ORIGINS OF OUR PARTISAN DIVIDE.

AuthorCaldwell, Christopher
PositionNational Affairs

"... 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 eventually would cause Americans to peel off into two different and incompatible constitutional cultures."

American society today is divided by party and ideology in a way it perhaps has 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 Pres. 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 am referring to here is the so-called student deferment. In the old days, university-level education was rare. At the start of World War I, 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: 90% of married women and 87% of unmarried women believed there was such a thing as "women's intuition." Only 16% of married women and only 15% 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."

However, it is a third strand of the story, running all the way down to the present 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 eventually would 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, which especially has been 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.

What I am talking about are the emergency mechanisms that, in the name of ending segregation, were established under the Civil Rights Act of...

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