Know Your Enemy
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Christopher Caldwell's Case Against Civil Rights
🕑 Added 2025-06-02 10:45:01 +0000 UTCAttentive listeners will notice that this episode is about a book but isn't an author interview. That's because it's the first in a new occasional series of episodes that will be dedicated to books by conservative writers that we think are important — whether because a book articulates the right's approach to an issue or problem in an especially revealing way, influenced or galvanized the conservative movement when it was published, or, with the benefit of hindsight, has proven to be prescient about where the right, and perhaps the country, were heading. Many of these books will be from decades past, but our first selection is more recent: Christopher Caldwell's 2020 broadside against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and what it wrought, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Caldwell argues that the apparatus created by civil rights legislation and the federal courts in the 1960s amounted to a new, second constitution that displaced the one Americans had lived under since the founding, one that jettisoned traditional liberties like freedom of association and replaced democratic self-government with rule by bureaucrats, lawyers, and judges.
Who has access to these new levers of power? Not the working class whites who are neither a favored racial or ethnic minority — a person of color — nor a member of the progressive elites who preside over the new regime. Much of The Age of Entitlement is dedicated to tracing the effects of civil rights legislation when it comes to the causes that arose in its wake: feminism, immigrant rights, gay marriage, and more. But the book is equally a brutal examination of the legacy of the Baby Boom generation (and, by extension, Ronald Reagan, whose presidency they powered), that most "entitled" of generations, whom Caldwell deplores for wanting to have their cake and eat it, too. Boomers, in Caldwell's telling, refused to straightforwardly reject the second constitution and its distributional demands, while also insisting petulantly, again and again, on having their taxes cut. We explore these topics and more, and end with a discussion of where Caldwell leaves the reader — and where we're at now, in light of the challenge he poses to both conservatives and the left.
Sources:
Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (2020)
— Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West (2009)
Helen Andrews, "The Law That Ate the Constitution," Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2020
Timothy Crimmins, "America Since the Sixties: A History without Heroes," American Affairs, Summer 2020
Perry Anderson, "Portents of Eurabia," The National, Aug 27, 2009.
Comments
Robert Savage
I enjoying reading/listening to books, podcasts and articles addressing arguments made by people I disagree with as long as they base their argument on facts. Sadly, this book does not. I am an employment discrimination lawyer who has enforced the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“CRA”) for over thirty years. Contrary to what Caldwell claims, the CRA does not support affirmative action; it has actually been used regularly to strike down affirmative action policies. It protects all races, even White men, from employment decisions and actions based on their race, sex, national origin, or religion. To pretend, as this book does, that this is not the case is outrageous propaganda that breeds undeserved White resentment. To gloss over the brutal history of Black people being foreclosed from jobs, schools, and public accommodations and exaggerate the freedom of association lost by White people is contemptible. What freedom of association did White people lose? Was it the freedom to bar Black people from workplaces, hotels, restaurants, and schools? What hateful nonsense. All people are still free to join hateful private clubs that does not involve commerce, just as they did before the CRA. The constitution/bill of rights as it was originally written did not prohibit slavery and therefore certainly did not protect freedom of association. Contrary to Caldwell's claims, we do not want to go back to the Constitution as it was originally written. Arguing to go back to the Constitution as amended by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments would have been a better argument but he did not do that. The Radical Republicans drafted and got those amendments passed and also passed 42 USC Sec. 1981, 1982, and 1983. The courts, until the 1950s, interpreted these amendments and statutes in a way that took away their intended meaning. Despite Sec. 1981's obvious prohibition against allowing racially based contract and employment discrimination, the courts didn’t enforce it until the 1960s. Same for state actors who racially discriminated against those they were supposed to serve; the courts interpret Sec 1983 as being meaningless. I could go on but it’s not necessary. These alleged violations of freedom of association should been prohibit through these amendments and statutes as far back as the 1860s and 1870s. The CRA, 1965 Voting Rights Act, and 1968 Housing Act restored the Constitutional provisions of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to their original meaning. Shame on Caldwell for ginning up further White resentment. Also, President Obama did not sign any legislation that favored or even dealt with race but you would never know that reading this seedy book. Again, pumping out White resentment without basis. This is a book could have been written by Richard Spencer.
John Woodbridge
I feel like I'm a bit more skeptial because as an Economics student, Caldwell seems to get a lot wrong in the areas of economic history and behavioral economics. In particular it feels flatly incorrect to say that the Reagonomics was a cynical preservation of the Great Society. It was the opposite the attempt at the dismantling of that welfare state through gutting welfare programs, attacking unions, deregulation, privatization ect... while keep corporate subsidies, trade adjustments and tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy. Furthmore, it seems myopic to fail to address how free-market economic policies probably did FAR more to create a resentful white ethnic class than any CRA legislation. . It begs the question which had greater effect? The rust belt, NAFTA, the China shock and real income stagnation or affirmative action?
Dan Kolbert
No baby boomer could vote til 1966
West
That your conservative interlocutors found this to be a valuable and persuasive text speaks very poorly of them. Though it makes sense a bunch of upper class liberal outfits desperate to find "reasonable" conservative sounding arguments would be supportive of this waste of paper.
