Should the Right Repudiate Reagan?

Drawing up to an altitude above Caldwell’s 30,000-foot view, we might question the centrality of his civil rights critique with the wider phenomenon of the expanding welfare state. The connection is genuine, yet we see the same identitarian and politically correct trends in Europe, which did not (with minor exceptions) have chattel slavery, still less Jim Crow-style segregation, a Fourteenth Amendment, a Civil Rights Act of 1964, or affirmative action litigation. Our civil rights and welfare state regime seems part of a broader secular trend within western liberalism. The racial tinge of our controversies distracts us from considering whether both the welfare state and political correctness are more a disease of modernity than race simply. That possibility is even bleaker than Caldwell’s diagnosis of American constitutional decay. Much of this I learned from reading Caldwell’s previous excellent books on Europe. About America—and the Reagan era in particular—I am less sure he has nailed it.

steven hayward