amazing read, scholarly, understanding how individual events explain what is going on in our lives.
pg 232 :" -- the civil rights approach to politics meant using lawsuits, shamming, and street power to overrule democratic politics. It encouraged-- no, it required--groups of similarly situated people to organize against the wider society to defend their interests."
this statement seems to me to sum up civil rights, its has nothing to do about rights & wrongs, & methods to correct, except by force, intimidation & threats ( )

A well researched domentary of US relations after Civil rights legislation. ( )

(44) I thought this was a very interesting book - an actual exploration of the recent history and politics of the US from something other than the typical leftist academic viewpoint. Not vitriol filled alt right crap, but not yet another offering to the altar of multiculturalism, diversity, and civil rights. Caldwell's thesis if I understand it correctly is that we got more than we bargained for when Civil Rights legislation was enacted. Instead of just a way to dismantle the Jim Crow South which was much needed -- Civil Rights Law became almost a constitution in and of itself. Whole bureaucracy's were set up to support it - Office of Civil Rights, HUD, EEOC, Department of Education, with carefully selected landmark cases that would come before the Supreme Court and activist judges. Expanded entitlements, government-sponsored lending of mortgages to people who were traditionally considered unqualified, coupled with the rise of globalization has left the country with a huge debt and lack of meaningful employment for the working class. Those who have benefited - the college educated elite, the tech sector, and historically marginalized groups - gays, people of color, women. And those who are losers - white men - named, shamed, and blamed. The last line of the book is purposefully unwritten but understood - enter Trump. This book makes crystal clear how someone like him could have come to power.

You might think this book is just white fragility backlash but I don't think entirely so - (though I admit to eye-rolling when polls of white Americans were taken as evidence of whether a problem was real or not.) Caldwell does not present himself as someone who would actually support Trump. What he says is when shame is a political strategy it works only on people capable of feeling it - so all the high-minded individuals have abandoned ship re: daring to disagree and instead the resistance (righteous and understandable resistance) is left to the crass and hurtful...

Anyway, I digress. I am taking a class right now called 'Teaching for Equity,' which takes as its assumptions we all agree with critical race theory, which assumes that for every example of inequality between people of color and the raceless white monolith - discrimination is the reason. That there is no other reason than racism and white oppression for the actual facts - unlike other marginalized communities which seem to come to parity after a generation or two; African American are on the bottom. The bottom of everything - income, incarceration, health, home-ownership, upward mobility - despite decades of enforcement of civil rights, anti-discrimination, and affirmative action. I don't know. I just don't know. But I do know that it is important to explore both sides of an issue unabashedly. The writing was a bit plodding and plebeian, but the subject matter was important to me and the intellectual crossroads I find myself at now. ( )

Christopher Caldwell’s “The Age of Entitlement” is a somber reflection of how America 2020 arrived at its current polarized, factionalized state. Caldwell delves into the schism that developed in the mid-1960’s as legislative and cultural changes created two opposing visions of the United States: a Constitutional view, reflecting the country’s historical restraint on the power of Government vs. the post-Civil Rights Era view, where social and political interest groups became intent on leveraging legislation aimed at righting historical wrongs for self-centered gains. The result was a raid on the values and beliefs that most Americans hold dear.

For those who had benefitted or had no special ambition to game the system, the Constitutional view was the foundation that enabled this country to progress on the many fronts that awes the rest of the world. For those wishing to leverage their perceived inferior status to a higher, more influential level, the post-60's view enabled these special interest groups to 'divide and conquer' by the use of government force and intimidation.

In the Constitutional view, Government was emphatically limited; (“Congress shall make no law…”, “…shall not…”, etc), while the opposite occurred post-Civil Rights legislation (Government mandating quotas, proactively creating protections for new classes, enabling the bureaucracy to determine acceptable social mores and punish non-adherents, Judicial activism, etc). One could argue the post-1960s is a case study of unintended consequences and the lack of comprehensive, reasoned policymaking resulting in outcomes diametrically opposite those originally envisioned.

Caldwell’s narrative arrives at the same destination as other recent books examining the increasing decay and stratification of our society, albeit through the lens of the social upheavals of the 1960’s. Depressingly, the author has no solution for the situation America now finds itself in; indeed, the book’s analysis leads the reader to project America on a trajectory that will inevitably destroy this great nation.