The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane instead left many Americans feeling alienated despised misledand 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. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly highin wealth freedom and social stabilityand that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half century taking readers on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine affirmative action CB radio leveraged buyouts iPhones Oxycontin 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 is a brilliant and ambitious argument about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systemsand drove it toward conflict.