As some cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, so have minorities nested & hatched their eggs in The Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Put more amply is Christopher Caldwell’s thesis:
“The Civil Rights Act Of 1964 was … a legislative repeal of the First Amend-ment’s implied right to freedom of association. Over decades it polarized the political parties and turned them into something like secret societies, each of them loyal to a different constitutional understanding. Democrats, loyal to the post-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that they owed their ascendancy to a rollback of the basic constitutional freedoms Americans cherished most. Republicans, loyal to the pre-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that the only way back to the free country of their ideals was through the repeal of the civil rights laws. The combination was a terrible one – rising tensions along with a society-wide inability to talk or think straight about anything.” (p.278)
Narrowing his summary’s focus, Caldwell continues:
The Age of Entitlement...
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“Ronald Reagan, for all the prosperity Americans enjoyed under his presidency, never found anything like the resources to carry out the projects Lyndon Johnson devised in the 1960s. He merely averted the social confrontation to which events had been building in the 1970s by devising a new system for financing those projects. That is what today’s national debt is. (Italics added) The financial collapse of 2008 was a sign that the government had exhausted the resources of the not-yet-born and would now tap the resources of the living. (p. 279)
(Reviewer’s Note: The financial collapse of 2020 and Congress’s $2 trillion spending response will further burden taxpayers of all ages.)
Contents are divided into two sections. Section I – The Revolutions of the 1960s – contains four chapters: 1. 1963 2. Race 3. Sex 4. War
Section II – The New Constitution – contains four chapters: 5. Debt 6. Diversity 7. Winners 8. Losers
(Simon & Schuster, 2020: Text: 279 pages Notes: 39 pages Bibliography: 5 pages)
Following the Ferguson shooting and riots of August 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement was born. The movement posed a problem.
Caldwell writes, “If Black Lives Matter was civil rights … civil rights had become a de facto constitution. The various extensions that black and white progressives had successfully fought to attach to civil rights – above all affirmative action and political correctness – had ceased to be temporary expedients. They were essential parts of this new constitutional structure …” (268)
Slouching toward election 2016, a “rough beast,” as in Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” was a “self-promoting New York real estate developer … appearing in a Manhattan office building he pretended to own …” who became 45th President.
To explain this, Caldwell says, “… the moral narrative of civil rights required that (Whites) be cast as the villains of their country’s history.” (276)
A “… massive accumulated power to shame ” fell to Obama and the Democrats. However, “shame as a means of governing” creates “great problems.” (277) “ … opposition does not disappear but only becomes unspeakable, making the public even less knowable to its rulers. … shame as a government weapon works only on people capable of feeling shame. It thus purges high-minded people from the opposition and ensures that, when the now-mysterious public does throw up an opposition, it will be led by shameless people and take a shameless form.” (277)
Reflections on the Rev...
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The heart of Caldwell’s thesis appears in the Debt chapter under the heading What did the debt buy? A few quotations, indicting the Baby Boom Generation, answer it arrestingly, if repeatedly.
“The borrowing power of the Baby Boom generation was invested in avoiding the choices that the confrontation of the 1960s had placed before the country. What the debt paid for was social peace, which had come to be understood as synonymous with the various Great Society programs …” (108-109)
“A government that was going to make an overwhelming majority of voters pay the cost of affirmative action had to keep unemployment low, home values rising, and living standards high. Reaganomics was just a name for governing under a merciless contradiction that no one could admit was there: Civil rights was important enough that people could not be asked to wait for it, but unpopular enough that people could not be asked to pay for it.” (111)
“Failing to win a consensus for the revolutions of the 1960s, Washington instead bought off through tax cuts those who stood to lose from them. Americans would delude themselves for decades that there was something natural about this arrangement. It was an age of entitlement.” (111)
Busy Reader: Your reviewer/butcher has displayed Caldwell’s choice cuts. The rest is study, reflection, discussion, silence.
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