Tag: The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

The Age of Entitlement – A Book Review

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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.

Claremont Review of Books – The Law That Ate the Constitution by Helen Andrews

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Here’s someone else who is mining the important but horrific story in Christopher Caldwell’s book, “The Age of Entitlement.”  I’m glad to see Caldwell getting coverage all over the Right.  His story is an eye opener and should wake up many normies who are confused by how we got where we are now.  In the parlance of the kids it will red-pill many and black-pill more than a few.  But it will also show how the judiciary was weaponized and that will indicate how a conservative court could reverse huge swaths of the unconstitutional overreach by admitting that anti-white discrimination is still discrimination and is a crime.

Diversity is Our Weakness – Bakke Revisited

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For someone as old as I am, one of the more horrific side effects of reading Christopher Caldwell’s book “The Age of Entitlement” is reliving all of the political debacles that he chronicles.  Each one comes back and delivers the same pain you felt originally plus the additional grief you get from reflecting on how that defeat reverberated through the years.

To select a specific example, Caldwell details the 1978 court case in which a white male applicant to the UC Davis medical school, Allan Bakke, was rejected in favor of a minority student.  Allan Bakke had board scores in the 96th, 94th, 97th and 72nd percentile while the minority candidate had scores in the 34th, 30th, 37th and 18th percentile.  Back then the California court rightfully ruled that Bakke had been discriminated against and also ruled that the California program that made this preference was racially discriminatory and must be eliminated.  But the University of California appealed to the Supreme Court and by a five to four vote the Court decided that although discrimination was being practiced, diversity was so important that quotas were acceptable as long as they were masked by calling them diversity “plus factors.”  Previous to this, no one had ever heard of diversity as a constitutional requirement.  So what we had was the very same anti-discrimination laws that the civil rights movement championed ten years before would now be purposefully broken by their government allies to disadvantage a population of people on the basis of race and gender.  How ironic.

This was the decision that sealed the fate of white male students across the country.  Women and various minorities would be put at the front of the line and regardless of how low their scores were they would get the seats ensured by the hidden quotas that all the universities employed.  And eventually the same system would be used by all the major corporations that were monitored by the Federal government which is essentially every one that had more than a handful of employees.

And that is where we are today.  The only difference is that additional “protected groups” like homosexuals and illegal aliens have been added over time to the rolls of the favored.  And now we have reached a place where every organization, whether a college, corporation or non-profit social group justifies this by employing a mantra that they drum into their employees, namely, “diversity is our strength.”

Diversity is our strength.  What does that even mean?  In what sense is it a strength?  I have personally witnessed diversity hires who have proven so incompetent that they effectively destroyed the functionality of a whole department.

I can remember a technical director standing up at a company meeting and during the “diversity and inclusion” sermon stating that he knew diversity was our strength because a company culture survey had confirmed that it was.  I tried not to smile, but failed because I remembered the last time a supposedly “anonymous” culture survey had provided results that contradicted the official narrative.  But anonymity was only maintained at the individual level.  All survey respondents were identified to the level of the supervisor above.  The low-level supervisors of the anonymous dissenters were told that their poor managerial skills were responsible for the “uninformed” nature of the contradictory responses of their direct reports and if the trend continued it would be handled by demoting the supervisors.  Naturally, the supervisors then begged their reports to toe the line if they didn’t want to see them fired.  So essentially the proof of diversity being a strength is that the company told the employees that it is.

Let’s look at it rationally.  If you wanted to hire mechanics what would you be looking for?  Several things; mechanical aptitude, strength, conscientiousness, experience and resourcefulness.  Now several of these general qualities we could hope to find in applicants of any race or either gender.  But if you are looking for strength and mechanical aptitude you would not be surprised to find that the great majority of the best applicants were men.  So, hiring an equal number of men and women as mechanics, while obviously producing more diversity than with an all-male staff is going to provide you with a weaker crew both in terms of strength and skill.

If you wanted to choose good medical school students what would you look for?  Until 1964 you would be looking for emotional composure, honesty but most importantly for very high analytical intelligence.  That is why science and math are the most important prerequisites for medical school.  But if after the civil rights era you would accept candidates solely based on their sex or race regardless of how low their testing scores for analytical intelligence were then you would get a weaker class of medical students.

This same exercise can be employed for any job that requires anything more than rudimentary skills.  In each case choosing candidates by a quota, regardless of fitness for the position does not give you a stronger employee, it gives a weaker one.  From this analysis I conclude that “diversity is our strength” is not just untrue but that the opposite statement is shown to be true.  If choosing applicants according to core job competency is subordinated to checking off gender and race boxes then you have purposefully picked less talented individuals as part of your selection process.  That is stupid.  And worse than stupid, it is dishonest.  And since the victims of this dishonesty, namely the co-workers, have to pretend they don’t see what’s happening it is also highly demoralizing for them.

There it is.  A dishonest process to defend an illogical goal.

There are many things that a conservative Supreme Court needs to do.  Reverse the homosexuality agenda, re-establish the right of free association and protect the First and Second Amendment Rights of all Americans.  But if I were to rank the priorities, I would say that ruling affirmative action unconstitutional is the first priority of a conservative agenda.  American society as a whole would benefit from the elimination of the dishonesty, incompetence and resentment that this insane practice foists on all of us.

Will the Supreme Court take up something like this?  Under John Roberts and with the current conservative/liberal 5/4 split it will not.  But with the 6/3 split that might soon exist it is possible.  And that is why I especially hope that President Trump ends up with a strong majority in the Senate after this year’s election.  I know he will be making an additional nomination within the next five years.  I want it to be a bold conservative judge who will make a bold step like eliminating affirmative action.

ZMan Reacts to Christopher Caldwell’s “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties”

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Caldwell rights about the deleterious effects caused by the affirmative action legislation in the 1960’s.

Surprisingly, the ZMan seems to think some of the views of the Dissident Right are leaking through to mainstream society.   I’ll have to read Caldwell’s book to see what I think.

 

The New Hope