The historian Christopher Lasch diagnosed the ills of late capitalism well and his books continue to be relevant. Three are briefly discussed here: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1978), The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995). These books will repay the effort more than most current diagnoses of our predicament as we navigate our current very dysfunctional political economy and political culture.
Choose your teachers well – this is a key to a rich life, of the body, the mind, and the spirit. The historian Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) is one teacher, for those willing to listen, who has helped us make sense of our times during the rise of Neoliberalism. [1] Some time ago we discussed why Salvador Luria is a scientist for our time (especially now in the early months of Trump v2.0) and why Hannah Arendt is a philosopher/historian/cultural critic for our time. The following brief discussion of three of his books will explain why Lasch should be viewed as a historian for our time.
These are (1) The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1978), (2) The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), and (3) The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995). Each of these books could have been written today, nearly 50 years after the first. We do not really need someone like George Packer, supporter of the Iraq War started in 2003, to explain anything further.
The Culture of Narcissism was written after the American defeat in Vietnam, during a time of economic stagnation and distress over what was at the time only theoretical climate and ecological catastrophe. The former had been predicted by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 while scientists at Big Oil were hiding what they knew. The more tangible ecological catastrophe had been averted, visibly, in my hometown and other pollution reservoirs by the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of Richard Nixon. From the Preface:
The political crisis of capitalism reflects the general crisis of western culture…Liberalism, the political theory of the ascendant bourgeoisie (which can be partially understood today as the Professional Managerial Class, PMC), long ago lost the capacity to explain events in the world of the welfare state and the multinational corporation…politically bankrupt, liberalism is intellectually bankrupt as well…What looks to political scientists like voter apathy may represent a healthy skepticism about a political system in which public lying has become endemic and routine.
A common response to Lasch is that he understood our past as something other than an unfortunate age to be overcome. The rise of identity politics as a substitute for real politics is implicit throughout the work of Lasch, however, as we have carried:
The logic of individualism to the extreme of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of narcissistic preoccupation with the self. Strategies of narcissistic survival now present themselves as emancipation from the repressive conditions of the past, thus giving rise to a cultural revolution that reproduces the worst features of the collapsing civilization it claims to criticize.
Was the past better? Certainly not, in many ways, for many of us. But extinguishing the past “rules out entirely any insights gained, and any values arrived at by personal experience, since such experiences are always located in the past.” If we refuse to know where we have been, it is impossible to know where we are going. And we have come to refuse this very thing over the past 40+ years with increasing stridency on the notional left and right while the putative center muddles along.
We have become a rootless people. This does not mean that everyone should remain “at home” but it does mean that everyone needs a home where he or she originally put down roots that nourished the body, the mind, and the psyche. Thus, rootedness is not necessarily associated with one place (although in my case I freely admit this to be so). Rootedness will be the key to human survival in the coming world, which is likely to be quite different from the present world, whatever our politicians and economists need to believe. Life under the Neoliberal Dispensation has no need for roots of any kind and certainly no need for fertile soil that will nourish healthy development:
The devaluation of the past have become one of the most important symptoms of (our) cultural crisis…A denial of the past, superficially progressive and optimistic, proves on closer analysis to embody the despair of a society that cannot face the future.
This was published in 1978, at the same time Barbara and John Ehrenreich defined the PMC. A remarkable explication of the PMC is the recent, astonishing book by Musa Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradiction of a New Elite. Al-Gharbi refers to the PMC as “symbolic capitalists,” which is what they wish to be, for the most part. This book could have been written only by a child of the working class who has understood political economy from the bootstraps up.
A common theme throughout the work of Christopher Lasch is that every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology. With Sigmund Freud it was the “hysteria and neurosis” of the Viennese bourgeoisie. Now, this has become syndromes such as “borderline personality disorder” and patients with ill-defined complaints that are difficult to identify in an enlarged DSM-5TR (2022). In the modern university and professional school, students have “test anxiety,” for which they receive accommodations? I digress, but in my reading much of this goes back to the development of modern advertising, explained well in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of A New American Culture by William Leach (the second draft of which was read Lasch).
The headings in the chapters of The Culture of Narcissism explain where we were in 1978 and echo where we are forty-seven years later with The Eclipse of Achievement:
In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself…(people)…have nothing to measure their achievements except the achievements of others…(previously) the good opinion of friends and neighbors rested on appreciation of accomplishments…today (people) seek the kind of approval that applauds not their actions but their personal attributes.
This explains our identity politics, in which people crave “the glamour and excitement of celebrity…and…want to be envied rather than respected…Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity.” People really do fall for this, both the famous and their admirers. Which leads directly to Politics as Spectacle. Politics has always had elements of spectacle, in the very serious Lincoln-Douglas Debates or the Scopes Trial a hundred years ago. But:
When politicians and administrators have no other aim than to sell their leadership to the public (e.g., the factitious firm of Clinton Obama Biden Pelosi & Schumer LLC) they deprive themselves of intelligible standards by with to define the goals of specific policies or to evaluate success or failure…because prestige and credibility (or place at table on K Street) had become the only measure of effectiveness.
The degradation of work under Neoliberalism has been a constant theme among those paying attention, although Harry Braverman published the definitive account the degradation of work in the twentieth century in Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974). This has led to what Lasch has labeled The Spread of Stupefaction:
Contrary to pronouncements of most educational theorists and their allies in the social sciences, advanced industrial society (which is now “advanced” deindustrialized society) no longer rests on a population primed for achievement…It requires instead a stupefied population, resigned to work that is trivial and shoddily performed, predisposed to seek satisfaction in the tune set aside for leisure.
Followed by The Atrophy of Competence:
The conversion of popular traditions of self-reliance into esoteric knowledge administered by experts encourages a belief that ordinary competence in almost any field, even the art of self-government, lies beyond the reach of the layman
Resulting in the appearance of The Managerial and Professional Elite as a Ruling Class, which we have discussed before as the PMC. Altogether, The Culture of Narcissism was a wakeup call we missed.
Reading The Culture of Narcissism, still in print, is worth several evenings. But it would not surprise me if the book were on the list to be removed from libraries.
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991) is in my view the capstone of Christopher Lasch’s work, but only because he died too young. [2] The history is sweeping, beginning with:
A deceptively simple question, how does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all. The attempt to explain this anomaly…led me back to the eighteenth century, when the founders of modern liberalism began to argue that human wants, being insatiable, required an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to satisfy them. Insatiable desire, formerly condemned as a source of frustration, unhappiness, and spiritual instability, came to be seen as a powerful stimulus to economic development.
Or one way to look at it is that the Seven Deadly Sins became the Seven Rules to Live By. A major theme of The True and Only Heaven is that Liberals’ solutions to our various crises have gotten it exactly backwards. The prototypical Liberal in the form of Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts “called for liberals to become more conservative on economic issues and more radical on social issues.” Or, in the current vernacular go all-in on identity politics and Neoliberalism at the same time. No. This did not work and it will not work, as covered in No Politics But Class Politics by Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr. (Eris, 2022).
Labor, if it is to be a source of value to human beings as well as the political economy, must approach a syndicalism that is:
(T)he moral equivalent of an earlier form of proprietorship and the only form of political action that could sustain…life…Whatever can be said against them, small proprietors, artisans, tradesmen, and farmers (I would add teachers, scientists, physicians and other professionals to this list) – more often victims of ‘improvement’ than beneficiaries – are unlikely to mistake the promised land of progress for the true and only heaven.
Algorithmic Intelligence (AI) cannot build our houses, or even design them very well. It cannot grow our food or sew our clothes. AI can only pretend to make us healthy, physically and mentally. AI can only pretend to make us rich while leading us to a promised land of error.
The importance of The True and Only Heaven lies in how it shows us how we could live together, mutually supporting one another in good faith and good will. This has always been so, but the powers that be, i.e., both wings of the neoliberal Uniparty in the so-called Global North, have a vested interest in hiding this truth. Thus, we have overshot the carrying capacity of planet Earth, and the consequences will be dire in the coming inconvenient apocalypse. The world will get smaller as a matter of course in the near future. The lessons of The True and Only Heaven must be re-remembered if we are to leave any kind of human and humane future to our children and their children. The only progress attainable and sustainable is “development without growth” on a finite planet. This was the kernel of the work of Herman Daly, who was an economist for our time.
The essays in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy round out the importance of Christopher Lasch for understanding our current world. Beginning with a description of the democratic malaise, Lasch notes that at one time not so long ago capital was rooted and that even under conditions of economic inequality a large measure of social equality was still normal. Now, the citizen has been replaced by the consumer. This Neoliberal turn has been facilitated by the elites of the title:
Upper-middle-class liberals (PMC) with their inability to grasp the importance of class differences in shaping attitudes toward life, fail to reckon with the class dimension of their obsession with health and moral uplift…They have mounted a crusade to sanitize American society…and in the person of Clinton Secretary of Labor…the starstruck Rhodes Scholar Robert Reich, prophet of the new world of ‘abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration’…advocate a world in which labor…has no future at all…in a society composed of ‘symbolic analysts’ and ‘in-person servers.’
This has led to the PMC version of meritocracy, apparently without the understanding that The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1970-2033 by the British sociologist Michael Young was a novel (still in print) describing just one more dystopia:
In Young’s narrative, a historian writing in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, approvingly chronicles the ‘fundamental change of the century and a half beginning around 1870: the redistribution of intelligence between the classes…Meritocracy, in Young’s description, rests on a mobilized economy driven by the compulsion to produce.
And here we are, eight years short of 2033. Continuous growth in a finite ecosphere is seen as the one true path to the good life. But as Edward Abbey put it The Journey Home, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
In his discussion of communitarianism and populism, which should be continued despite the current demonization of populists from the left and the right, Lasch points in the direction of an escape from our predicament. Contrary to current misunderstanding:
Populism…is unambiguously committed to the principle of respect…populism is to be preferred to communitarianism…Populism has always rejected both the politics of deference and the politics of pity. It stands for plain manners and plain, straightforward speech…Populism is the authentic voice of democracy. It assumes that individuals are entitled to respect until they prove themselves unworthy of it, but it insists that they take responsibility for themselves…Communitarians regret the collapse of social trust but often fail to see that trust, in a democracy, can only be grounded in mutual respect.
It is our reluctance to make demands on each other…that is sapping the strength of democracy today…In the name of sympathetic understanding, we tolerate second-rate workmanship, second-rate habits of thought, and second-rate standards of personal conduct…We seldom bother to correct a mistake or to argue with opponents in the hope of changing their minds. Instead, we either shout them down or agree to disagree, saying that all of us have the right to our opinions. Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than intolerance.
This was, of course published before the internet was a thing, and before Justice Anthony Kennedy and Citizens United v. FEC. But its truth is self-evident.
Which brings us to The Lost Art of Argument, written in the early days of the “Information Age that will include an insatiable demand trained personnel, an upgrading of skills required for employment, and an enlightened public capable of following issues of the day and of making informed judgments about civic affairs.” Not so much, actually. Once again Christopher Lasch diagnosed more than thirty years ago what may be our most pressing current problem:
Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise, we take in information passively – if we take it in at all.
It is only by subjecting our preferences and projects to the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in Lippman’s pejorative sense – half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of “opinions,” gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well…we come to know our own minds by explaining ourselves to others.
The decline of the partisan press and the rise of a new type of journalism professing rigorous standards of objectivity do not assure a steady supply of usable information. Unless information is generated by sustained public debate, most of it will be irrelevant at best, misleading and manipulative at worst.
Finally, in Conversation and the Civic Arts, Lasch notes that “ If elites speak only to themselves, one reason for this is the absence of institutions that promote general conversation along class lines.” For another time, but this was not the world of my childhood in a working class family that socialized with people who would have been members of the PMC today. This chapter is where I learned of the sociologist Ray Oldenburg and his marvelous book The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How they Get You through the Day (1989, still in print). A central theme in The Great Good Place is the “third place” where people gather apart from larger structured institutions and their families:
The contrast between voluntary associations and the sociability of neighborhoods helps to explain why decency…is more highly regarded in the third place than wealth or brilliant achievement, and decency, we might add, is the preeminent or political virtue…third-place sociability…encourages virtues more properly associated with political life.
Shopping malls are dying a natural death because they are so unnatural, not unlike one of the most astonishing marketing failures in history, New Coke. This new concoction appealed to testers for one reason and one reason only, it had more sugar in it. Same with malls, except the sweetener was more artificial than high-fructose corn syrup. Oldenburg’s book, on the other hand, helps us identify what is missing in most of our current world:
Urban amenities, conviviality, conversation, politics – almost everything, in short, that makes life worth living. When the market preempts all public space, and sociability has to “retreat” into private clubs, people are in danger of losing the capacity to amuse themselves (without amusing themselves to death) and even to govern themselves. As long as they recognize the danger, however, it is still possible to hope that they will find a way to reverse the suburban trend of our civilization and restore the civic arts to their rightful place at the center of things.
Do we recognize this danger? Yes, in certain places, such as the midsize city in which I live, across the street from a very good public library and a half-block from the Imposing United States Post Office. Both of these essential institutions of American life are in serious jeopardy, here and everywhere. A mile down the hill is a trying-to-thrive renascent downtown. My local economy, originally with a foundation in manufacturing and transportation, was devastated by suburbanization, deindustrialization, and the decline of the railroads. But the built environment has been preserved, so there is hope.
To end as we began: Choose your teachers well – this is a key to a rich life, of the body, the mind, and the spirit. Christopher Lasch remains one such teacher more than thirty years after his death. The communal, public, and political life he describes will be essential in the coming years as the world gets smaller due to our multiple cascading crises. The perspicacious economist Herbert Stein put it well: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. The question is what comes after. We can follow Christopher Lasch and live a humane life. Or not. The choice is ours.
Acknowledgment: A special thanks to Gulag in this comment on March 8, 2025, who prompted me to think again about this essay. All deficiencies in the argument are mine alone.
Notes
[1] This has been discussed widely. A consensus is that Ronald Reagan, our original MAGA President, was our first neoliberal president. But it was Jimmy Carter, with his unimaginative technocrat mindset, who began the transformation from half-good liberalism to malignant Neoliberalism, i.e., The Market Is the Measure of All Things, Even Those that Cannot Be Measured.
[2] His final book was the posthumous Women and the Common Life (1997), a collection edited by his daughter, the historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. From the Acknowledgments: We put our love where he have put our labor. – Ralph Waldo Emerson.