The Age of Entitlement

Starred review from November 18, 2019
Civil rights law has become “a model for overthrowing every tradition in American life” according to this stimulating and contrarian rethink of modern politics. Former Weekly Standard editor Caldwell (Reflections on the Revolution in Europe) contends that the 1964 Civil Rights Act went beyond the project of ending Jim Crow to give government bureaucrats and courts vast powers to regulate business, education, and other institutions. As civil rights laws grew to address the grievances of feminists, homosexuals, and immigrants, they became a “second constitution,” Caldwell argues, pursuing an agenda of minority preferments and social transformation while undermining democratic rule and the official Constitution’s freedoms of speech and association. Caldwell charts this development through incisive accounts of legal battles including court-ordered busing, abortion rights, affirmative action, and gay marriage, as well as politically correct Twitter mobs and the right-wing backlash that now insists whites are an oppressed group. Caldwell’s thesis is provocative, but not partisan—he blames the Reagan administration for entrenching both the civil rights regime and a plutocracy of financial elites—and shrewd in analyzing Americans’ conflicted attitudes toward progressive initiatives. Liberals will find much to dispute, but Caldwell delivers the sharpest and most insightful conservative critique of mainstream politics in years. Agent: Tina Bennett, William Morris Endeavor.