In January 2020, five months before the wave of left-wing activism unleashed by George Floyd's death, the writer Christopher Caldwell published a provocative book about the brewing cultural war. Titled The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties , the book traced contemporary identity politics back to the Civil Rights Act, which, in Caldwell's telling, had created the enforcement apparatus for modern progressivism. It was civil rights law, Caldwell argued, that spawned the HR