Christopher Caldwell

"In the wake of the 1992 L.A. riots, Bush lowered standards of creditworthiness for inner-city home buyers. But it was Clinton who opened the floodgates of housing credits by threatening, on the strength of misrepresented agency data, to find lenders guilty of “redlining” black neighborhoods. He used the Carter-era Community ­Reinvestment Act to pressure banks politically. Black homeownership rose by 25 percent between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s. This was the era of subprime loans, which would bring on the crash of 2008 and the ensuing global recession. The American media has never been comfortable acknowledging that minority homeownership programs were at the root of an international economic calamity. But economists (notably Atif Mian and Amir Sufi of Chicago, and Viral Acharya of NYU) have understood it all along, and the progressive Cambridge University ­historian Gary Gerstle, in his recent The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, puts the Bush-Clinton subsidies squarely at the center of the 2008 crash."

"Civil rights survived because it proved an extraordinary tool—unlike any in peacetime constitutional history—for contravening democratic decision-making. By withholding money, by suing states and businesses, the federal government can use civil rights law to coerce local authorities ­into changing policies; it can alter the behavior of private citizens. When Bill Clinton broadened the remit of civil rights, he didn’t have to spend money to do it. His predecessor, George H. W. Bush, had taken the first steps down this road. Bush’s Civil Rights Act of 1991 introduced punitive damages in a broad range of civil rights cases, creating major incentives to file lawsuits for race and sex discrimination."

"Dual citizenship is a great convenience for certain favored people and those who serve them. But it shakes loose the wider society’s understanding of itself as a people — and thus shakes loose the basis on which it can secure its own rights. Citizenship rights are not just an abstract but a practical thing. They have to be not just dreamed up and proposed, but also administered and defended. They are most likely to produce a stable and just society when the people who are asserting them are the same people who are defending them."

"Important demographic distortions created conditions for a more open attitude toward both blacks and gays than had been possible before or would be possible after. A program of mass incarceration, launched as part of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, had landed the great majority of young black criminals in jail. For the first time in a generation, black neighborhoods became safe for non-blacks to enter and spend money in, and the non-incarcerated remainder had more in common with their non-black contemporaries than had seemed to be the case in previous generations. What had most bothered people about gays, as late as the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, was the promiscuity of the anonymous “bathhouse” scene. Then the AIDS epidemic arose, and by the time effective therapies came on the market in 1994, hundreds of thousands of the men who had belonged to that world were dead. The survivors had been selected for fidelity and bourgeois prudence, and many had shown extraordinary courage and character in enduring the worst ordeal any group of American men had undergone since the Vietnam War. The movement for gay marriage won over Hawaii’s Supreme Court in 1996 and Vermont’s in 1999."

"Democrats are the party of the university-educated. As university-generated high technology moved to the center of the American economy, Democrats quite naturally consolidated their position as the party of the country’s business and financial elite. But Democrats are also dependent on black voters, who are, on the whole, disproportionately dependent upon government programs. The alliance between university know-it-alls and hard-pressed minorities can be an effective one, but only so long as government spending is rising. And it was not. Clinton was able to keep the alliance alive in an era of cuts by making adroit use of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the regulations, executive orders, and court-ordered expansions stemming from it. He shunted the cost of black advancement into the private sector through affirmative action and housing finance subsidies. He opened civil rights to other groups, particularly women and gays. And—the first president to do so—he made an almost religious appeal to diversity as an American calling, casting as unpatriotic any allegiance to the traditions and cultures of the majority."