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, wide-ranging, 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 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
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