Quotes from Christopher Caldwell

Civil rights thus does not temper popular sovereignty, it replaces it. What we call political correctness is the natural outcome of civil rights, which makes fighting bias a condition for the legitimacy of the state. Once bias is held to be part of the "unconscious," of human nature, there are no areas of human life in which the state's vigilance is not called for.

Three weeks before Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was ousted and then murdered in a coup that Kennedy had authorized.

There are, however, great problems with shame as a means of governing. For one thing, opposition does not disappear but only becomes unspeakable, making the public even less knowable to its rulers. For another, shame as a government weapon works only on people capable of feeling shame. It thus purges high-minded people from the opposition and ensures that, when the now-mysterious public does throw up an opposition, it will be led by shameless people and take a shameless form.

arrived veiled, as compared to 639 the previous fall. Chirac ordered that the hundredth anniversary

Only with the entrenchment of political correctness did it become clear what Americans had done in 1964: They had inadvertently voted themselves a second constitution without explicitly repealing the one they had. Each constitution contained guarantees

Bob Dylan's Christianity has been allusive, idiosyncratic, and never the sort to place him on anyone's side in any Kulturkampf.

One of history's secrets is that the revolutionaries' appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew.