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
America Since the Sixties
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.
Reviews
"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
“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