This is a narrative of American society from the 60s up to the present. Author Christopher Caldwell explains who gained power and wealth, who has lost, and how these changes led to the polarized politics of today. “The changes [in Federal law] from the 1960s,with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival Constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible--and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out.”
The starting point was Brown vs Board of Education. Rather than asking if schools could be separate but equal, the Supreme Court dismissed the question by stating that segregated schools were inherently unequal. The question then became one of freedom of association on equal terms. Blacks had to be granted the right to associate with whites. (The freedom of whites exclusively to associate with whites was ignored.) The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which applied to many public facilities besides schools, required the right to free association. A proportionate mix of white and black was required; if not, there was unequal association, therefore injustice. Public facilities of all kinds could always be found unequal in some way or other. Thus anxiety about inequality became a permanent condition, and was expanded to other groups besides blacks.
The 60s marked a heightening and expansion of the American outlook from the cramped outlook of the 50’s. The heroes were the veterans, who were eventually to hold 75% of US Congressional seats. The 60s seemed idealistic and focused on increasing personal freedom. The culture was also heavily male. In cities, a lot of old but serviceable buildings were torn down and replaced by dreary brutalist structures (for example, Government Center in Boston). Freedom for women expanded after two major Supreme Court decisions, Griswold vs Connecticut and Roe vs Wade, even if nominally they were about privacy. Abortion became an issue on the political reliability of judges. The constitutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court was put in question. Then came the ERA, which was highly favored at the beginning of the 70’s but faded. ERA promised to feminize public space just as Civil Rights Act promised to desegregate it. Now, the author explains (not very clearly) there was a sense of too much freedom; therefore in the 70s a hankering for rural, off-freeway America.
As we know reluctantly, the Vietnam war set America a large American goal that was disastrously lost. Originally Kennedy had planned to make an anti-communist state of Laos. American bureaucrats were sure they could build a Great Society in Southeast Asia. The war created a class division between the men who entered graduate or professional school and those who did not. Soldiers appeared as marauders and burners of villages. This had its impact on domestic politics. In Boston, school desegregregation through busing looked like a military campaign by well-off Bostonians against poor white neighborhoods. Privileged Americans took out of the Vietnam era an enhanced sense of moral authority. The people of South Boston were seen as part of the "basket of deplorables" and their future was to be overthrown.
The author points out that the 70s were a period of disillusionment from the late 60s. Reaganism shared to some degree the counterculture’s deepest aspirations. It was for conservative localist freedom against progress, favoring voluntary communities like South Boston over bureaucratically designed housing projects. But Reagan merely tapped conservatism. The return of power to communities never happened. Jack Kemp and later, Clinton promoted low taxes (promoted by Kemp, Jude Wanniski, and Arthur Laffer), high expenditures on Social Security and Medicare, and a big helping hand for minorities. The US dollar became the world's reserve currency. The Baby Boomers used their generational voting power to vote all of this into effect, arrogating the better-paid labor of future generations (who then were not old enough to vote), and trading it to other nations whose low-wage population gave us inexpensive products.
Social Security and Medicare were made more generous; there were expanded student loan programs and Pell grants. From an actuarial and human capital perspctive, the post-Reagan election years should have been easiest time to cut the budget, due to the large earning powr of Baby Boomers, but this didn’t happen. The wealth was spent on these expanding the new programs. As the author puts it, “The Great Society is the institutional form into which the civil rights impulse hardened.” More and more classes were icluded in the victim class, including other races, women, immigrants, Native Americans, .. .on and on.
The legally mandated outlays for civil rights, student loans and grants, grew incessantly, especially those for new programs, which courts assiduously worked to expand. The first major sign of this was the case of Nichols vs Lau (1974), concerning bilingual instruction in schools. The Supreme Court ruled that a school district was violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act if the children were not offered English instruction by their school district. By 1982 English instruction was offered in two forms, as a second language and as a bilingual program, but there were serious cost problems. The children were staying much longer in the bilingual program than appropriate. Similar cost-effectiveness problems occurred in other programs and in other cities. Boards of Education made many attempts to shut down bilingual programs, but they remained as a constitutional requirement.
Reaganism was a generational truce that cut some deadwood from government but not much. The exorbitant policy of using the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and getting to write the rules of international commerce were outcomes that seemed uncertain when Reagan took office. Voters were unwilling to pay the taxes for Great Society programs, student loans, and Pell Grants. They were “too big to fail”. Their effectiveness was in dispute but an iron coalition of educ administrators and student advocates won’t let them be touched.
"Diversity" was something of a cult-word in the late 80s. The author finds one source of its popularity in the Bakke decision, as an alternative for "equality". But another more mundane explanation is the widespread business use of the computer, which made it possible to assemble a product out of many different sources and designs; he cites Banana Republic clothing, in some ways "authentic," in other ways not. A manufactured product could draw on materials from all over the world (even if they were really cheap and new) and from designers in all different traditions (even if they were bogus). In human relations on the job, if there was a perceived lack of diversity in employment arrangements or a lack of sensitivity, there was a ground for a civil rights complaint. The author sees Political Correctness (PC) as "an unwillingness to distinguish between institutions (which could be oppressive) and individuals (which could only be misguided.) (p.156). Understandably he makes no attempt to explain how we can determine the restorative action necessary to remedy a specific complaint, but in general the required action had to meet a high bar. Undoing court-ordered diversity would be difficult if it could be done at all.
The last chapter, "Losers", covers events in the last few years of this diversity/P.C. state, which the author sees as its culmination. Whites have been devalued to an inferior status, below "people of color": " ...when race rather than citizenship becomes the structure through which people accede to their rights, one must have a race, willy-nilly. And under the law, whites were "raceless". (p. 238). Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who successfully impersonated as black, was on her discovery attacked in the media for "passing" as black, as was Margaret Seltzer, a middle-class suburbanite who concocted a narrative about her life as a black female gang member. This was considered not funny, but a fraud. The publisher destroyed the entire print run of Seltzer's book. Then we have the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, who did not raise his hands and say "Don't shoot!" in his running attack on Officer Darren Wilson. In sum, whites were not allowed to joke about race in their own way or expect consistent standards concerning how people of color talked about them versus how they talked about people of color.
These incidents reveal a class division: Dolezal, Seltzer, and Wilson on one side, media moguls and judges on the other. It’s as if, absent a provable crime, we are never allowed to see minorities as demanding more than is warranted. I can only wander how far this can go.
This seems to me an extremely important book. The notes are very rich, referring to much related material of high relevance. There's a lot that for reasons of space alone, I've had to omit, even in this book of less than 300 pages, and only a few errors.
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Jean-Marc Cormier
Grab a copy before the book-burning mob cancels it.
Reviewed in Canada on January 22, 2021
