Christopher Lasch appears to be having a moment.
Following on this morning's "The vindication of Christopher Lasch".
From The Ideas Letter, July 10:
“Everything in Trumpworld happens twice,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole wrote recently—“the first time as performance and the second as reality.” He was commenting on the deployment of the U.S. National Guard and U.S. Marines in Los Angeles against protesters challenging President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. If Trump’s victory in 2016 was performance, the aftermath of his 2024 victory is reality. And that reality, now manifest daily, is one that most liberals, leftists, or middle-of-the-roaders had not fully anticipated, despite warnings.
Among the most prescient, consistent, and insistent critics to warn the United States of its own frailties was the historian Christopher Lasch.
Some observers were blinded by their belief in the rootedness and resilience of the country’s institutions, its liberal political tradition, and the irreversibility of progress. Others failed to fully appreciate how money would corrode the American political system and would so deepen cultural-cum-class polarization. But beginning several decades ago, Lasch identified the growing divide between the educated managerial elites and the bulk of the lesser educated public.
Writing of “an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself),” he argued that it “seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or ‘alternative’ institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.” American democracy would deteriorate based on “the routine acceptance of professionals as a class apart.”
Lasch was erudite. He was engaged in intellectual conversation with different disciplines, theories, and approaches worldwide, including the Frankfurt School, which inspired his texts from the late 1970s and 1980s. His major works present an archeology of social and political upheavals today: He identified long ago the roots of the current crisis of liberalism in the United States. After arguing that neither socialism nor fascism represented the future, Lasch asserted that “the danger to democracy comes less from totalitarian or collectivist movements abroad than from the erosion of its psychological, cultural, and spiritual foundations from within.”
Lasch’s last book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, was published posthumously, in 1995; he had rushed it into print as he was fighting cancer. In that work, along with what is arguably his most famous book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), and his most substantive one, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), he identified, with alarm, the corrosive influence of markets and bureaucratization on individualism and responsible citizenship. He also tracked the economic and cultural trends that turned citizens into consumers and created an environment in which “indifference, not the fear of deeply divisive disagreements, underlies the public’s refusal to get excited about politics.” And, for Lasch, “this indifference betrays the erosion of the capacity to take any interest in anything outside the self.”
To read Lasch, therefore, is in part to read the history of the transformation of capitalism, class, and cultural conflict in America over the last few decades—the rise of a mainly white, middle-age, and middle-class rebellion with patriarchal leanings—well before all those issues crystallized over wokeness and the inequalities caused by globalization.
Writing The Revolt of the Elites in the heyday of the West’s triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, Lasch questioned its self-congratulatory tone over the supposed victory of liberal democratic capitalism. As a critic of progressivism—an obsession, he believed, of both the right and the left—he called attention to the growing crisis of citizenship in advanced capitalist democracies such as the U.S. and warned, “Having defeated its totalitarian adversaries, liberalism is crumbling from within.” One reason for this, he argued, in keeping with themes he had pursued in the 1970s and 80s, was that: “Liberalism was never utopian, unless the democratization of consumption is itself a utopian ideal. It made no difficult demands on human nature”—and yet, to him, such demands were precisely what made civic virtue.
His solution? Populism. One could say Lasch was a romantic when it came to rectifying an enfeebled democracy. But today the burgeoning literature on populism sees the movement as a threat to democracy. The German political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller has argued that populism is not just anti-elite but also anti-pluralism: Populists believe they are the only true representatives of the people and that anyone who is not with them is not part of the people. This exclusivist approach is inherently authoritarian, and so populism is, on the face of it, against liberalism and democracy.
For Lasch, though, writing in the early 1990s, “at a time when other ideologies are greeted with apathy, populism has the capacity to generate real enthusiasm,” because “populism, as I understand it, is unambiguously committed to the principle of respect.” In his view, respect was the essential ingredient of civic virtue—without it, liberalism loses its constitutive ethos and deteriorates toward “a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” Populism, he wrote, “is the authentic voice of democracy.”
Lasch did recognize that:
“It would be foolish to deny the characteristic features of populist movements at their worst—racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, and all the other evils so often cited by liberal critics. But it would be equally foolish to deny what is indispensable in this tradition—its appreciation of the moral value of honest work, its respect for competence, its egalitarian opposition to entrenched privilege, its refusal to be impressed by the jargon of experts, its insistence on plain speech and on holding people accountable for their actions.”
Considering today’s realities, it turns out that he could have been more circumspect about tooting the positive aspects of populism.
A Leftist Conservative
Lasch was a critic from within, if not at times a contrarian. As a person of the left, he started to ring the alarm for the leftish-liberal New Deal order during social and political turbulence prompted by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and student radicalism in the United States. Though he then remained a leftist in matters of political economy—in particular privileging equality in both economic and especially civic matters—he gradually distanced himself from the social and cultural tenets of the New Left. He believed that the once-hopeful movement of the ‘60s had gradually substituted culture for class and that its sense of individualism had paved the way for the neoliberal order and its egotistic ethos. “Most of us can see the system but not the class that administers it and monopolizes its wealth,” he wrote. “We resist a class analysis of modern society as a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Thus, we prevent ourselves from understanding how our current difficulties arose, why they persist, or how they might be solved.”....
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Previously from The Ideas Letter:
"Our Spreadsheet Overlords"
"AI, China’s Invisible Scaffolding"
