Why Trump?
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Why Trump? The Age of Entitlement: America Since the 1960s, Christopher Caldwell, Simon and Schuster, 2020, pp. 352, $17.39 hardcover. David Randall # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement relates the devastating effects on America of the Civil Rights Revolution as Waiting for Donald and his narrative culminates with the most famous escalator ride in history. Caldwell’s acute, wideranging, patchy, and procrustean historical essay argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act explains the Trumpean moment. He makes his case by generalization, selected fact, narrative tow, and bravura style. Caldwell—former senior editor at The Weekly Standard, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, author of Reflections on the Revolution in David Randall is director of research at the National Association of Scholars, 420 Madison Ave., 7th Floor, New York, NY 10017; [email protected]. His most recent books are The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero’s Sermo to the Grand Siècle’s Conversation (2018) and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought (2019).
Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (2009)—by brio assembles his story from several historical dynamics. Caldwell oversimplifies, illuminatingly. His account goes like this. The 1960s American economy approximated utopia: it provided a decent life for American workingmen and their families. America’s economy then bifurcated. “Between 1973 and the turn of the century, real income rose by 21 percent for Americans with advanced degrees and fell for everyone else: by 4 percent for college grads, 26 percent for high school grads, and 38 percent for dropouts.” (53) The price of a house rose from 250 percent to 450 percent of average annual family income. Main Street and the Working Joe suffered ever harder times. Government-facilitated computerization and globalization accelerated their impoverishment. Simultaneously the sun shone on Big Businesses, whose many well-paid servitors united self-righteous progressivism and complaisance with the market by which they had prospered. America as a whole, and the American workingman in particular, suffered further from linked economic, technological, and civilizational decadence. Uncle Sam
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substituted panem et circenses for the greatness that aimed at economic innovation, military triumph, and the glorious moxie of our jaunt to the moon. American politics failed to reverse the common man’s intensifying impoverishment. The Reagan-era ballooning of the national debt maintained “social peace” by funding both the Great Society welfare state that disproportionately supported black and brown Americans and “a golden parachute for the white middle class, allowing it, for one deluded generation, to recreate with private resources a Potemkin version of the old order.” (108-10) Reaganomics also ran as a Ponzi scheme, with the bill slipped to grandchildren and immigrants. Reagan and his successors staved off America’s bankruptcy
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