Mrs Murphy and the New Constitution

​Caldwell's Age of Entitlement (great book, google it) is a book about two American constitutions – the 1788 constitution that everyone thinks of as ‘the Constitution’ protecting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the 1964 constitution that was drafted during the civil rights era and now functions, in practice, as the real constitution protecting equal opportunities, equal outcomes, diversity, and non-discrimination in all walks of life. Thus when people debate how to interpret ‘the constitution’, they often have two entirely different constitutions in mind:

​The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible – and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out.

Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement, p. 6.

Read More