A major American intellectual and âone of the rightâs most gifted and astute journalistsâ (The New York Times Book Review) makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misledâand ready to put an adventurer in the White House.
Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences and his conclusion is this: even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly highâin wealth, freedom, and social stabilityâand that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.
Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half-century, taking you on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycotin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules.
Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement âis an eloquent and bracing book, full of insightâ (New York magazine) about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systemsâand drove it toward conflict.