The social upheaval brought about by the coronavirus can easily serve as an epilogue for The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, which Christopher Caldwell published just before the full-scale outbreak of the pandemic. It details “The Roots of Our Partisan Divide” that were born in the tearful emotionalism of innocent civil rights songs like “We Shall Overcome,” but soon became an underground political bulldozer for doubling the Constitution itself.
Caldwell suggests that constitutions and governments aren’t overthrown by military force these days. The old militaristic model of the Bolshevik Revolution is too old hat to be cogent again. Social and political emergencies are the new revolutionary triggers that provide the necessary disruptive cover and disorder. “Usually when European governments of the past bypassed their constitutions by declaring emergencies, it was on the grounds of a military threat or a threat to public order,” he says. World War I was started by an assassination, which ended with the Marxists in power, where they remain, but less overt.
As with WWI, the covert assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King in the early 1960s can only be surmised in terms of deeper players. We do know that the Democratic Party took a sharp leftward turn, though not until changing its color from red to blue. Lyndon Johnson automatically took over the government. He and his allies immediately pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 past a stunned and docile congress, the representatives of a shell-shocked voting populace. Now every lightweight political hack knows that “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
This was the beginning of the end of the traditional America that generations had grown up with. For Caldwell, “in America, as our way of governing has evolved since 1964, emergencies are declared on a moral basis: people are suffering; their newly discovered rights are being denied. America can’t wait anymore for the ordinary democratic process to take its course.” Is it a moral basis that resides in the sugary emotions of pop music?
The game plan was to insert radicals into the leadership of public institutions, from universities to television media, from Hollywood to the Supreme Court. Caldwell argues that decision-making and power soon filtered down to lesser bureaucrats once radicals were in those places: “civil rights law gave bureaucrats and judges emergency powers to override the normal constitutional order, bypassing democracy. But the key question is: Under what conditions is the government authorized to activate these emergency powers? It is a question that has been much studied by political thinkers in Europe.”
The latest emergency, of course, is COVID-19. With no time to let people vote on what they want, or even to convene bodies of representatives, middle managers seem to be making spot decisions personally. Whose idea was it to quarantine, for the first time in history, the healthy rather than the sick? To lockdown and almost destroy the public itself? People are bewildered by a cacophony of voices and opinions. The president’s leadership is undercut at every turn by the mainstream media.
Some argue that COVID-19 is simply an act of nature, others that devious Chinese launched it to gain power in a weakened world. Others yet are convinced that the attempt to cripple American society is consistent with the anarchistic juggernaut that began in 1964, but was temporarily sidetracked by the unexpected election of Trump in 2016. When global warming failed as an existential threat, the coronavirus suddenly came forward like a Democratic Party super hero to save the leftist state.
Another interesting irony for the ostensible “Marxists” who rallied against the Vietnam War reveals a split in American culture that pits the well-off “Ivy League” Democrats against future Trump supporters.
As Caldwell points out, “One of the strands of this story involves the Vietnam War. The antiquated way the Army was mustered in the 1960s wound up creating a class system. What I’m referring to here is the so-called student deferment. In the old days, university-level education was rare. At the start of the First World War, only one in 30 American men was in a college or university, so student deferments were not culturally significant. By the time of Vietnam, almost half of American men were in a college or university, and student deferment remained in effect until well into the war. So if you were rich enough to study art history, you went to Woodstock and made love. If you worked in a garage, you went to Da Nang and made war. This produced a class division that many of the college-educated mistook for a moral division, particularly once we lost the war. The rich saw themselves as having avoided service in Vietnam not because they were more privileged or—heaven forbid—less brave, but because they were more decent.”
For Caldwell, the irony is that charges of racism and political incorrectness have now stripped away the civil rights of the majority, who no longer are allowed to defend themselves:
“As civil rights laws have been extended by analogy into other areas of American life, the imputation of moral non-personhood has been aimed at a growing number of people who have committed no sin more grievous than believing the same things they did two years ago, and therefore standing in the way of the progressive juggernaut.”
Caldwell spells out how the original civil rights sentiment morphed over time to include everything now associated with the “rights” of any farfetched or trendy abnormality, such as transgenderism. Normal, traditional, and straight people became objects of hate:
“[I]n order to use this rights-based system rather than the voting-based system, you need to convince the government that there’s some historic emergency going on, some terrible abuse, that someone is behaving wickedly in the same way that the southern segregationists and the southern sheriffs were. And increasingly, that role of like official wicked person gets played by people who defend ordinary American institutions.”