Christopher Caldwell

There is no middle way between these two opposite paths.

In fact, what we are coming to is the end of trying to pretend that there can be a middle way between these two opposite a- approaches, as Christopher Caldwell explains so well in his book, The Age of Entitlement.

In fact, many scholars, not just Mr. Caldwell, have written books about this, and one I'll name-check also is Charles Kesler's Crisis of the Two Constitutions.

That's basically a more philosophical take on Caldwell's theme.

By twenty twelve, it had hardened into a full literature.

Mark Steyn, Christopher Caldwell, Douglas Murray, historians Bernard Lewis and Niall Ferguson, novelist Michel Houellebecq, and those who started to call Europe Eurabia, all arguing some version of Fallaci's thesis that projected a Muslim majority Europe was on the horizon.

That was the target of Douglas Saunders, a Globe and Mail columnist, whose twenty twelve book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide, took aim.

His method was the opposite of Fallaci's: data and surveys instead of fury.

It's a pretty dark Thursday.

A year ago today, my colleague Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, America was attacked.

In between, there have been terrible things, including the Great Recession, 10-7, the invasion of Ukraine.

I walked down Connecticut Avenue.

And it was bumper to bumper heading north.

And I ran into my colleague, Christopher Caldwell.

And so he got out of his car because nothing was moving.

So in this episode of Interesting Times, Christopher Caldwell sits down with Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith to discuss something pretty troubling, whether the presidency itself is becoming a profit center under Donald Trump.

And Goldsmith doesn't pull punches here.

He points out that what's normal for presidents is strict separation from personal finances, usually through a blind trust.

And so it was bumper to bumper going uptown in the morning.

And Christopher Caldwell was there.

He got out of his car and yelled at me.

So we started chatting.

Yeah, yeah.

I would say Christopher Caldwell is a guy.

He wrote a book called Age of Entitlement, and it's on life from the 60s.

The 60s, obviously, is the sexual revolution.

And part of King's mainstream appeal is that he preached nonviolence, but as the Birmingham campaign shows, even nonviolent protests led to the hospitalization of police officers.

As Christopher Caldwell notes in The Age of Entitlement, quote, "The riots were the civil rights movement.

Not the whole of it, certainly, but an important element of it." Over time, a, a new cycle was born.

Whether it was justified or not, when police killed a Black person, the media would cover the story.

In his I Have a Dream speech, King used for the first time a term familiar to audiences of today, people of color.

This was one of the first signs that a movement which had begun in the 1950s to end injustices against Black Americans would, by the turn of the 21st century, evolve into something radically different.

As Christopher Caldwell notes in his book, The Age of Entitlement, this was a very significant change.

Quote, "People of color was a harbinger of what later came to be called intersectionality, a philosophical sounding term of the political strategy of bundling different minorities into a coalition." It was a way to bundle up all the various non-white groups into one package to promote a new narrative of victimhood and oppression.