Summary

Caldwell argues the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created a rival constitution that fundamentally transformed American society. The 1960s revolutions around race, sex, and war became templates for all subsequent social change, using civil rights law to override democratic barriers. This produced winners and losers: elites who benefited from globalization and tech, versus working-class whites who saw their culture delegitimized. The resulting polarization stems from two incompatible constitutional visions competing under conditions of scarce resources – a conflict that reached its peak in 2016.

"The reinterpretation of America's entire history and purpose in light of its race problem is the main ideological legacy of the last 50 years"

"A liberal society stands or falls by the distinction between the political (or state) and society (or by the public or private)"

Key Takeaways

Notes

1: The revolutions of the 1960s

1: 1963

• Sex, immigration, civil rights, voting rights
• Civil rights "are a rival constitution with which the original one was frequently incompatible"
• Book is about the increasing necessity for citizens to choose between ↑ and poisonous conflict it ultimately drove

2: Race

• "The reinterpretation of America's entire history and purpose in light of its race problem is the main ideological legacy of the last 50 years"
• Civil rights vs freedom of association
• "A liberal society stands or falls by the distinction between the political (or state) and society (or by the public or private)"
• Discrimination: "the cure could wind up worse than the disease"
• Only ~25% of people wanted civil rights laws enforced at the start
• "The civil rights movement was a template… becoming the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life"

3: Sex

• The Feminine Mystique
• Military discipline applied to society in 60s
• Sexism term coined in 1968: discriminating by sex when it doesn't matter
• Different from race in that it very often matters
• Sexual revolution
• "There must be a reason that flourishing, fertile, creative societies tend to be conservative about sex"
• Equal rights amendments
• Feminism "a solution in search of a problem"

4: War

• Wars that were majority resented:
  • WWI: 61%
  • Korean: 62%
  • Vietnam: not until final years ↑
• Losing the war tainted everything
• Yearning for the idealized America
• 1970 census:
  • Most "culturally stable" in history, only one where foreign born <5%
  • México, Cuba only non-European countries in top 10 immigrant pop.
• 2010 census:
  • No European countries in top 10

2: The new constitution

5: Debt

• Regan's tripling of national debt
• New economic theories
• Democrats → Republicans as Santa Claus
• Civil rights "was too unpopular to ask people to pay for it" eg. affirmative action
• Eg. can't discriminate by nationality
• Immigration: "every law was turning into an expansion of civil rights law"
• The "other" not being someone like yourself
• Immigration → inequality
• Outsourced pollution, repression, etc.
• Culture of ambition, fetishization of the entrepreneur / businessman, LBOs

6: Diversity

• Globalism: the political promotion of globalization, actions to facilitate it
• Could avoid computers until the 1980s
• "Facts grow arithmetically, but questions grow geometrically. The result is a deterioration of certitude. The closer we get to the truth, the less certain we are of it."
• Relativism → postmodernism: ↑ "all narratives are unstable and contingent"
• "Authentic imitations"
• MLK holiday controversy
• Ethnic studies took over:
  • Eg. 2008 study of 2k 11/12th graders 10 most significant non-presidents: MLK, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman 1,2,3
  • ↑ not Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford
• Cancel culture + censorship
• Political correctness: "the redesign of institutions and philosophies so that they might recognize, accept, vindicate, validate, and console groups deemed disadvantaged"
• "Blacks, women, gays, immigrants"
• Academic speech code
• "The rainbow curriculum"
• Voluntary initiatives vs gov't compulsion
• "They were all minoritarian impulses that could now - through the authority of civil rights law - override every barrier that democracy might seek to erect against them"

7: Winners

• Outsourcing and global value chains
• Too big to fail / "risk distributed across society"
• Polarization: "conflict between these two social orders newly reactivated under conditions of curtailed access to resources"
• Not free: antiracism, women's rights, sexual liberation, world hegemony, gov't thru tech
• Both / and anomaly → either / or regular
• ↑ "that is the drama that would enter its final stage with the presidential election of 2016"
• Obama's election should've been the end of affirmative action in the US, but actually ratcheted up DEI / race legislation
• Internet companies favored / subsidized to remove middlemen, eg. from retail
• "The problem was not the expansion of government until it crowded out the private sector, it was the expansion of the private sector until it became a kind of government"
• Eg. privacy & data processors
• Amazon sales tax took 5+ years
• Internet companies are networks, new market systems themselves
• "Inequality" vs "racial discrimination" difference between terms is lost
• "Far-sighted philanthropists all come to realize that advocacy (efforts to share how public resources are utilized) offers the best possible bang for the charitable buck"
• Bias: flaws in the way the normal human mind normally works
• "For a generation, every imputation of bias in public life had required the ransacking of institutions and the shredding of reputations. Now the word bias, which had once carried overtones of bigotry and evil, had come to mean something like human nature."
• Nudge and libertarian paternalism
• Socrates' "know nothing" → establishes a meta-hierarchy → judge over what wisdom is → his intelligence transcends politicians'
• Gov't legitimacy defined by reducing bias in every aspect of society
• Judge Scalia on gay marriage: "the elites have hijacked the language of civil rights and used it to alter the country in its preference"
• Precedent that any marginalized group can concentrate and fight for rights like this

8: Losers

• Anti-racism akin to anti-communism craze
• Study: in 2000, 12% of US was black, but average American thought 33%
• "Whites and blacks were diverging culturally" - rebellion
• "Political correctness and affirmative action had ceased to become more than temporary expedience, they were essential parts of this new constitutional structure"
• Paradox of civil rights: "the faster racism and privilege are dismantled, the greater the psychological need to point to racism and privilege"
• 2016: "Americans' grievances against diversity were bottled up"
• Democrat party became a collection of minorities who benefited from the new systems
• "The civil rights act of 1964 was… a legislative repeal of the first amendment's implied right to the freedom of association"
• ↑ argument: republicans should want repeal of the civil rights act
• All of this led to Trump