Christopher Caldwell
Conservative public intellectual; Claremont Institute senior fellow; regular New York Times opinion contributor; author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the 1960s (2020); argues the Civil Rights Act created a “second constitution” that supplanted the original; spring 2021 Claremont Review of Books essay romanticizing Robert E. Lee
Who He Is
Christopher Caldwell is a well-regarded conservative public intellectual who occupies an unusual position: respected enough to write regularly for the New York Times opinion section, yet affiliated with the Claremont Institute and author of a book that Field describes as making white grievance its animating center. He represents the overlap between respectable mainstream conservatism and New Right racial revisionism.
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the 1960s (2020)
Caldwell’s book shares a core structure with Charles Kesler’s “Two Constitutions” thesis — the argument that progressive jurisprudence created a second, illegitimate constitution that supplanted the original — but pushes the argument further and in a more dangerous direction. Where Kesler traces the break to the New Deal, Caldwell traces it to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The argument: the rights protections created by and since the Civil Rights Act — anti-discrimination law, affirmative action, Title IX, etc. — constituted a new constitutional order that grew through “administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed laws, and finally were sanctified by the Supreme Court.” This new constitution is in tension with the original, and the original is losing.
The book is not without empirical content — it documents the growth of bureaucracy and rights protections since the 1960s. But Field’s critique is pointed: it is “written in a mocking tone that takes hard-fought legal protections for minority groups as an obvious step toward decline because it involved governmental growth.” Caldwell fails to contend with the most obvious counter-argument: that not having basic civil rights protections was a far graver constitutional violation than the expansion of the federal government required to enforce them. And he offers no way forward that would not reignite the injustices he refuses to name.
Jonathan Rauch’s scorching review: “The real heart of Caldwell’s story is race and civil rights. A more descriptive subtitle might be: ‘How the Civil Rights Revolution Overturned the Constitution, Divided America and Victimized Whites.’”
The Robert E. Lee Essay (Spring 2021)
In the spring 2021 edition of the Claremont Review of Books, Caldwell published an essay about Robert E. Lee. Field’s description: he “reverted to cloying romanticism and ‘Lost Cause’ hagiography on behalf of the Confederate general.” The essay:
- Described the George Floyd protests as involving “mayhem”
- Traced the calls for Lee statue removal back to those protests
- Argued that “the urgent, invective-filled attacks on Lee that are beginning to appear would have seemed overheated even if the Civil War were still going on”
Field’s response: “The fact is, of course, that millions of Union soldiers risked their lives trying to kill Lee and his army — a simple truth that reveals the perversion of Caldwell’s thinking.”
This essay appeared in the CRB — the journal edited by Charles Kesler, while Sohrab Ahmari was briefly involved in its editorial operations — as a display of white identity politics and Lost Cause sentimentality at the heart of the New Right’s most prestigious scholarly outlet.
Significance
Field groups Caldwell with Kesler and Patrick Deneen as conservative intellectuals who, despite their sophistication, have “not given even basic consideration to the problems that fester here” — meaning America’s racial history and ongoing inequality. In Caldwell’s case, this failure is unusually stark: his book’s core argument implies that providing legal protections for Black Americans was a constitutional mistake. It is Caldwell who demonstrates most vividly what Field calls the “context collapse” technique — treating the formal similarity between discrimination (which harms marginalized people) and affirmative action (which aims to mitigate historical harm) as if they were morally equivalent.
Cross-References
- Claremont Institute — senior fellow
- Claremont Review of Books — venue for his Robert E. Lee essay
- Charles Kesler — parallel “two constitutions” argument; CRB editor
- 1776 Commission Report — parallel erasure of racial history
- Hard Right — Caldwell’s arguments circulate in and legitimize the Hard Right’s racial grievance framework
- Ideas First — Caldwell’s technique: abstract constitutional arguments that cover racial retrenchment