The Way Forward
28th May 2024
Race, more than anything else, has come to define American politics. Sixty years after the Civil Rights Act, it permeates virtually all political and cultural discourse. The decades-long campaign to position race at the center of American life has succeeded, and to avoid the subject is to embrace irrelevance.
Most accounts of this transformation are celebratory, as scholars and cultural tastemakers are intimately aware of the advantages of affirming the present. But in recent years a small cohort of intellectual rebels have gone against the grain, most notably Christopher Caldwell, whose book The Age of Entitlement provides an alternate account of the 1960s.
Caldwell argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act effectively replaced the U.S. Constitution as the nation’s primary legal and moral authority, abridging the social contract and fundamentally altering the relationship between Americans and their government. Since its publication, Age of Entitlement has served as the definitive counterargument to the whitewashed, self-congratulatory retelling of racial progress. Caldwell’s book is a must-read, and its powerful thesis will continue to influence political dissent for years to come.