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| Home Front: Politix |
| The Roots of Our Partisan Divide |
| 2020-02-29 |
| [Imprimis - Hillsdale College] American society today is divided by party and by ideology in a way it has perhaps not been since the Civil War. I have just published a book that, among other things, suggests why this is. It is called The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It runs from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the election of Donald J. Trump. You can get a good idea of the drift of the narrative from its chapter titles: 1963, Race, Sex, War, Debt, Diversity, Winners, and Losers. I can end part of the suspense right now‐Democrats are the winners. Their party won the 1960s‐they gained money, power, and prestige. The GOP is the party of the people who lost those things. One of the strands of this story involves the Vietnam War. The antiquated way the Army was mustered in the 1960s wound up creating a class system. What I’m referring to here is the so-called student deferment. In the old days, university-level education was rare. At the start of the First World War, only one in 30 American men was in a college or university, so student deferments were not culturally significant. By the time of Vietnam, almost half of American men were in a college or university, and student deferment remained in effect until well into the war. So if you were rich enough to study art history, you went to Woodstock and made love. If you worked in a garage, you went to Da Nang and made war. This produced a class division that many of the college-educated mistook for a moral division, particularly once we lost the war. The rich saw themselves as having avoided service in Vietnam not because they were more privileged or‐heaven forbid‐less brave, but because they were more decent. Another strand of the story involves women. Today, there are two cultures of American womanhood‐the culture of married women and the culture of single women. If you poll them on political issues, they tend to differ diametrically. It was feminism that produced this rupture. For women during the Kennedy administration, by contrast, there was one culture of femininity, and it united women from cradle to grave: Ninety percent of married women and 87 percent of unmarried women believed there was such a thing as "women’s intuition." Only 16 percent of married women and only 15 percent of unmarried women thought it was excusable in some circumstances to have an extramarital affair. Ninety-nine percent of women, when asked the ideal age for marriage, said it was sometime before age 27. None answered "never." But it is a third strand of the story, running all the way down to our day, that is most important for explaining our partisan polarization. It concerns how the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, divided the country. They did so by giving birth to what was, in effect, a second constitution, which would eventually cause Americans to peel off into two different and incompatible constitutional cultures. This became obvious only over time. It happened so slowly that many people did not notice. Because conventional wisdom today holds that the Civil Rights Act brought the country together, my book’s suggestion that it pulled the country apart has been met with outrage. The outrage has been especially pronounced among those who have not read the book. So for their benefit I should make crystal clear that my book is not a defense of segregation or Jim Crow, and that when I criticize the long-term effects of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, I do not criticize the principle of equality in general, or the movement for black equality in particular. |
| Posted by:Herb McCoy |
| #6 Ref #2: Extending credits to you for the effort and post. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2020-02-29 17:38 |
| #5 Including on Rantburg Your duplicate now deleted from the hopper, Herb, but only after I enjoyed the fact that you gave us a straightforward excerpt without fancy HTML stuff needing to be deleted. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2020-02-29 17:11 |
| #4 |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2020-02-29 14:42 |
| #3 I do not criticize the principle of equality in general, or the movement for black equality in particular. I suppose that's prudent, but it means that you've accepted some core assumptions (both explicit and implicit) of the left. For example, in practice,"the movement for black equality" is actually about revenge, reparations, and primacy if not supremacy. Once you accept their premises, then you're just debating the details of the subjugation and punishment of the majority population and culture. The Civil Rights Act (and just as importantly, the Voting Rights Act of 1965) are the policy expressions of those assumptions. So while addressing the legislation is important, it won't achieve much if we don't have a real debate about what "social justice" and "equality" mean in light of actual history (how many whites are actually descended from slaveowners, for example?). And can we take the sacrifices that have already been made into account (the dead and maimed of the Civil War, all the social spending of generations, the costs of black and other minority crime, the costs of affirmative action, the decline of social trust in the face of diversity)? To say nothing of the explicit "Whitey's gotta die" rhetoric that has become increasingly acceptable. These matters require an accounting, as well. Without it, we're just going in circles. |
| Posted by: charger 2020-02-29 13:09 |
| #2 Outstanding essay. I shared everywhere I could. Including on Rantburg, as I had clicked through and not realized it came from here originally. |
| Posted by: Herb McCoy 2020-02-29 12:41 |
| #1 The birth of entitlement, identity politics, and anarchy: But it is a third strand of the story, running all the way down to our day, that is most important for explaining our partisan polarization. It concerns how the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, divided the country. They did so by giving birth to what was, in effect, a second constitution |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2020-02-29 12:25 |