A New Conservative Theory of Why America Is So Polarized

Photo: Junfu Han/Detroit Free Press/Tribune News Service via Getty Images Christopher Caldwell is not a household name. But for the relatively small set of people who care deeply about political writing, he is a towering figure. His prose — full of wit and irony, enlivened by an eye for paradox and the telling detail, informed by a polyglot and polymathic erudition — is second to none in the world of conservative journalism and exceeds nine-tenths of what is published in the press at large.

In Caldwell’s latest book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, he applies this framework to American history from the assassination of Kennedy to the election of Trump. The result is in many ways impressive; in some, explosive. Caldwell’s basic thesis is that the country’s current divisions are the product of a longstanding and as-yet-unresolved conflict over the legacy of the ‘60s, and over race and civil rights in particular.

Such objections to the 1964 act have long been aired by paleoconservatives and libertarians — in 2010, Rand Paul came under fire for voicing a version of them — and they are pretty small-bore. Caldwell’s concern is less legalistic and has more to do with how “civil rights ideology… became, most unexpectedly, the model for an entire new system of constantly churning political reform.

Caldwell sees the rival constitutions as having realigned American politics, and much of his book traces, in essayistic and sometimes cursory fashion, the history of this realignment. His depiction of Reagan is particularly scathing — Caldwell sees him as having won a majority based on the public’s rejection of the 1964 constitution, but blames him for doing little to nothing to attack its legal and bureaucratic foundations.

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