Christopher Caldwell’s book, “The Age of Entitlement – America Since the Sixties” is a hard book to read. As I described in several places it took me much too long to finish because many times I had to stop after about fifteen minutes of reading and put it down. It was too painful to hear the seemingly endless litany of defeats, betrayals and acts of cowardice by our elected officials and their bureaucratic, academic, legal and corporate co-conspirators. And yet I think this book should be read by anyone who doesn’t know the full history of how we have been stripped of our constitutional rights based solely on our European ancestry and normal male identity. It is so infuriating to read, that it serves as the perfect eye-opener for anyone who still thinks that affirmative action and political correctness are harmless and just.
Caldwell walks us through the years, starting with the Civil Rights struggle against segregation in the South and shows the gradual but continual evolution of that movement from a crusade to end discrimination against blacks to a concerted program to discriminate against whites. He shows how the logic went from successfully ending the unconstitutional denial of equal rights for blacks into implementing the unconstitutional practices of affirmative action, with its abrogation of free speech, freedom of association and property rights based on not equality of opportunity, but rather equality of outcome. And since these decisions were made by unelected judges who were basically answerable to no one, no recourse was possible. For every white man the burden of guilt never had to be proved. It was always assumed.
After this Caldwell walks us through the expansion of the civil rights movement to embrace other “victims.” Next was women with the adoption by the left of abortion on demand and equal rights for women in the work place and the delegitimization of traditional marriage. After this we get homosexual rights, immigrant rights and on to the explosion of immigration. Finally, we come to the present day where demonization of European identity and culture is all pervasive. We reach a point where open contempt for the native-born Americans is open and threatening. We see these people marginalized and starved out of their homes by industry and government leaders who openly connive to replace them with immigrants legal and illegal. They end up on welfare and waiting for death under the soporific influence of cheap and plentiful opioids that have purposefully been allowed to flooded our streets and countryside.
Throughout Caldwell points out how the leaders of the conservative cause are always woefully unprepared or even unwilling to challenge incredibly unpopular programs and laws. Time after time a leader will run for office on a platform to defend or revive some part of life that the progressives are undermining and again and again, we witness either a defeated attempt or no attempt at all to prevent the destruction of our way of life.
And at the heart of most of these campaigns are the progressive lawyers and judges working hand in glove with the progressives in the bureaucracies and in the non-profit foundations. These foundations were set up by the elites that use them to push for the programs that they support but do not affect them personally. Their schools and homes and families are above the level of being disadvantaged or impinged upon by these forces, unlike the common people that they demonize whose lives are thrown into chaos by these anti-social measures.
Equally distressing is seeing how the leaders of industry sided with the progressives in order to gain access to cheap labor by both exporting jobs to the third world and importing these third world workers right here in the United States as either legal or illegal immigrants. And once the Tech Revolution was in full swing, we are walked through how the American men who dominated this industry adopted the progressive cause and used their new found tools to obliterate the brick and mortar retail landscape of the entire United States. And with the diminution of newspapers, radio and television as advertising channels, communication companies like Google and Facebook now get to decide who is allowed to do business and who is not. And they decide it based on whether they like your politics.
So, we reach the present day where any dissent from the official narrative that demonizes white men is not just shouted down but answered with de-platforming, unemployment, physical assault and sometimes criminal prosecution. And as the book signifies on its last page. That is what gave us the Trump presidency.
Personally, this book reinforced in my mind the necessity of challenging affirmative action in front of a conservative Supreme Court. The fig leaf that affirmative action employs to shield its unconstitutional nature is the importance of “diversity.” But since diversity doesn’t appear in the Constitution, a brave and honest court should strike down all the quota driven fairness devices and strip the Federal and State bureaucracies of their discriminatory mechanisms. All that needs to be asserted is that equality under the law doesn’t need to provide equal outcomes for every individual. Some people are smarter or stronger or more hard working or crueler or more beautiful or taller or shorter or luckier. I can live with those things and believe me there are enough things that I wish I could do that I can’t. But facing that is called sanity. And it’s far from a bad thing.
I highly recommend this book. It’s about time that someone published something as honest and informative on the subject of America’s descent into the maelstrom of social justice insanity. It’s time that we throw our support behind whichever men are brave enough to lead the fight back to sanity. And I know it won’t be easy. As Steve Bannon said “If you think they are going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.” He’s right. They will fight at every step. If the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action, the big cities will riot and burn. Well, that’s nothing new. But it’s the only way back to a world where fairness and freedom even have their original meanings.
Good work Christopher Caldwell. You wrote a horrible, urgently important, good book. Bravo.