ogc163
Superstar
America is a divided country.
If I asked you to work backwards to the origins of the culture war or to the event that set us on our current course, what would it be? Vietnam? Watergate? The Iraq War? Donald Trump?
A new book by Christopher Caldwell, an influential conservative journalist, proffers a surprising answer: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Caldwell’s book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, has become a must-read among right-leaning intellectuals. The book isn’t exactly an assault on the initial Civil Rights Act so much as an attack on its legal outgrowths.
Caldwell doesn’t defend racism or the apartheid system the Civil Rights Act dismantled; rather, he argues that the civil rights movement spawned a whole constellation of other liberation struggles — for immigrants, for gay and transgender rights, for sexual freedom — that Americans did not sign up for and did not want. And the result of this steady encroachment is what Caldwell calls a “rival Constitution” that is incompatible with the original one and the source of a great deal of social unrest.
There are a lot of fascinating observations in Caldwell’s book, and some conspicuous omissions, but it does scan as something of a rant, albeit a very eloquent one. White Americans, he writes, “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.”
The notion that white Americans are at the bottom of any hierarchy seems far-fetched, but he’s right in a narrow sense. The price of leveling an unequal social order is often the resentment of people whose power has been diminished. Caldwell seems to think that price is too high.
I reject Caldwell’s view of history, but I do think he identifies some very real tensions at the core of American life. And whatever you think of his diagnosis, this is an important book that’s worth engaging because it articulates what many Americans on one side of the culture war feel.
I spoke to Caldwell by phone about his motivations for writing the book, what he thinks went wrong with the Civil Rights Act, and why he thinks white people — white men, in particular — are getting left behind.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
I think it’s fair to say that a majority of Americans regard the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a great moral and political achievement. You call it an “oppression.” Why?
Christopher Caldwell
Well, what I said was that by November of 2016, there was a working majority in a presidential election that perceived it as an oppression. And the judgment that was made in the 2016 election was at least indirectly a response to the order that arose out of the 1960s.
Sean Illing
Who was oppressed by the order that arose out of the Civil Rights Act?
Christopher Caldwell
Of the book’s many narrative lines, the one that’s received a lot of attention finds the source of a lot of our conflicts in the legislative outgrowths of the Civil Rights Act.
Overturning segregation meant overturning a lot of the democratic institutions of the South. Now you can argue that they were illegitimate or that they were invidious or they were exclusionary, but the federal government needed legal tools to overturn a functioning democratic system. And those tools wound up being adaptable to a whole range of other tasks.
Sean Illing
What other tasks?
Christopher Caldwell
Securing the advancement of women in corporations, securing the integration of immigrants in American society, winning rights for gays, winning rights for transsexuals. Set aside the merits of any of this, the point is that accomplishing these things involved empowering judges and regulators or bureaucrats more generally to make laws. And I think that a lot of people felt left out of that process.
Sean Illing
Do you think it would’ve been better to have left things as they were? Should we have allowed Jim Crow to end whenever the South decided the time was right?
Christopher Caldwell
The short answer to that is no. This book is in no way a defense of Jim Crow or segregation or anything like that.
If I asked you to work backwards to the origins of the culture war or to the event that set us on our current course, what would it be? Vietnam? Watergate? The Iraq War? Donald Trump?
A new book by Christopher Caldwell, an influential conservative journalist, proffers a surprising answer: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Caldwell’s book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, has become a must-read among right-leaning intellectuals. The book isn’t exactly an assault on the initial Civil Rights Act so much as an attack on its legal outgrowths.
Caldwell doesn’t defend racism or the apartheid system the Civil Rights Act dismantled; rather, he argues that the civil rights movement spawned a whole constellation of other liberation struggles — for immigrants, for gay and transgender rights, for sexual freedom — that Americans did not sign up for and did not want. And the result of this steady encroachment is what Caldwell calls a “rival Constitution” that is incompatible with the original one and the source of a great deal of social unrest.
There are a lot of fascinating observations in Caldwell’s book, and some conspicuous omissions, but it does scan as something of a rant, albeit a very eloquent one. White Americans, he writes, “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.”
The notion that white Americans are at the bottom of any hierarchy seems far-fetched, but he’s right in a narrow sense. The price of leveling an unequal social order is often the resentment of people whose power has been diminished. Caldwell seems to think that price is too high.
I reject Caldwell’s view of history, but I do think he identifies some very real tensions at the core of American life. And whatever you think of his diagnosis, this is an important book that’s worth engaging because it articulates what many Americans on one side of the culture war feel.
I spoke to Caldwell by phone about his motivations for writing the book, what he thinks went wrong with the Civil Rights Act, and why he thinks white people — white men, in particular — are getting left behind.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
I think it’s fair to say that a majority of Americans regard the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a great moral and political achievement. You call it an “oppression.” Why?
Christopher Caldwell
Well, what I said was that by November of 2016, there was a working majority in a presidential election that perceived it as an oppression. And the judgment that was made in the 2016 election was at least indirectly a response to the order that arose out of the 1960s.
Sean Illing
Who was oppressed by the order that arose out of the Civil Rights Act?
Christopher Caldwell
Of the book’s many narrative lines, the one that’s received a lot of attention finds the source of a lot of our conflicts in the legislative outgrowths of the Civil Rights Act.
Overturning segregation meant overturning a lot of the democratic institutions of the South. Now you can argue that they were illegitimate or that they were invidious or they were exclusionary, but the federal government needed legal tools to overturn a functioning democratic system. And those tools wound up being adaptable to a whole range of other tasks.
Sean Illing
What other tasks?
Christopher Caldwell
Securing the advancement of women in corporations, securing the integration of immigrants in American society, winning rights for gays, winning rights for transsexuals. Set aside the merits of any of this, the point is that accomplishing these things involved empowering judges and regulators or bureaucrats more generally to make laws. And I think that a lot of people felt left out of that process.
Sean Illing
Do you think it would’ve been better to have left things as they were? Should we have allowed Jim Crow to end whenever the South decided the time was right?
Christopher Caldwell
The short answer to that is no. This book is in no way a defense of Jim Crow or segregation or anything like that.