Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Notes on The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell


 

Speaking of the political consequences of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 Caldwell suggests that tempting though it might be to attack discrimination at its root, the cure could wind up worse than the disease, as Leo Strauss warned:

‘The prohibition against every ‘discrimination’ would mean the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between the state and society, the destruction of liberal society.’

When court cases do not arise ‘naturally’ out of a country’s ordinary social frictions but are confected by interested parties, doesn’t the entire tradition of  judicial review lose its legitimacy, Caldwell asked. Today, the ‘staging’ of court cases is such a standard strategy for activist litigators that even many lawyers are unaware that until the 1950s it was widely considered a straightforward species of judicial corruption, and not just in the South.

The Acts that had been intended to normalize  American culture and cure the gothic paranoia of the Southern racial imagination instead wound up nationalizing Southerners  obsession with race and violence, the author asserts.

The polarization that faces Americans in the second decade of the twenty-first century has many causes. Most were long developing economic and social shifts,. The Roe vs Wade decision was an exception. The decision was sloppily argued. It rested on a nonce right to ‘privacy’ established by Griswold vs Connecticut that was only ever invoked for the ulterior purpose of defending abortion.  In countless important privacy cases that have come before the court in the half century since, covering everything from internet surveillance of terrorists to GPS tracking of automobiles, the Griswold/Roe ‘privacy right’ never came up. Brown vs Board of Education may not have been a forensic masterpiece, either, and the line of civil rights cases from Katzenbach to Bakke didn’t exactly shine for its constitutional logic – but powerful political pressures were then bearing down on Americans regarding their historical responsibility for slavery, and these were enough to override majority misgivings. Roe was different. It pronounced on an issue in which Americans were divided, and frozen those divisions in place. It laid down a fundamental moral and even religious order on a fickle and frivolous basis. .  .  .

Feminism was potentially a rich intellectual current. It is close to that part of Western philosophy that, since Rousseau, has speculated on what is ‘natural’ to humans and what has been conferred (or imposes) on them by civilization. The first-wave feminism of the nineteenth century was built on the Bible and the Fourteenth Amendment. Second-wave feminism was a moral work in progress. Happily it had no respect for superstition. Less happily, it cast as superstition any tradition that could not justify itself in one sentence. Very little that passed for sexual common sense in the middle of twentieth century would be standing by the end of it . . .

There is a limit to how hard one can strain against a mythology. Sexuality,  the font of human life, is fickle, mysterious, contingent. It is not always subject to will, to put it mildly, and sometimes seems to blow in like the weather. A mythology that moralizes sex may do something to shelter a delicate flame. It is hard to say exactly what, but there must be a reason that flourishing fertile, creative societies tend to be conservative about sex.

The modern impulse to rationalize human relations undermined conservatism, and threatened to take the ground rules of sexual relations down with it. As early as the 1920s, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell had warned that the establishment of welfare states risked turning not just the economy but everything upside-down, because the state would replace the father as protector and provider. Breaking the traditional family structure might look rational, modern and sensible. Nonetheless, Russel wrote:

‘if this should occur, we must expect a complete breakdown of traditional morality, since there will no longer be any reason why a mother should wish the paternity of her child be indubitable .  . Whether the effect on men would be good or bad, I do not venture to say. It would eliminate from their lives the only emotion equal in importance to sex love. It would make sex love itself more trivial. It would make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s death. It would make men less active and probably cause them to retire earlier from work. It would diminish their interest in history and their sense of the continuity of historical tradition.’

Here Russell, enthusiast for sexual freedom as he was, was willing to go out on a limb. Citing the ebb of paternal feeling in the Roman empire and among the upper classes in his own time, he warned that an un-superstitious attitude towards family formation would ultimately threaten Western countries with de-sexualization:

‘My belief is, though I put it forward with some hesitation, that the elimination of paternity as a recognized social relation would trend to make men’s emotional life trivial and thin, causing in the end a slowly growing boredom and despair, in which procreation would gradually die out, leaving the human race to be replenished by stocks that had preserved the older convention.’

 .  .  .  . Hyper-sexualization might be a mask worn by de-sexualization. What is thrilling, fulfilling, and functional about sexuality might be wrapped up in the very ‘complexes’ about sexuality that crusaders for sexual freedom and other reformers insist on getting rid of.


For a while, starting in 1963, when Timothy Leary was ejected from Harvard for his ‘demonstrations’ of LSD, drugs were the spiritual solution with which that generation’s protestors were most closely identified. ‘To arrive at the unknown by disordering all the senses,’ as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud put it, was a cause on a par with making love, not war. People used drugs with particular ardor for only  about two decades until, around 1985, the government cracked down on them and young people decided they were not a liberty wort defending. In the years after that, the ‘head’, the ‘stoner’, faded out of the story of the 1960s, like some reprobate who enlivens the early pages of a gothic novel but whom the author loses track of as the action picks up.

Maybe the problem with drugs was that they were an affront to one vital component of countercultural thinking, religious or not: tye idea of purity. Somewhere out there was the ‘real’ America, unspoiled, unexposed to the influence of television and shopping, un-manipulated by politicians. Americans of the sixties and seventies sought out places where the twentieth century had not done its awful work on the national character.

 

 [ Caldwell uses the example of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974); another good example might be Gary Snyder’s Smokey Bear Sutra (1969), https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2012/01/smokey-bear-sutra-by-gary-snyder.html ]

A certain cultural environmentalism was a natural accompaniment of this rural hankering. It was not the mix of science, ethics and politics that we call environmentalism today and which, back then, was only just emerging under the name of ecology.’ It was more a Romantic way of life, in the sense that William Wordsworth (‘Nature never did betray the heart that loved her’) was Romantic. Drawing from Western culture’s deep well of ideas about simplicity and authenticity, it was, while it lasted, something you could partake of even in a truck or on a mortorcycle. It meant natural ingredients, home cooking, family values as defined in some past era, folk and country music, all kinds of crafts, the grumpy novels of Edward Abbey, backpacking, and the Whole Earth Catalogue.

[ see
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2019/09/innocence-lost-by-michael-arntfield.html ].

The expression ‘American Dream’ is not an ancient one and has had its ups and downs. It was invented only in 1931 by the historian James Truslow Adams and caught on a bit in that decade, only to fall out of fashion in the 1940s. It owes its near-omnipresence in today’s political discourse to two periods when it was very much in fashion, In the seven years between 1963 ( the year King gave his ‘I have a dream’ speech and the first Baby Boomers left high school) and the end of the decade, its usage more than doubled. In the seven years between 1986  ( the year the last Baby Boomers left college) and 1993 (the year Bill Clinton, the first Baby Boomer president, took office after twelve years of Reaganism, its usage went up by nearly 50 percent.

Dreams were where Americans lived. An unwillingness to recognize the limits of reality and common sense in any walk of life became the signature of their political rhetoric, of their corporate marketing, and even of their national culture . . .The problem came from how these dreams were to be managed. In social life, questioning limits means not bowing down to anything. In economics, questioning limits means not paying for anything. At first, American Baby Boomers appeared to be doing with little effort what other generations had only managed to do by the sweat of their brows. But that was an illusion. What they were doing was using their generation’s voting power to arrogate future generation’s labor, and trading it to other nations and peoples for labor now. Reaganism meant  Reaganomics. Reaganomics meant debt.

Keynesian economists had believed that higher taxes could make the economy not only fairer but more efficient. Rich people tended to sock their money away as savings. A progressive government could dislodge it via taxes and invest it in big projects, pumping up demand as it did. But this argument became harder to defend after FDR’s infrastructure state gave way to LBJ’s welfare state. ‘Supply-side’ economists now argue, with considerable cogency, that when government collected too much from ‘the rich’, potentially productive concentrations of investment capital were eroded, and spooned back into society in bites of welfare too small to be used for anything but immediate consumption. Tax cuts became the order of the day but spending was not diminished.

Consider affirmative action – unconstitutional under the traditional order, compulsory under the new.- which exacted a steep price from white incumbents in the jobs they held, in the  prospects of career advancement for their children, in their status as citizens. Such a program could be made palatable to white voters only if they could be offered compensating advantages. A government that was going to make an overwhelming majority of voters pay the cost of affirmative action had to keep unemployment low, home values rising, and living standards high. Reaganomics was just a name for governing under a merciless contradiction that no one could admit was there: Civil rights was important enough that people could not be asked to wait for it, but unpopular enough that people could not be asked to pay for it.

Ronald Reagan saved the Great Society in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt is credited by his admirers with having ‘saved capitalism.’ That is, he tamed some of its worst excesses and found the resources to protect his own angry voters from consequences they would otherwise have found intolerable. That is what the tax cuts were for. Each of the two sides that emerged from the battles of the 1960s could comport itself as if it had won. There was no need to raise the taxes of a suburban entrepreneur in order to hire more civil rights enforcement officers at the Department of Education. There was no need to lease out oil-drilling rights in a national park in order to pay for an aircraft carrier. Failing to win a consensus for the revolutions of the 1960s, Washington instead bought off through tax cuts those who stood to lose from them. Americans would delude themselves for decades that there was something natural about this arrangement. It was an age of entitlement.

Using resources taken from future generations, the Baby Boom generation was briefly able to offer a vision of an easy and indulgent lifestyle, convincing enough to draw vast numbers of people to construct it, like the pyramids or the medieval cathedrals or the railroads.

The big problem with the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was that it bred inequality. Its role in doing so was as significant as that of other factors more commonly blamed: information technology, world trade, tax cuts. In 1995, the economist George Borjas, writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, modeled the actual effects of immigration on Americans. He found that while immigration might have caused an increase in economic activity of $2.1 trillion, virtually all those gains – 98 percent- went to the immigrants themselves. When economists talk about ‘gains’ from immigration to the receiving country, they are talking about the remaining 2 percent – about $50 billion. This 450 billion ‘’surplus’ disguises an extraordinary transfer of income and wealth. Native capitalists gain $566 billion,. Native workers lose $516 billion.

One way of describing mass immigration is as a verdict on the pay structure that had arisen in the West by the 1970s: on trade unions, prevailing-wage laws, defined-benefit pension plans, long vacations, and the power workers had accumulated against their bosses more generally. These had long been, in most people’s minds, excellent things. But Republicans argued that private business, alas, could not afford them, and by the 1980s  they had won the argument. Immigration like outsourcing and tighter regulation of unions, allowed employer to pay less for many kinds of labor. But immigrants came with other huge costs: new schools, new roads, translation (formal and informal), and healthcare for those who could not afford it . Those externalities were absorbed by the public, not the businessmen who benefited from immigration.

Outsourcing was a similar windfall. Sending manufacturing jobs abroad offers consumers all the advantages of heavy industry and none of the pollution.  .  . pollution continued at the same rate, of course; It just involved deforesting Brazil instead of pouring bilge into Lake Erie. And it would be years before people began paying attention to the cost of permanent underemployment outside the country’s globalized cities.. .

If we were judging open immigration and outsourcing not as economic policies but as U.S. aide program’s for the world’s poor, we might consider them successes. But we are not. The cultural change, the race-based constitutional demotions of natives relative to newcomers, the weakening democratic grip of the public on its government as power disappeared into back rooms and courtroom, the staggeringly large distributions of wealth – all these things ensured that immigration would poison American politics right down until the presidential election of 2016. .  .  .

 

The Reagan administration’s model of deficit financing  was like the business deals that were going on at the same time. Leveraged buy-outs, which spread across the business world in the 1980s, involved borrowing against the assets of a company you didn’t own in order to buy it – at which point the borrowed money could be paid back by a combination of superior efficiencies (which often didn’t materialize) and pitiless sell-offs (which always did).This meant that financiers had to become more like politicians ( or enlist politicians to do their dirty work). They had to tell a story to convince the public they were advancing progress, not stripping assets. The economist and businessman Louis Kelso, who, like Lewis B. Cullman and many others, claimed to be the inventor of leveraged buy-outs, always described his financial innovation as a kind of shareholder democracy. Boardrooms were now the place for ‘activists’ – fighters and crusaders who wanted to earn billons, fix world hunger, or preferably both at the same time.

Up-and-coming businessmen like these were seldom Reaganites. They didn’t appear even to like Reagan. Why should they? Those profiting most in the 1980s were not, as Reagan’s oratory implied, government-hating small-town loners  dreaming big. Nor were they cigar-chomping robber barons, as his detractors would have it. Increasingly, they were highly credentialed people profiting off of financial deregulation and various computer systems that had been developed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the NASA space program. They were not throwbacks to William McKinley’s America but harbingers of Barack Obama’s. They were the sort of people you met at faculty clubs and editorial board meetings. Their idea of what constituted a shining city on a hill was different from the one held by the president who enriched them.

Political engagement and economic stratification came together in an almost official attitude known as snark, a sort of snobbery about other opinions that dismissed them as low-class without going to the trouble of refuting them. Why offer an argument when an eye roll would do? The targets of elite condescension  could be roughly identified as those Americans who made up the Reagan electorate, minus the richest people in it. A new social class was coming into being that had at its disposal both capitalism’s means and progressivism’s sense of righteousness. It would breathe life back into the 1960s projects around race, sex, and global order that had been interrupted by the conservative uprisings of the 1970s.  .  .

‘Political correctness’ became the name for the cultural effect of the basic enforcement powers of civil rights law. Those powers were surprisingly extensive, unexpectedly versatile, able to get beneath the integument of institutions  [through fear of litigation] that conservatives felt they had to defer to. Reagan had won conservatives over to the idea that ‘business’ was the innocent opposite of over-weaning ‘government.’ So what were conservatives supposed to do now that businesses were the hammer of civil rights enforcement, in the forefront of advancing affirmative action and political correctness ?

Corporate leaders, advertisers, and the great majority of the press came to a pragmatic accommodation with what the law required, how it worked, and the euphemisms with which it must be honored. All major corporations, all universities, all major government agencies had departments of personnel or ‘human resources’ – a phrase five times a prevalent in the 1980s as it had been in the 1960s. ‘Chief diversity officers’ and ‘diversity compliance officers,’ working inside companies, carried out functions that resembled those of the Soviet commissars. They would be consulted about whether a board meeting or a company picnic was sufficiently diverse.

The Rainbow curriculum that Joseph Fernandez was advancing in the early 1990s in Queens, for instance, had been laid out by his predecessor, Richard Green, in 1989 as a full-spectrum overthrow of everything in the New York school system, including its personnel. In Green’s words: ‘The commitment to multicultural education will permeate every aspect of educational policy, including counseling programs, assessment and testing, curriculum and instruction, representative staffing at all levels, and teaching materials.’ At a time when political conservatism was alleged to be triumphant, politics came under the dominance of progressive movements that had been marginal the day before yesterday: question in the Western literary canon, arguing that gays ought to be able to marry and adopt, suggesting that people could be citizens of more than one country and so on.. These disparate preoccupations did not spring up simultaneously by coincidence. They were old minoritarian impulses that could now, through the authority of civil rights law, override every barrier that democracy might see to erect against them.

Republicans and others who may have been uneasy that the constitutional baby had been thrown out with the segregationist bathwater consoled themselves with a myth: The ‘good’ civil rights movement that the martyred Martin Luther King Jr. had pursued in the 1960s had, they said, been ‘hijacked’ in the 1970s by a ‘radical’ one of affirmative action, with its quotas and diktats. Once the country came to its senses and rejected this optional, radical regime, it could have its good civil rights regime back. None of that was true.


Affirmative action and political correctness were the twin pillars of the second constitution. The were what civil rights was. They were not temporary. Affirmative action was deduced judicially from the curtailments on freedom of association tat the Civil Rights Act itself had put in place. Political correctness rested on a right to collective dignity extended by sympathetic judges who saw that, without such a right, forcing the races together would more likely occasion humiliation than emancipation. As long as Americans were  frightened of speaking against  civil rights legislation or, later, o being assailed as racists, sexists, homophobes, or xenophobes, their political representatives could resist nothing that presented itself in the name of ‘civil rights’. This meant that conflict, when it eventually came, would be constitutional conflict, with all the gravity that the adjective ‘constitutional’ implies.

[The rest of the book is an account of the winners and losers that resulted from the transformation of the demand for civil rights into the demand for human rights but with out much consideration for the role this has played in the justification for the U.S.’s  hegemonic foreign policies; see

 https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2015/05/formal-and-substantive-human-and-civil.html ]



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