Sunday/Video Replay
Is dogma fluid? Is the unflinching believer in a universal truth a man of determined integrity imposing a certain reality on a volatile world or an inhuman automaton applying laws to a world whose very nature is compromise?
There is a new book by Caldwell, a book with a truly terrifying thesis. The book deals with the conflicts in American political thinking, its origins, evolution and his appalling conclusion. Park MacDougald's review is pieced together here, in and out with me. Hair-raising.
Christopher Caldwell is not a household name. But for the relatively small set of people who care deeply about political writing, he is a towering figure. His prose — full of wit and irony, enlivened by an eye for paradox and the telling detail, informed by a polyglot and polymathic erudition — is second to none in the world of conservative journalism and exceeds nine-tenths of what is published in the press at large. In a review of Caldwell’s previous book, 2008’s immigration-skeptic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, himself one of the most learned individuals on the planet, praised Caldwell’s “cultural range” as “perhaps without equal” among American journalists and noted, respectfully, that his “columns in the Financial Times make much liberal opinion look the dreary mainstream pabulum it too often is.”
He develops the idea that America, filled with guilt and desperate to reverse previous errors, put theory and philosophy on hold and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In doing so, it set up an inherent conflict between it and the original constitution.
Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “de facto constitution” incompatible with the original one? In a strict legal sense, Caldwell argues, it is that the Civil Rights Act and associated Supreme Court decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education, conflicted with or modified what had traditionally been understood as Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed rights. Court- or legislatively-mandated integration, for instance, curtailed freedom of association, in the same way that legal prohibitions on discrimination in hiring or renting out a room curtailed the property rights of a business or hotel owner.
Near the end of the book, he mentions in passing that Republicans have failed to see that “the only way back to the free country of their ideals [is] through the repeal of the civil rights laws.” It’s a shocking notion, and it is hard to believe that even Caldwell believes it is a viable way to proceed. In another late passage, he writes:
"As they moved inland in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Americans had obliterated whole cultures with a clean conscience, as if the continent were unpeopled. In the half-century after the mid-1960s, America’s leaders, still dreaming their big dreams, obliterated their own cultural institutions in a similar spirit."
Years ago Robert Coover wrote a fantasy novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., about a fantasy baseball league--before any existed. It is an unsettling book with purposeful religious implications. In the book's pivotal moment the inventor and manager of the game rolls the dice and, by a freak chance, his favorite player is hit by a pitch and killed. So Mr. Waugh changes the rules and raises him from the dead.
Christopher Caldwell is not a household name. But for the relatively small set of people who care deeply about political writing, he is a towering figure. His prose — full of wit and irony, enlivened by an eye for paradox and the telling detail, informed by a polyglot and polymathic erudition — is second to none in the world of conservative journalism and exceeds nine-tenths of what is published in the press at large. In a review of Caldwell’s previous book, 2008’s immigration-skeptic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, himself one of the most learned individuals on the planet, praised Caldwell’s “cultural range” as “perhaps without equal” among American journalists and noted, respectfully, that his “columns in the Financial Times make much liberal opinion look the dreary mainstream pabulum it too often is.”
He develops the idea that America, filled with guilt and desperate to reverse previous errors, put theory and philosophy on hold and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In doing so, it set up an inherent conflict between it and the original constitution.
Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “de facto constitution” incompatible with the original one? In a strict legal sense, Caldwell argues, it is that the Civil Rights Act and associated Supreme Court decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education, conflicted with or modified what had traditionally been understood as Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed rights. Court- or legislatively-mandated integration, for instance, curtailed freedom of association, in the same way that legal prohibitions on discrimination in hiring or renting out a room curtailed the property rights of a business or hotel owner.
Near the end of the book, he mentions in passing that Republicans have failed to see that “the only way back to the free country of their ideals [is] through the repeal of the civil rights laws.” It’s a shocking notion, and it is hard to believe that even Caldwell believes it is a viable way to proceed. In another late passage, he writes:
"As they moved inland in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Americans had obliterated whole cultures with a clean conscience, as if the continent were unpeopled. In the half-century after the mid-1960s, America’s leaders, still dreaming their big dreams, obliterated their own cultural institutions in a similar spirit."
Years ago Robert Coover wrote a fantasy novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., about a fantasy baseball league--before any existed. It is an unsettling book with purposeful religious implications. In the book's pivotal moment the inventor and manager of the game rolls the dice and, by a freak chance, his favorite player is hit by a pitch and killed. So Mr. Waugh changes the rules and raises him from the dead.
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