Christopher Caldwell

Monday

November 9, 2020

Monuments and memorials in Maryland

Easton, Maryland Three weeks before the election, I went to an event here in Easton where writers of various kinds — journalists, historians, speechwriters — read texts about political rhetoric and discussed them around a seminar table. Is rhetoric a set of tricks, as Socrates said, or an art, as Aristotle would have it? Lately politicians seem so constrained by propriety that they cannot say anything at all. Barack Obama ended his speech to the Democratic National Convention in August with ‘God bless.’ Sorry, God bless what? America? Joe Biden? Or did someone sneeze? In front of the Talbot County Courthouse in Easton is a beautiful monument to the 85 ‘Talbot Boys’ who fought in the Civil War.

Tuesday

January 21, 2020

Dominic Green

‘A system at odds with the Constitution’

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.How did America’s house divide for a second time in the 1960s? By a tragedy of good intentions and bad-faith actions, Christopher Caldwell argues in his new book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. He talks to our Life & Arts editor about how we got here from there, and how activism inside and outside the courts has refounded American politics on an undemocratic basis. DG: The Age of Entitlement argues that the Civil Rights Act divided the country by establishing what you call a ‘second constitution’. CC: That is a big part of it. The book is about the evolution of American society since the Kennedy assassination.