https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/03/09/civil-rights-law-and-the-rival-constitution/
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, by Christopher Caldwell (Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $28)
“The Age of Entitlement is much more than a history of civil rights. Caldwell offers provocative and illuminating analyses of immigration and demographic change, the failures of Reaganism, the rise of Big Tech and the digitization of life, woke capitalism, and politicized philanthropy. Almost every page contains an arresting observation, a telling anecdote, or an interesting fact. This is revisionist conservative history at its best.”
There are many reasons the Right, in spite of the Republican Party’s electoral successes, steadily loses ground to the Left with each passing decade. The Left controls all the elite institutions that bestow praise and lay blame in America. It has a clarity of purpose, a resolve, and a ruthlessness that are generally lacking on the right. Most important though, it is the Left’s moral framework that is authoritative. Their pieties rule and are enforced by conservatives and liberals alike.
Nearly everyone in America either believes in or defers to the Left’s hierarchical politics of victimization. According to the country’s official mythology, in the beginning, only straight white men were free. Over time, marginalized members of the rainbow coalition gained more rights. American history, in this retelling, is progressive — yet tragic. Disparities in life outcomes between men and women, blacks and whites, gays and straights prove that sexism, racism, and homophobia remain systemic.
In the spirit of John Rawls, America is to be judged by how its oppressed identity groups fare. Progressivism leads the charge in demanding more rights for more people, while conservatism is, at best, reduced to playing second fiddle in ministering to women and minorities. A rising tide lifts all boats — especially boats of color! As President Trump never tires of tweeting, the black and Hispanic unemployment rate is at an all-time low.
Non-accommodationist conservative arguments — anchored in the centrality of freedom, family, God, and country — lack a soil in which to take root. They are bound to fail — and fail they do, as the leftward drift of the country and of conservatism itself confirms. Robert Lewis Dabney’s biting words have proven prescient: “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.”
The Right will not stem its losses and reclaim the country until it upends the Left’s narrative. America needs a moral revolution and a different conceptual framework to think about its history. Hence the importance of Christopher Caldwell’s marvelously well-written and deliciously impious new counter-history of America since the Sixties, The Age of Entitlement.
Caldwell, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, paves the way for such a transvaluation of values by calling into question the regime’s most sacred cow: civil rights. In his retelling, the civil-rights movement that justly destroyed Jim Crow did not bring equality to America. In a sad irony, it instead re-created the problem it promised to resolve, albeit in a modified form. America today once again has a system of government-backed racial preferences, except that blacks (and other recognized identity groups) are now its beneficiaries, while whites occupy “the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”
