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The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
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About This Book
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, misled—and 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 high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and 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 systems—and drove it toward conflict.
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Reviews
"Caldwell offers the best analysis and theory yet as to how we perhaps unwittingly arrived at a place where we would elect a president bent on unraveling our institutions, assumptions and beliefs about ourselves and where we no longer even start with a set of accepted facts about anything."
"[a] stimulating and contrarian rethink of modern politics ..."
"provocative and well-argued ..."
"Perhaps the author should have come up for oxygen when he found himself suggesting that the Southern segregationists were right all along."
"Not much of this material finds its way into The Age of Entitlement ..."
"Rather than build an empirical case, he relies on choice quotes from contemporary commentators, selective surveys and Google searches of the frequency of certain terms to discern what 'the majority' believed."
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