Publisher Description

A major American intellectual and "one of the right's most gifted and astute journalists" (The New York Times Book Review) makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled--and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences and his conclusion is this: even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high--in wealth, freedom, and social stability--and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half-century, taking you on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycotin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules. Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement "is an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight" (New York magazine) about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems--and drove it toward conflict.

Author Biography

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He was previously a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties and Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.

Review

The Wall Street Journal's Best Political Books of 2020 "One of the right's most gifted and astute journalists"
-- New York Times Book Review
"The Age of Entitlement is a work of history, not a work of sociological analysis. It does not conclude with a list of solutions or proposals. But this is no ordinary work of history. It engages and dazzles the reader in the way the histories of A.J.P. Taylor once did. Caldwell, as those who know his journalism and his 2010 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe will know, has a marvelous talent for pointing out the unacknowledged contradictions and perversities in the outlooks of both left and right."
--Commentary "American conservatism's foremost writer... This is a heretical, unsettling work"
--The Irish Times
"The Age of Entitlement is an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight."
-- New York Magazine
"The Age of Entitlement rudely dismembers the moral pretensions of our ruling class in the tradition of Christopher Lasch. If the trajectory of political correctness leaves you bewildered, here you will learn its institutional logic--the key role it plays in legitimating new structures of inequality. Thanks to Caldwell, we now understand how this regime change happened, and why half the electorate thought it necessary to cast a vote of desperation in 2016."
--Matthew Crawford, New York Times bestselling author of Shop Class as Soulcraft
"A deeper, wider cultural and constitutional narrative of the last half-century... Caldwell's account is indispensable -- especially for liberals -- in understanding how resentments grew... nuanced and expansive"
-- Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine
"A sweeping but insightful examination into every social, political and legal decision, movement and trend that leaves us where we are today in a polarized nation. ... a fascinating read that could ignite 1,000 conversations ... Caldwell's analysis of our Vietnam legacy is particularly masterful but the book brims with brisk evaluations of how a confident nation became an argumentative, fragmented one."
-- The Associated Press
"In all, a deeply felt, highly readable, and dead honest account of America since the 1960s and the terrible wrong turn we took then and continue to follow, disrupting what we used to call the American way, and leading to the increasing alienation of many of our most productive citizens, who believe they may be losing their country."
-- The Washington Times
"In this landmark cultural and political history of the last half-century, Christopher Caldwell brilliantly dissects the new progressive establishment, and shows how the reforms of the sixties gradually devolved into intolerance, self-righteousness, and the antithesis of what had started out as naive idealism. A singular analysis by a masterful chronicler of the sixties dreams that have gone so terribly, but predictably, wrong."
-- Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Case for Trump
"Scholarly, provocative, insightful: this is history-writing at its best. Readers of Caldwell's journalism will instantly recognize his capacity to use a single moment or event to illuminate a much wider phenomenon. Anyone wishing to understand the failure of the American elite over the more than half century since President Kennedy was assassinated, and thus why Donald Trump was elected, must read but profoundly thoughtful book."
-- Andrew Roberts, New York Times bestselling author of Leadership in War
"The sharpest and most insightful conservative critique of mainstream politics in years."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Review Quote

The Wall Street Journal's Best Political Books of 2020 "One of the right's most gifted and astute journalists" -- New York Times Book Review

Excerpt from Book

Chapter 1: 1963 1 1963 The assassination of Kennedy In the mid-1960s, at a moment of deceptively permanent-looking prosperity, the country''s most energetic and ideological leaders made a bid to reform the United States along lines more just and humane. They rallied to various loosely linked moral crusades, of which the civil rights movement, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, provided the model. Women entered jobs and roles that had been male preserves. Sex came untethered from both tradition and prudery. Immigrants previously unwanted in the United States were welcomed and even recruited. On both sides of the clash over the Vietnam War, thinkers and politicians formulated ambitious plans for the use of American power. Most people who came of age after the 1960s, if asked what that decade was "about," will respond with an account of these crusades, structured in such a way as to highlight the moral heroism of the time. That is only natural. For two generations, "the sixties" has given order to every aspect of the national life of the United States--its partisan politics, its public etiquette, its official morality. This is a book about the crises out of which the 1960s order arose, the means by which it was maintained, and the contradictions at its heart that, by the time of the presidential election of 2016, had led a working majority of Americans to view it not as a gift but as an oppression. The assassination of Kennedy The era we think of as the sixties began with relative suddenness around the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Americans are right to say that nothing was ever the same after Kennedy was shot. You can hear the change in popular music over a matter of months. A year-and-a-half before Kennedy was killed, "Stranger on the Shore," a drowsy instrumental by the British clarinetist Acker Bilk, had hit number one. A year-and-a-half after the assassination, the musicians who would form Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and various other druggie blues and folk-rock bands were playing their first gigs together in San Francisco. This does not mean that the assassination "caused" the decade''s cultural upheaval. The months before Kennedy''s death had already seen the publication of Thomas Kuhn''s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (August 1962), which upended notions about science''s solidity and a lot of social and political assumptions built on it; Rachel Carson''s expos

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