W H AT TH E R IGH T IS R E ADING JA N.

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A New Conservative Theory of Why America

Is So Polarized
By Park MacDougald

Photo: Junfu Han/Detroit Free Press/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Christopher Caldwell is not a household name. But for the relatively small set of
people who care deeply about political writing, he is a towering gure. His prose —
full of wit and irony, enlivened by an eye for paradox and the telling detail,
informed by a polyglot and polymathic erudition — is second to none in the world
of conservative journalism and exceeds nine-tenths of what is published in the
press at large. In a review of Caldwell’s previous book, 2008’s immigration-skeptic
Re ections on the Revolution in Europe, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson,
himself one of the most learned individuals on the planet, praised Caldwell’s
“cultural range” as “perhaps without equal” among American journalists and noted,
respectfully, that his “columns in the Financial Times make much liberal opinion
look the dreary mainstream pabulum it too often is.”

Although long a liated with the neoconservative Weekly Standard, Caldwell has
always been more of an old-school, even Old World type of conservative. The cast
of his mind is literary and historical, not ideological, and his principal concern is
with cultural preservation and continuity. Perhaps for this reason, Caldwell has,
over the past several years, emerged as America’s premier highbrow defender of
transatlantic populism. In his recent essays for the Claremont Review of Books,
City Journal, and even the New Republic, he has relentlessly attacked the
“globalist” consensus around free trade and immigration while writing
sympathetically — some would say too sympathetically — about some of
globalism’s most disreputable opponents: Viktor Orbán, Eric Zemmour, Rodrigo
Duterte, et al. In Caldwell’s writing, the con ict between globalism and populism is
staged as a clash of civilizations: on one side is a high-handed elite, set on
transforming the West into a sort of multicultural shopping mall; on the other is a
loose band of dissidents, patriots, cranks, and gad ys who want their cultures, as
they know them, to survive.

In Caldwell’s latest book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, he
applies this framework to American history from the assassination of Kennedy to
the election of Trump. The result is in many ways impressive; in some, explosive.
Caldwell’s basic thesis is that the country’s current divisions are the product of a
longstanding and as-yet-unresolved con ict over the legacy of the ‘60s, and over
race and civil rights in particular. His radical innovation is to argue that the legal
regime that emerged out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its subsequent
expansions was, in his words, “not just a major new element in the Constitution,”
but “a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.”

Early in the book he writes:

Much of what we have called ‘polarization’ or ‘incivility’ in recent years is

something far more grave. It is the disagreement over which of the two
constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the
traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture
 behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind
of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites
and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a
liberation.

But how is the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “de facto constitution” incompatible with
the original one? In a strict legal sense, Caldwell argues, it is that the Civil Rights
Act and associated Supreme Court decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education,
con icted with or modi ed what had traditionally been understood as Americans’
constitutionally guaranteed rights. Court- or legislatively-mandated integration,
for instance, curtailed freedom of association, in the same way that legal
prohibitions on discrimination in hiring or renting out a room curtailed the
property rights of a business or hotel owner.

Such objections to the 1964 act have long been aired by paleoconservatives and
libertarians — in 2010, Rand Paul came under re for voicing a version of them —
and they are pretty small-bore. Caldwell’s concern is less legalistic and has more to
do with how “civil rights ideology… became, most unexpectedly, the model for an
entire new system of constantly churning political reform.” He argues that the act
and its subsequent expansions provided a blueprint, a moral rationale, and a legal
toolkit for ambitious and frequently unpopular social engineering projects,
justi ed in the name of an ever-proliferating suite of rights and operating outside
the bounds of traditional democratic and constitutional legitimacy. “The civil rights
model of executive orders, litigation, and court-ordered redress eventually became
the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emerging idea of fairness
against old traditions,” he writes. When the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade,
legalized abortion based on a hitherto unheard-of construal of the 14th
Amendment’s due process clause (“nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law”), or when, in Obergefell v. Hodges,
it did the same for gay marriage, it was acting according to the spirit of this de facto
constitution rather than the letter of the actual one.

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Caldwell is strongest when discussing the ironies and unintended consequences of
the civil rights revolution. He notes that white Americans in the ‘60s had been
embarrassed by Jim Crow and were willing to countenance a little government
heavy-handedness in order to solve what were, in their view, the regional problems
of the backward South. Whites, in other words, were complacent, naive, and more
than a little arrogant — they assumed that once explicit legal discrimination was
eliminated, America’s “race problem” would simply go away. But Caldwell, drawing
on the work of the sociologist Alan David Freeman, notes that “victims” and
“oppressors” tend to have very di erent views of systems of racial discrimination.
Oppressors think that once individual and legal prejudice has been ended, so too
has discrimination. Victims tend to see discrimination in systemic terms, and feel
that justice requires an equalization of outcomes. Over time, the victims’ view
became the o cial view, the one taught in schools and universities and which now
pervades our mass media and public culture. (Caldwell notes that the phrase
“white supremacy” is now used ve times as often as during its previous heyday in
the 1960s.) As a result, “a measure that had been intended to normalize American
culture and cure the gothic paranoia of the Southern racial imagination… instead
wound up nationalizing Southerners’ obsession with race and violence.”

Caldwell sees the rival constitutions as having realigned American politics, and
much of his book traces, in essayistic and sometimes cursory fashion, the history of
this realignment. His depiction of Reagan is particularly scathing — Caldwell sees
him as having won a majority based on the public’s rejection of the 1964
constitution, but blames him for doing little to nothing to attack its legal and
bureaucratic foundations. Instead, by cutting taxes for the white middle class,
Reagan e ectively kicked the can down the road, allowing his voters the option of
recreating a simulacrum of the old order — via private schools and ight to the
suburbs — through private, often debt- nanced means. The bitter, zero-sum
character of recent political con ict stems, in Caldwell’s telling, from a recognition
that the Reagan settlement is no longer tenable, and that the country can no longer
a ord — literally, given Caldwell’s heavy emphasis on debt — to nance the
existence of two irreconcilable constitutional and social orders. It must choose
between them. In 2016, Caldwell appears to believe it did.

The Age of Entitlement is eloquent and bracing book, full of insight even when
parts of its argument are di cult to credit (this is particularly true of Caldwell’s
 attempts to draw a causal connection between civil rights and the social
pathologies — opioids and deaths of despair — now a icting white Middle
America). It is the best and the most thoughtful statement we have of what might
be termed the “Flight 93 mindset” — the feeling, among a certain type of white
conservative, that the changes of the past half century have amounted to a war on
the country and the civilization that they knew and loved. The outstanding
question is what, if anything, Caldwell believes the right can do to reverse these
changes. Near the end of the book, he mentions in passing that Republicans have
failed to see that “the only way back to the free country of their ideals [is] through
the repeal of the civil rights laws.” It’s a shocking notion, and it is hard to believe
that even Caldwell believes it is a viable way to proceed. In another late passage, he
writes:

As they moved inland in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries,

Americans had obliterated whole cultures with a clean conscience, as if the
continent were unpeopled. In the half-century after the mid-1960s, America’s
leaders, still dreaming their big dreams, obliterated their own cultural
institutions in a similar spirit.

One gets the sense that these lines are closer to his heart. The story his book tells is
a kind of reactionary American tragedy — a lament for a version of the country that
is now gone, dispatched by the same hubris and ambition that powered its ascent.
As in a tragedy, events seem decreed by fate. There is little sense they could have
turned out otherwise.

TA G S : WHAT THE RIGHT IS READING C O N S E R VA T I S M RONALD REAGAN BOOKS

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