they did to white people by excluding them: bringing about the decay of their communities by injuring their capacity for self-government. One of them, Clarence Thomas, sits on the Supreme Court. He may well have a chance to pare back the scope of affirmative action significantly in the next few years, and perhaps even to restore to the constitutional interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the strict race neutrality that was written into its text.
In the absence of any real evidence that the civil rights state has done grave material harm to white America, Caldwell settles into a long rant against political correctness. It is, of course, true that political correctness has run out of control in recent years, descending into rhetorical extremity, mania, bombast, and melodrama while assigning white males to “the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.” Caldwell notes that a leading political scientist “cited as evidence of rank-and-file Republicans’ racism their agreement with the statement ‘If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites,’” correctly pointing out that “disagreeing with that statement would have been even stronger evidence of racism.” The well-chosen example stands in for a hunt for racism that has become a sport among academics and journalists.
Caldwell repeatedly insists that political correctness was always at the core of civil rights, resting, as he puts it, “on a right to collective dignity extended by sympathetic judges who saw that, without such a right, forcing the races together would more likely occasion humiliation than emancipation.” But by damning the whole enterprise, he obscures the specificity of what happened to civil rights in the second term of Barack Obama’s presidency, when the administration’s Justice Department and Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education went on a spree, stripping college men accused of sexual misconduct of their due process rights and requiring schools to give transgender students access to bathrooms that conform to their internal sense of their gender identity. This was a more expansive use of civil rights law than anything attempted before.
Caldwell also fails to note that overwhelming majorities of people of every ethnicity, including 3 out of 4 blacks and upwards of 80% of Asians, Native Americans, and Hispanics, dislike political correctness. Just because organized civil rights lobbies claim to represent various groups doesn’t mean they actually do; nor, for better or worse, do the actions of those lobbies impinge that heavily on the lives of most people in those groups, just as they do not touch the lives of most whites.
In these figures, we can glimpse the continued health of the American body politic, even amid the hysteria unleashed by Trumpism. It is this America, a multiracial America where freedom and civility largely still obtain and virtually everything still functions, that has kept the economy steadily growing throughout the politicized mania of the Trump years. And it is to this America we must turn for deliverance from those who would propagandize it into something worse.
Wesley Yang is the author of The Souls of Yellow Folk.
