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.