Indeed, Carter so liked the book that it inspired his election speech on “the American malaise”, a misjudgement said to have cost him support against the cheery, optimistic Ronald Reagan. Lasch’s most successful book, the 1979 The Culture of Narcissism, was highly critical of American society’s self-obsession and was hugely influential, partly thanks to the support of President Jimmy Carter. Lasch was thoroughly on the Left during the 1960s, indeed he moved further in that direction, but as Alan Ryan wrote soon after his death, he “emphasised what many on the Left have thought to be the guilty secret of American liberalism: its affection for corporate organisation, and a thoroughly manipulative view of the relationship between the new social sciences and the populace whose lives the liberals wanted to improve”. He came from one Left-wing intellectual family and married into another his father Robert was a Pulitzer-winning journalist, and after Harvard the younger Lasch married Nell, the daughter of Harvard historian and prominent liberal intellectual Henry Steele Commager (who, like Lasch’s father, outlived him). Lasch was born in 1932 in Omaha, Nebraska, the heart of the original populism movement in the Midwest, and it was populism and the progressive era that would be the focus of his teaching, at the University of Iowa and later Rochester, New York.
“It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution,” he wrote: “their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators.” If this continued, then the top strata of society would become increasingly alienated by their society and country, and turn against it, something that has come to pass with the first corporate-backed revolutionary movement in history. Yet what Lasch saw in 1994, but which has only now reached its apogee in 2020, was how social revolution would be pushed forward by the radical rich and resisted by the rest.
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The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy warned of a growing cultural and social divide caused by a rapacious free market and the radical politics of the Sixties, one that would lead to extremism and division.
Their demands were for more diversity and racial equality, already sacred ideas among the cognitive elite, all of it accompanied by bizarre, quasi-religious public declarations of faith.Ĭhristopher Lasch never lived to see his great work published, but since his death from cancer in February 1994, it has developed a cult following among unorthodox sections of Right and Left. Here was a revolution backed by almost all billion-dollar businesses and public institutions bar the US presidency, and whose leaders had almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment.
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