1,643 words
Christopher Caldwell
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020
In 2015, Kim Davis, a frumpy county clerk from a Nowheresville in Appalachia, refused to issue gay marriage licenses and was briefly jailed as a result. Additionally, Davis and her fellow office workers were subjected to the cruelest of internet jokes. Ironically, in the months before Davis was bullied on a nationwide scale, her very detractors had launched an anti-bullying campaign that had support from the highest levels.
Kim Davis was cruelly treated for her lonely stand.
After reading Christopher Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, I thought back to the Kim Davis Affair and reinterpreted it. At the time of the controversy, I felt it was a permanent end to conservatism. After reading the book under review, I realized that the gay identity movement had won a victory that they couldn’t keep. After all, Kim Davis was not a criminal, and she hails from a culture that mounted their guard on the walls of Londonderry while on half-rations and then went to civilize the North American wilderness. Davis also bore and raised four children. Her adversaries cannot have children, and they made sterile sexual behavior their primary identity. Furthermore, to accept transgenderism, one must also accept an obvious lie.
For now, however, gay identity won, and won big — and they’ve been winning for decades:
Republicans. . . saw political correctness as little more than a series of jokes. . . [but] on their own chances of prevailing on matters of law had fallen to nil. Once social issues could be cast as battles over civil rights, Republicans would lose 100 percent of the time. The agenda of “diversity” advanced when its proponents won elections and when they lost them. [1]
Caldwell’s book has three different thrusts. The first thrust can be summed up as “white people problems.” It details recent issues with capitalism, especially the shenanigans of Amazon and other internet-based companies. Since this review is for a racially-aware website, I won’t expand upon these ideas. Suffice to say, the new captains of industry have the same goods and bads as the captains of industry of old, and they’ll need to be managed somehow for the good of society. The second is the impact of the Baby Boom Generation on politics. The final idea — highly radical — is that the 1964 Civil Rights Act is, in effect, a second constitution governing American society.
The Greatest Generation Wasn’t That Great, & the Baby Boomers Weren’t That Bad
Caldwell argues that the generation gaps weren’t conservative elders vs. liberal youngsters. Instead, much of the counter culture was the rejection of the liberal technocratic order built by FDR and others, to include a rejection of “civil rights.”
The “Greatest Generation” is usually defined as the cohort of people born between 1901 and 1924. However, a better case can be made that America’s true greatest generation are those born between 1860 and 1882. In their youth, the latter generation won their war (with Spain) in a matter of months, sent an expeditionary force to Peking, China and won, and then won an insurgency in the Philippines within two years. As adults, they enacted immigration restrictions and carried out pro-white policies in all parts of the USA. As elders, they directed strategy for World War II. Even most state flags were designed by the women of this generation.
Victorious in war, racially aware, industrious, spiritual; the generation born in the two decades after the US Civil War were the greatest American generation.
The World War II generation returned home, created suburbs with family-sized barracks, and built stifling schools that looked exactly alike. It was this generation’s complacency that allowed America to deindustrialize. On their watch, American-made cars became the shoddy, undrivable monstrosities of the 1970s. As older adults, they were baffled by the challenges of the Vietnam War. Even worse, it was they, not the Boomers, who enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Caldwell writes:
By the time the oldest Boomers got to college in 1963, there were 16,000 troops in Vietnam and the March on Washington had already happened. When Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in the spring of 1968, no Baby Boomer had ever voted in a presidential election. At the time of the countercultural music festival at Woodstock [in] 1969, the youngest Baby Boomers were still too young for kindergarten. [2]
The definitive history of the “civil rights” movement has yet to be written, but I agree that the Boomers didn’t enact “civil rights” or the 1965 Immigration Act. Indeed, the impulses that created these twin disasters were decades-long in the making. Jewish activists in the NAACP were shaping the Judicial Branch as early as the Taft administration when they helped block the appointment of Judge William C. Hook for the Supreme Court. Segregation laws were successfully challenged throughout the 1930s and beyond. The NAACP’s strategy of advances by means of the Judicial Branch was effective. They used a trick called barratry, where litigants created stylized cases in districts with sympathetic judges. Rosa Parks was a carefully selected activist creating a scene, not a tired seamstress. Other non-white and leftist activists have used the same trick. Gay “rights” advanced through barratry.
Bearing that in mind, Caldwell argues that the counter-culture movement of the late 1960s was a conservative reaction to the massive failures of early 1960s technocratic leftism. It was also a reaction against “civil rights.” Caldwell shows that the majority of white Americans were hostile to the 1964 Civil Rights Act even after it was freshly signed, with many wanting the law not enforced. The act was passed with the idea that it was limited to African-Americans and would be temporary. Boomers that supported “civil rights” were bureaucratic normalizers of it, not revolutionaries themselves.
Caldwell argues that Ronald Reagan was elected by Boomers to dismantle “civil rights.” Instead, Reagan created a system that paid for the massive economic costs of “civil rights” through debt. Later presidents doubled down on this policy until the 2008 Recession — an economic disaster that was caused by lending money to non-whites. Reagan and his successors also expanded “civil rights” so that recently-arrived, wealthy third-world immigrants had more advantages than native-born whites.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act — The New Constitution
“Diversity” is the logical conclusion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is a second constitution operating parallel to the US Constitution. What is implied by the 1964 Civil Rights Act (such as bussing) is treated by the courts the same way as what is implied by the US Constitution. Supporters of the law are also willing to use raw power to enforce the act, rather than persuasion — and they don’t care about the costs. Caldwell writes:
Barack Obama was the first president to understand civil rights law this way, as a de facto constitution by which the de jure constitution could be bypassed, and to lead the country on that new constitutional basis. His second inaugural address in 2012, an explicitly Constitution-focused address in which he repeated “We the People . . . ,” honored “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” (i.e., women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights) as the great constitutional achievements of modern times, and extra-parliamentary protest and Supreme Court jurisprudence as the high roads that led there. [3]
Free speech, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms — all of the rights white Americans have held sacred since the Magna Carta — are under threat from the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Additionally, the ideas of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are exportable. As a result, political parties in Ireland that trace their roots to the ethnonationalist struggle of 1916 are importing third-world migrants to replace their population.
Caldwell makes a case that American whites stay silent, duck and weave, and/or dissemble when dealing with the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s implications. Most ominously:
This polarization around civil rights resembled the polarization around slavery that emerged into public view only with the vote on the Wilmot Proviso in 1846. Similar questions of affiliation and identity were emerging. Republicans held the allegiance of the vast majority of white people. Their party united almost the entirety of both the pro-New Deal and the anti-New Deal coalitions of fifty years before. The Democrats were the party of those whose concerns had never been in the forefront of American political life until the 1960s — blacks, gays, and women (as women) — and of tens of millions of immigrants and their offspring, who back then had not been in the country at all. The culture of civil rights was what American politics had come to be about, even if Americans had trouble talking about it. [4]
A Watershed Publication
Age of Entitlement, written by the editor of the now-defunct Weekly Standard Christopher Caldwell, is a watershed publication. It is the first mainstream non-fiction book I’ve ever read that validates the ideas of the white nationalist right. Caldwell quotes Sam Francis and Peter Brimelow. He doesn’t insist that the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision was subverted by “progressives.” Instead, he argues that “civil rights” was rotten from the get-go.
The Age of Entitlement is well written and highly quotable. But most importantly, it paints a target on the cause of much American malaise and avoids issues that normies don’t easily grasp, such as the JQ. Recognizing the 1964 Civil Rights Act as evil gives activists focus. Young law students can seek to be admitted to the bar with the intent to destroy the 1964 Civil Rights Act as they advance their careers. In the future, ending the 1964 Civil Rights Act can be a litmus test.
Caldwell shows that ending “civil rights” has been on the collective white mind for decades — and it can now be on their lips, too.
Notes
[1] Caldwell, Christopher, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2020): Pages 168 and 169
[2] Ibid, page 82. Additionally, the Freedom Riders stunt took place in 1961, and the Port Huron Statement was written in 1962.
[3] Ibid, page 229
[4] Ibid, pages 237 and 238
11 Comments
My opinion of Reagan keeps going down and down the more I read about him.
It is interesting that Caldwell ever could have been the editor of “The Weekly Standard.” Wasn’t that Kristol’s magazine?
Reagan’s heart was in the right place, but he was so totally focussed on the threat of Soviet Communism that everything else was kind of an afterthought. This seemed justified at the time, with the Communists going from victory to victory in the Third World in the 1970’s, but this outlook has not aged particularly well. Let’s just say that lots of us who were on the Right in the 1970’s and 1980’s overestimated the threat of international Communism, and underestimated the threat of domestic Communism, especially in its entryist or Frankfurt School variety. 20/20 hindsight, of course.
Tucker Carlson also worked there at one point. There’s a humorous passage in “Ship of Fools” where Carlson eviscerates Kristol. He also talks about other similar Establishment Republicans and essentially says they’re all the same and from the same background, without telling us what is the same about them or what the background is.
I can’t wait to read this book, and am frankly shocked that it got mainstream publication. It’s a very heartening sign.
Yes, it is interesting what Tucker can say and what he can’t say.
I remember listening to the Daily Shoah about a year ago and Mike E said he thinks Tucker knows everything, the Black Problem, the JQ and everything. But he clearly can’t say everything or he would be fired instantly. Tucker does use the term “Neo-Con” which I don’t think any other mainstream media person would use.
However, just yesterday, Tucker’s assistant Trace Gallagher was covering a story showing about 6 black teen-agers beating up on a 68 year old white man in the Chicago subway. Gallagher called them “teens” even though the smart phone video showed they were all black. Tucker did not correct Gallagher and say they were “black teens” as if they could have been any race. But still, Tucker is the best there is. I was hoping he might try to take on Trump in the Republican primary but I guess that is not going to happen.
I am just blown away by the concept of ‘The 1964 Civil Rights Act’ as being our ‘Second Constitution’ in this country! This is so true — and it explains and clarified so much of the confusion about how we are ruled more by civil rights laws and thinking than by our constitutional rights — gun ownership, free speech, freedom of religion and , etc. — and especially the right to ownership and usage of property in this land.
Good grief — it is the boulder in the middle of the road to having clearly-established White communities within our land, which is the basis of White Nationalism. Civil Rights laws allow for the creation of Sanctuary Cities (and entire states!) for ‘oppressed minorities’ (mostly illegal aliens), but not for ‘our class’ of citizens who just desire our own neighborhoods, not to mention — OMG! — the return of the entire country to the citizens who built it.
As I see it, we need a bevy of good lawyers to get us clear of the tangle of these oppressive laws until we can get them actually repealed. I’m hoping some of our young people who see the correctness of White Rights will take up the study of Law at University in order to make this change a reality.
I think what would serve you best would be an amendment to your constitution, granting you freedom of association in all aspects of your private life. That would entail residence, education, work and recreation and forbid any form of forced racial integration. It would also allow you to create your own communities like the Whites in South Africa have done with their Orania.
Caldewell’s book is being reviewed in interesting quarter — https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/the-age-of-entitlement-america-since-the-sixties/ — and not entirely negatively. I’m not familiar with Caldwell’s work but it seems like he’s got juice, enough juice to keep reviewers from simply chimping out on him.
I wonder if this work would have been written if Trump had not come along. If the Civil Rights Act was undone, no non-White would have the right to access Whites and their stuff. Ethnostates could naturally flow from its demise.
Have read many reviews of this, and this is my favorite yet. Caldwell has generally passed himself off as a demure, moderate conservative, but this book will prove a veritable Rosetta Stone and guidebook for nationalist activists, going forward.
Good treatment of the confused Boomer-bashing of today, and much incisive skewering of other useful targets, e.g.:
‘[Caldwell] doesn’t insist that the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision was subverted by “progressives.” Instead, he argues that “civil rights” was rotten from the get-go.’
But of course. Incidentally I thought the reviewer’s discussion of the mechanics of civil-rights legislation (see the paragraph on “barratry”) was clearer and more succinct than Caldwell’s own.
This review highlights aspects of the book that I passed over as trifling. For me, the whole gay-marriage thing (which Caldwell gets into deep in the book), was basically a minor coda to the real damage begun by the legislation of the 60s. Such late-blooming weeds could take root and flourish only because the ground was already well-tilled and manured. (Though I must say that the suggested connection between Kim Davis and the walls of Derry—completely foxed me, and I wonder what point was being made.)
I don’t recall the book saying that Ronald Reagan was elected by Boomers (who in 1980 were mostly in their teens, like Caldwell himself, or twenties) to undo the civil-rights morass. Reagan voters were mostly over 35. In 1980 those of us in the Younger Set tended to be apathetic, and even when of voting age didn’t make it to the polls. Furthermore Reagan’s cadre of revolutionaries (e.g., David Stockman) were mainly focused on economic theory and deregulation. Reagan was elected out of revulsion at the sad and beleaguered administration of Jimmy Carter, with its Iran hostage crisis, chronic stagflation, and post-Vietnam malaise. Rolling back Affirmative Action and ending grievance politics were scarcely on most people’s todo list in 1980.
It’s a valid point to say we hoped and expected the Reagan people to undo those Leftist excesses . . . but they were not first and foremost on our minds . . . and if Caldwell believes they were, then he is completely misremembering the political atmosphere of the time he entered Harvard College.
He makes a much better point when he suggests that this era was the last clear opportunity to bring back the Constitution and reclaim our nation. The Reagan time wasn’t our very last chance, it was probably just our last chance to do so without violent turmoil and revolution.
James Burnham makes the point in his The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom that the purpose of political struggle is not to enact ostensible campaign slogans; rather, it is to seize power (citing Mosca, Sorel and Pareto, among others). The Civil Rights Revolution is an obvious example.
The Revolution was sold to Americans as being about “freedom,” “equality,” “justice” and “content of character.”. The actual results of the Revolution have included the loss of the right of association, the accession of legal privileges for minorities (via affirmative action, etc.), the entrenchment of a managerial regime to enforce equal opportunity, the end of the American manned space program, free passes to blacks for “disparate impact,” the displacement of White people from cities they built from Selma to Detroit, and what looks like to be a new wave of censorship under the Orwellian rubric of hatespeak.
Regardless of the fact that the original civil rights agenda has long since been implemented, the demands escalate. The non-stop civil disobedience, race hustling, rioting, gangbanging and black lives mattering which have accompanied the Revolution are the street muscle. It’s all part of the Permanent Revolution.
Should be interesting to see how all this plays out as White people become minorities in their own countries. We already see System’s media promote the idea that the recent pro-2nd Amendment rally in Richmond was really about “White supremacy.” Oddly enough, the media is right insofar as guns are a part of traditional (White) America, and there is perhaps an incipient awakening of White racial consciousness.
The critical thing is next time around, let’s see White people take a page or three from The Machiavellians. Remember: it’s about political power.
While it is true that the generation born between 1860 and 1882 did some great things, such as the segregation laws both local and state because they noticed that the negro generation born since the Civil War reverted to DNA genetic mental trait(s) found in the negro and making them incompatible with a western read: White nation/society/culture. The negroes who were adult at the end of the Civil War were not so bad because, as Robert E. Lee remarked, they had been subjected to an onerous discipline by Whites to make them (the negro) behave so they could exist in such a White society.
On the other hand the 1860-1882 generation elected the Congresses and President that handed (unconstitutionally) the money power to a private and largely jewish central bank that has no financially bled this late great Republic to the bone marrow. And this generation elected a Congress and re-elected a President that involved the USA in a European war for which we had no quarrel. They also got the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act passed into law.
jews getting ahold of the money power canceled out, or laid the groundwork for invalidating all that they accomplished. jews raked off American’s wealth and used it to destroy their (the American’s) country by bribing politicians to do the jews’ bidding, predatory price any competition out of news media and entertainment media and buy influence in academia.
To defeat the jew, the money power must be regained and all jews mercilessly excluded from it as the Byzantine Empire supposedly did. jews were stymied to a great extent in the Byzantine Empire and therefore in the 20th century there has been no Hollywood epics or other movies about it.
BTW, Rosa Parks had been an attendee of the Highlander Folk School, which was a Communist training academy in what we’d today call “community organizing”. There’s a notorious picture of MLK attending that same academy.