No doubt Trump appealed to resentments.
The Associated Press review said, "A sweeping but insightful examination into every social, political, and legal decision, movement, and trend that leaves us where we are today in a polarized nation. . . . A fascinating read that could ignite one thousand conversations . . . Caldwell's analysis of our Vietnam legacy is particularly masterful but the book brims with brisk evaluations of how a confident nation became an argumentative, fragmented one."
No doubt "we are today a polarized nation." Because I participated in protests against the Vietnam War, I am interested in understanding "our Vietnam legacy."
Reviewer Andrew Roberts said, "Scholarly, provocative, insightful: this is history-writing at its best. Readers of Caldwell's journalism will instantly recognize his capacity to use a single moment or event to illuminate a much wider phenomenon. Anyone wishing to understand the failure of the American elite over more than half century since President Kennedy was assassinated, and thus why Donald Trump was elected, must read this profoundly thoughtful book."
I am still struggling to understand why Donal Trump was elected first in 2016 and then again in 2024 to serve as the president of the United States.
Now, writing in the ominously titled "Did the Civil Rights Movement Go Wrong?" in The New York Times (dated January 17, 2020), reviewer Jonathan Ruch says, "Being a homosexual American now miraculously married to my husband for almost a decade, I can't help feeling astonished by a history of America since 1964 that finds space for only one paragraph briefly acknowledging the civil rights movement's social and moral achievements - before hastening back to 'But the costs of civil rights were high.'
"Perhaps most depressingly, Caldwell's account, even if one accepts its cramped view of the Constitution and the one-eyed moral bookkeeping, leads nowhere. It proffers no constructive alternative, no plausible policy or path. The author knowns perfectly well that there will be no 'repeal of the civil rights laws.' He foresees only endless, grinding, negative-sum cultural and political warfare between two intractably opposed 'constitutions.' His vision is a dead end. Unfortunately, it also seems to be where American conservatism is going."
In this respect, Caldwell's vision conservatism in his 2020 book accounts for what American conservatives voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
However, in the "Index" in Caldwell's 2020 book, we find entries on gay marriage (pp. 169, 216, 219-231, and 250) with sub-entries on adoption by gay (p. 220) and civil unions (p. p. 220) and on gay rights (pp. 35, 161, 163, 164, 166-170, 2160220, 223, and 229) with a sub-entry on gay population (p.250) and on homosexuality (pp. 34, 64, 65, 101, 166-168, and 217) with a sub-entry on lesbianism (p. 59).
In conclusion, Caldwell's 2020 book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties is thought provoking and informative. Nevertheless, I still prefer to use Ong's work to interpret America since the sixties as living through our contemporary secondary oral culture in which certain individual persons may experience stage eight of the eight stages of consciousness described by Erich Neumann.
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