Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Retracing America’s dividing line
Christopher Caldwell’s “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties” is a sweeping but insightful examination into every social, political and legal decision, movement and trend that has left us where we are today in a polarized nation.
Caldwell traces the origins of today’s deep discords to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
Grief that shrouded the nation after Kennedy’s assassination, Caldwell writes, “gave a tremendous impetus to changes already under way.” Lyndon B. Johnson, who was sworn into office after Kennedy’s death, was able to push through far more ambitious civil rights legislation in 1964 than Kennedy would have been able to do.
Most significantly, in the author’s telling, the Civil Rights Act, and social movements that followed, were accelerated and empowered more through court decisions and government agencies than decisions by elected officials.
Although the Civil Rights Act was designed principally to ban employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, Caldwell presents a persuasive case that it provided the legal, social and cultural guidepost for advancing almost every movement since — gay rights, immigration, affirmative action, fundamentalist Christianity, leveraged buyouts, political correctness, the Martin
Luther King Jr. holiday and much more.
The citizen’s band radio craze, leveraged buyouts and political correctness — Caldwell fits all of these topics and more into an engaging, questioning book that proceeds at almost dizzying speed. A reader feels like he has but a moment to think when Caldwell writes that “to establish new liberties is to extinguish others” before speeding off to the next topic.
“Entitlement” is a fascinating read that could ignite a thousand conversations.