America Unraveled: Our Competing Constitutional Regimes

Chri stopher Caldwell’s new book, The Age of Entitlement, offers a striking revision of recent American history that has the advantage of being readily summarized. The polarization of political opinion and the dissolution of the American fabric, he argues, has its roots in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which represented a sharp break with the past. “The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core,” he explains, “were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.” The common narrative surrounding civil rights, he maintains, is that it represented a fulfillment of the American promise of liberty. Since the Founding, America has been steadily expanding the franchise to more classes of people. From the elimination of property requirements for voting to the post-Civil War due-process amendments, from the Nineteenth Amendment granting suffrage to women to the bestowal of full citizenship on Native Americans in 1924, from desegregation and the civil rights movement to lowering the voting age, and all the way up to the Windsor and Obergefell Supreme Court decisions extending full rights to gay people, America has become fully invested in treating all its citizens as “created equal.” Read Full Article »