Did Civil-Rights Laws Ruin America?

The cliché is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The maxim animating The Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell’s much-talked-about book covering “America since the Sixties,” is something more like: “Extraordinary claims should be floated on every other page, often implied rather than stated outright, and backed up only minimally.” The tome is astonishing in scope, yet underwhelming on most of the particulars.