The Best Political Books of 2020

Christopher Caldwell’s “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties” (Simon and Schuster, 352 pages, $28) appeared in January, before the George Floyd riots or the coronavirus panic, but a careful reader of this penetrating study of postwar America might have foreseen the reckless lunacy occasioned by both events. Mr. Caldwell contends that, with the passage and signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the nation’s leaders established a new de facto constitution under which the purpose of politics was to remake civil society according to enlightened theories of racial justice. American leaders set about erecting enormously powerful and cripplingly expensive government agencies and programs to guarantee a state of racial equality. When their efforts failed, their successors created more such agencies and programs, and cultivated the destructive social convention known as political correctness to punish dissenters.