Christopher Caldwell: The Endless 1960s

Christopher Caldwell on The Endless 1960s: the political career of the Baby Boom Generation over the past half-century, tracing a genealogy from the clashes of the 1960s to the political polarization of the Obama era.

Caldwell: "The revolutions of the 1960s — particularly on race, sex and the nation — had, by the late 1970s, won potentially limitless statutory power. But had lost all social legitimacy. The key figure of the last fifty years, and the most misunderstood, is Ronald Reagan. Far from overturning the reforms of the 1960s, Reaganism defused opposition to them. He left the new order intact (statutorily and bureaucratically) but subsidized (fiscally) those who wanted to secede from it. Reaganism was not a conservative counterrevolution — it was a buying off of the revolution's losers. That is the reason the country went so deeply into debt: We were paying for two social orders at the same time. Now we have two inimical half-nations, each of which is sincerely convinced it has a constitutional mandate to speak for the 'real' America."

Chris Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, regular commentator in The Financial Times, and contributor to other significant newspapers and magazines that either honor or tolerate him. He is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (2009).

Presented by the Program on Constitutional Government on October 24 2014.