Eliternas uppror och sveket mot demokratin

by Christopher Lasch, Margareta Eklöf (Translator)

Demokratin idag hotas inte av massorna, som José Ortega y Gasset hävdade i Massornas uppror, utan av eliterna. Dessa eliter – rörliga och alltmer globala i sin syn – vägrar att acceptera gränser eller band till en viss nation eller plats. Christopher Lasch anser att de överger medelklassen då de isolerar sig i sina nätverk och enklaver och att de splittrar nationen och sviker idén om en demokrati för alla medborgare.

Eliternas uppror är ett spännande och viktigt inlägg i dagens debatt om den globala ekonomin.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Sociology, Cultural, Political Science

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Christopher "Kit" Lasch (June 1, 1932 – February 14, 1994) was an American historian, moralist, and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester.

Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities. He strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled the 'culture of narcissism.'

His books, including The New Radicalism in America (1965), Haven in a Heartless World (1977), The Culture of Narcissism (1979), and The True and Only Heaven (1991), and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy published posthumously in 1996 were widely discussed and reviewed. The Culture of Narcissism became a surprise best-seller and won the National Book Award in the category Current Interest (paperback).

Lasch was always a critic of liberalism, and a historian of liberalism's discontents, but over time his political perspective evolved dramatically. In the 1960s, he was a neo-Marxist and acerbic critic of Cold War liberalism. During the 1970s, he began to become a far more iconoclastic figure, fusing cultural conservatism with a Marxian critique of capitalism, and drawing on Freud-influenced critical theory to diagnose the ongoing deterioration that he perceived in American culture and politics. His writings during this period are considered contradictory. They are sometimes denounced by feminists and hailed by conservatives for his apparent defense of the traditional family. But as he explained in one of his books The Minimal Self, "it goes without saying that sexual equality in itself remains an eminently desirable objective...". Moreover, in Women and the Common Life, Lasch clarified that urging women to abandon the household and forcing them into a position of economic dependence, in the workplace, pointing out the importance of professional careers does not entail liberation, as long as these careers are governed by the requirements of corporate economy.

He eventually concluded that an often unspoken but pervasive faith in "Progress" tended to make Americans resistant to many of his arguments. In his last major works he explored this theme in depth, suggesting that Americans had much to learn from the suppressed and misunderstood Populist and artisan movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is symptomatic of my own political leanings, I suspect, that I started losing interest in this a little after the half-way mark and then could barely take a note from the book for the whole of the third part. To me, this book loses its way and stops being about elites (in revolt or not) in the last section of the book. This is a pity, as I think the start was particularly interesting.

This was written in 1995 – in fact, the copy I read from my university library had a ‘due date’ sheet on the front cover – which is nice, since I now know it was borrowed 16 times prior to 1998 – something I rarely get to see about books I read from the library. Now, 1995 is a significantly long time ago, even if it does seem like yesterday, and yet a lot of what is said here could have, in fact, been written yesterday.

It only occurred to me, right at the end, that what might have been meant by ‘elites’ – given this is an American book – might not be I would normally mean by elites. You know, in the US ‘elite’ often means someone with a bit more than a grade school education who doesn’t watch Fox News… There are places here where the notion of ‘cultural elites’ gets something of a run – again, not my favourite bits of the book.

The main thrust of the start of the book is that the growing inequality in our society is producing such a disconnection between those who rule and those who are ruled that they might as well live on separate planets. Not just that, but because wealth equates to power and since there just isn’t anywhere when the very wealthy get to speak to most of the rest of us, the notion that ‘democracy’ should be pursued or encouraged or supported is something the elites are increasingly less likely to feel even makes sense.

This book, being American, focuses on what I feel are particularly American obsessions, particularly American views of themselves – and these views don’t always translate elsewhere as easily as Americans imagine they should. Nevertheless, growing inequality is an international phenomenon and it is having many of the same impacts across the globe as it is in the US.

I’ve been reading a lot of Bauman – and while both writers are concerned with many of the same themes, for instance, the increasing commodification of all aspects of society, how this is destroying personal relationships, how it undermines community and replaces that with shopping malls, how the public is being replaced by the commercial and so on – I feel this book perhaps ‘personalises’ these issues a little too much – which I guess is my understanding of the last part of the book and its obsessions with finding spiritual pathways in a post-Enlightenment world and where the cultural elite feel that ‘religious experience’ is only for those too uneducated to know better. As someone who too easily falls into exactly this trap, I would have liked this part to have been more illuminating – but unfortunately, I don’t feel I got anything from it at all. I’m prepared to admit this may have been my fault.

I think I’m going to let this guy speak for himself – so here are some quotes:

In the first half of the nineteenth century most people who gave any thought to the matter assumed that democracy had to rest on a broad distribution of property. They understood that extremes of wealth and poverty would be fatal to the democratic experiment. p7

Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of / depending on the state pp7-8

Self-governing communities, not individuals, are the basic units of democratic society p8

It is the decline of these communities, more than anything else, that calls the future of democracy into question p8

Democracy requires a vigorous exchange of ideas and opinions. Ideas, like property, need to be distributed as widely as possible. p10

‘Diversity’ – a slogan that looks attractive on the face of it – has come to mean the opposite of what it appears to mean. In practice, diversity turns out to legitimize a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion. The physical segregation of the population in self-enclosed, racially homogeneous enclaves has its counterpart in the balkanization of opinion. p17

Washington becomes a parody of Tinseltown; executives take to the airwaves, creating overnight the semblance of political movements; movie stars become political pundits, even presidents; reality and the simulation of reality become more and more difficult to distinguish p38

A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains. Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional and managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rest on intelligence alone p39

Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites; if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognise so few obligations to their predecessors or to the communities they profess to lead. Their lack of gratitude disqualifies meritocratic elites from the burden of leadership, and in any case, they are less interested in leadership than in escaping the common lot—the very definition of meritocratic success p41

In Europe referenda on unification have revealed a deep and widening gap between the political classes and the more humble members of society, who fear that the European Economic Community will be dominated by bureaucrats and technicians devoid of any feelings of national identity or allegiance p46

The decline of nations is closely linked, in turn, to the global decline of the middle class p48

What the left makes of such failings is exemplified by Michael Lerner’s argument to the effect that ‘self-blaming’ is the most important obstacle to working-class militancy. ‘Workers come to feel that the problems they face are their own failures to adjust to the given reality’. p54

By giving the school system exclusive control over education, Mann’s reforms encourage a division of cultural labor that would weaken the people’s capacity to educate themselves. The teaching function would be concentrated in a class of professional specialists, whereas it ought to be diffused throughout the whole community. An educational establishment was just as dangerous as a priestly or military establishment. Its advocates had forgotten that children were best ‘educated in the streets, by the influence of their associates, … by the passions and affections they see manifested, the conversations to which they listen, and above all by the general pursuits, habits, and moral tone of the community’ p66

Before the Civil War it was generally agreed, across a broad spectrum of political opinion, that democracy had no future in a nation of hirelings p81

The hope that rising expectations would lead men and women to invest their ambitions in their offspring was destined to be disappointed in the long run. The more closely capitalism came to be identified with immediate gratification and planned obsolescence, the more relentlessly it wore away the moral foundations of family life. The rising divorce rate, already a source of alarm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, seemed to reflect a growing impatience with the constraints imposed by long-term responsibilities and commitments p95

Americans have a ‘split personality, which in turns emphasizes individual liberty and the importance of community’ (quoting E J Dionne Why Americans Hate Politics) p113

Needless to say, the elites that set the tone of American politics, even when they disagree about everything else, have a common stake in suppressing a politics of class p114

Our approach to eating and drinking is less and less mixed with ritual and ceremony. It has become strictly functional: We eat and drink on the run. Our fast-paced habits leave neither rime nor—more important—places for good talk, even in cities the whole point of which, it might be argued, is to promote it p118

As neighbourhood hangouts give way to suburban shopping malls, or, on the other hand, to private cocktail parties, the essential political art of conversation is replaced by shoptalk or personal gossip. Increasingly, conversation literally has no place in American society. In its absence, how—or, better, where—can political habits be acquired and polished? p123

What New York needs, Sleeper argues, is a politics that / will emphasize class division instead of racial ones, addressing the ‘real problem, which is poverty, and the real need, which is jobs’ p139-140

The bureaucratization of education has the opposite effect, undermining the teacher’s autonomy, substituting the judgment of administrators for that of the teacher, and incidentally discouraging people with a gift for teaching from entering the profession at all p159

The social effects of the communications revolution, we are told, will include an insatiable demand for trained personnel, an upgrading of the skills required for employment, and an enlightened public capable of following the issues of the day and the making of informed judgments about civic affairs. Instead we find college graduates working in jobs for which they are vastly overqualified. The demand for menial labor outstrips the demand for skilled specialists p161

Since the public no longer participates in debates on national issues, it has no reason to inform itself about civic affairs p162

What democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information p162

Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product p163

It is significant, as Carey points out, that Dewey’s analysis of communication stressed the ear rather than the eye. ‘Conversation’, Dewey wrote, ‘has a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech … The connections of the ear with vital and outgoing thought and emotion are immensely closer and more varied than those of the eye. Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator’ p172

Unless information is generated by sustained public debate, most of it will be irrelevant at best, misleading and manipulative at worst p174

Economic stratification means that a liberal education (such as it is) has become the prerogative of the rich, together with a small number of students recruited from select minorities. The great majority of college students, relegated to institutions that have given up even the pretence of a liberal education, study business, accounting, physical education, public relations, and other practical subjects p177

At best, the exposure to ‘otherness’ turns out to be a one-way street. The children of privilege are urged—even required—to learn something about ‘marginalized, suppressed interests, situations, traditions,’ but blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities are exempted from exposure to ‘otherness’ in the work of ‘Western white males.’ An insidious double standard, masking as tolerance, denies those minorities the fruits of the victory they struggled so long to achieve: access to the world’s culture. The underlying message that they are incapable of appreciating or entering into that culture comes through just as clearly in the new academic ‘pluralism’ as in the old intolerance and exclusion; more clearly, indeed, since exclusion rested on fear more than contempt. Thus slaveowners feared that access to the best of Euro-American culture would encourage a taste for freedom p185

One of the effects of corporate or bureaucratic control is to drive critical thinkers out of the social sciences into the humanities, where they can indulge a taste for ‘theory’ without the rigorous discipline of empirical social observation. ‘Theory’ is no substitute for social criticism, the one form of intellectual activity that would seriously threaten the status quo and the one form that has no academic cachet at all p193

If Rieff is correct in his contention that culture rests on a willingness to forbid, a ‘remissive’ culture like our own cannot be expected to survive indefinitely. Sooner or later our remissive elites will have to rediscover the principle of limitation p223

Socialists and aesthetes shared a common enemy, the bourgeois philistine, and the unremitting onslaught against bourgeois culture was far more lasting in its effects… p233

The educated classes, unable to escape the burden of sophistication, might envy the classes that continued to unthinkingly to observe traditional faiths in the twentieth century, not yet having been exposed to the wintry blasts of modern critical thinking p339

The deepest variety of religious faith (the ‘twice-born type’, as he (James) calls it) always, in every age, arises out of a background of despair p243

[Murtaza · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written right at the end of Lasch's life and it reads like it: he pulls no punches in telling the chattering classes what he thinks about them and the cultural trends they are presiding over. It is surprising this was published two decades ago since the criticisms are not only still applicable it did not seem to have made any difference for Lasch to have pointed them out so long ago. Elites of all types effectively live in their own world; the original American ideal of an educated public at all levels actively involved in debate and able to argue their interests has been replaced by a highly-credentialed cognitive elite lording it over uneducated plebeians. The latter are viewed with patronizing contempt, and indeed they periodically seem to confirm their low status by expressing themselves politically in a way that reflects their lack of education.

The gap has gotten bigger politically, although in the years since Lasch wrote this the cultural playing field has been at least partly levelled by the internet. One thing social media has shown us is that people truly do love to debate and are hungry for knowledge at all levels of society. His analysis of hte attempt to replace religion with a mixture of art (broadly defined) and psychoanalysis is also apt. Almost all social problems are now talked about as though the solutions are primarily therapeutic, the recent interest in self-help books for white people about racism seeming to be a prime example. The therapeutic state really becomes stronger with every iteration.

I don't know if Lasch identified as a conservative but this certainly came across as a conservative critique of contemporary culture. Lasch stood strongly against relativism in knowledge and lamented what he saw as the dissolution of the intellectual and moral bases of society; accusing contemporary forms of liberalism of living off the moral capital of the systems it replaced. As a whole the book was an entertaining and at times eloquent polemic but the crux of it should be more or less familiar to anyone following the subject broadly.

[J. Mulrooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Christopher Lasch died on Valentine’s day in 1994, America lost the most profound of her critics. His final book, The Revolt of the Elites, was published a year after his death. It is a group of discrete but thematically linked essays that continue the concerns of his previous book, The True and Only Heaven: how did American democracy come to its current state?

The title of the new book reverses José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses. Lasch contends that the American elites -- executives of the Fortune 1000, the political class in Washington, celebrities of the mass media, academics, even the heads of the great unions -- refuse to accept ordinary limitations and ignore the concerns of ordinary people. Speaking only to their own kind, they push the country in directions that best suit their own aggrandizement, and undermine any democratic impulse that might allow middle America -- an economic as well as a geographic description -- a share in governing.

As befits an historian, Lasch’s method is to mine the veins of the past to discover the core of our present predicament. This historical approach is so old-fashioned as to seem entirely new. Liberals, committed to the myth of progress, too often simplify the past into the record of people-who-were-not-so-sophisticated-and-wise-as-ourselves. Conservatives, committed to the mirror image of progress, nostalgia, romanticize the past into a golden age. Lasch rejects these typological approaches. History is the story of the answers that people gave to the questions they asked, and the story of how those answers conditioned the questions that their sons and daughters asked. The excitement of reading Lasch is that he is not so much interested in fixing our answers as our questions.

In his discussion of religion, he writes, “In the commentary on the modern spiritual predicament, religion is consistently treated as a source of intellectual and emotional security.” This is true, he points out, both of liberals and conservatives. Liberals condescendingly admire the small-mindedness of believers: they are like “children... who know exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves.” Conservatives, accepting the same premise, believe that the moment doubt is entertained, the world collapses into “relativism, moral anarchy, and cultural despair.” Eschewing arguments over foundationalism, Lasch argues for a more pragmatic approach. Religion, especially in the prophetic tradition common to Jews and Christians, contains in itself an unsparing attack on the believer’s own pride and complacency. A glance at the book of Psalms or the sayings of Christ should be enough to show anyone the silliness of Freud’s idea that religion was created out of the need for “dependence”, for a comforting father figure of a God -- and yet people on both sides of the debate argue as if Freud captured the essence of religion.

The Revolt of the Elites ought to have been a book, not an essay collection. The material, with a little more work, might have been welded into a single argument. As it is, the essays are less than they might have been. In his Acknowledgments, Lasch notes the book was written under “trying circumstances” -- a laconic description of his own terminal cancer. He did what he could with the time he had. What he left contains more insight than any dozen bestsellers on our cultural predicament.


[the above was published in a slightly different form in the Canadian Catholic Review some years ago. On re-reading, Lasch ages very well. We've added troubles with Muslim fundamentalists to our immediate list of things to worry about; and the access to information and communications enabled the internet and personal mobile devices are not things Lasch considered -- but by and large, the essays stand up, because the essentials have not changed.]

[Sean Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the thinkers and intellectuals of the last 40 years, none were as piercing, original, and prophetic as Lasch. In the 1970s, he predicted that the student radicals would become good Reaganites, or at least that their revolt would not upset the power structure. Here, as he stared at death, he saw progressives, radicals, capitalists, and their ilk turning away from class politics and creating a new elite that had more in common with elites of the wider world than their own people. Although he does not say it, this is essentially a return to pre-1789 Europe, where nobles mingled freely in a cosmopolitan world far removed from the masses they commanded.

The gulf between the lower class, who simply want better wages, and the professional class that seeks to radically remake culture is today a chasm. Lasch anticipated that and the inexorable and bitter culture wars. At the same time, he was masterly at pointing out the weaknesses, blind spots, prejudices, and pretensions of the professional class. His most searing contention was that the professional class, despite its pretensions at emancipatory politics, would fail to heal racial divides or stop the growing power of capitalism. The former was because the remedies were wrong and based on paternalism, while the latter is because of their tacit alliance with capital.

Although Lasch suffered from making obscure references without any explanation, I am stunned by his crisp writing style. It is all the more impressive considering this book was written on death's door. Yet, it could have been written yesterday, which makes it even sadder. Books like this cast a long shadow over our present and our failures. Even worse, there is no contemporary thinker on par with Lasch. One reason we feel lost is that so many original thinkers have disappeared. Instead, we are faced with a stunning intellectual conformity and a culture where silencing opponents (dressed up as taking a brave stand against platforming) is applauded by the professional class. Lasch saw the professional class as narrow-minded and arrogant, instead of how they saw themselves, which was as open and egalitarian. But everyone thinks they are a hero. Lasch is there to tell you that you are not a hero.

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great social commentary. Highly recommend. It's almost a mini-worldview primer, exploring the ways Marxism and CRT has seeped into academia and the media. But he also has lots of other things to say. Quite prophetic for 1995, though I suppose that just shows it's been a long time coming.

I also enjoyed The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations.

For related books, see:
--Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
--Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
--The Closing of the American Mind
--The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
--The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
--The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture

[strategian · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most enjoyment I got out of reading this book is the irony at the heart of its existence. Much of Lasch’s ire is directed at academia. Rightly, he accuses the academy of being, bluntly, a circlejerk. I am left asking after the fact – who is this book for, if not those who already accept its critique?
Lasch’s target is worthy, because his target is so vague. If you believe there is something wrong with American society and aren’t particularly far gone down the bourgeois social politics ladder, you’ll probably see the things he attacks as meriting attack. Western elites are insular, detached and deluded regarding their own superiority. The academy really is a predominantly worthless birdcage for failed political radicals. Critics of religion do generally tend to lack a coherent metaphysical underpinning to their own worldview by which to undermine those they perceive as failing.

So why the acclaim and recent attention? If a piece of social critique is redundant in choosing its target, we can at least expect it to provide a causal explanation and, as a product, a solution to the ailment it discusses – is that why Lasch has come into vogue again?

It seems unlikely. Why have American elites become increasingly alienated from the majority of people? Because of wealth inequality – whodathunkit. Why has wealth inequality increased? That doesn’t really matter. Maybe it’s because of technological advancement; maybe because of increased immigration and deskilling. It’s not something Lasch particularly cares about – probably because a systemic critique of capitalism would undermine the regular regression to totemic cultural touchstones he can’t toss aside.

If capitalism inherently produces wealth inequality then his frequent romanticisation of America’s ‘golden age’ just becomes the kind of naïve nostalgia he also tries to shove criticism against in (only, though, for a perceived sense of fatalism in that nostalgia – if the ‘nostalgics’ believed we could return to the periods they wax nostalgic over, they’d be fine by Lasch). If the cultural artifacts he fetishise, the neighbourhood, the ‘community’, whatever that is, are just the redeemable byproducts of a historical trend in production, Lasch is doomed. Because those, in the body of this work, are his highest values.

The urban and suburban neighbourhood, as embodiments of community, are central to what Lasch finds lacking in modernity. If we start to see their existence as predicated on an early stage of the economic model he (hesitantly) critiques, what is he but an old man wishing things could go back to what they were whenever they were that way?

I read this book immediately after finishing Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘After Virtue’ and it’s hard to avoid contrasting the two. In reviewing that book, I suggested that the broad range of its subject matter, being sociological, historical and philosophical, served to undermine its rhetorical punch – but that was a gentle ‘critique’ if it could be called one as that book effectively functions as a sociological, historical and philosophical book. I cannot say the same for The Revolt of the Elites. It is not an insightful historical work; it does not provide a convincing sociological account; nor is it philosophically innovative or enlightening.

Every part of this work which seems to offer some interesting or salient point is pilfered - the structure of the book is as follows: the author will make a critical remark around how those he opposes view the world. Sometimes these are insightful or interesting. He will then quote a contradictory evaluation by a historical figure, typically from the 19th century but occasionally the first half of the 20th century. Sometimes these are insightful or interesting. He will analyse their opinion in the manner of an undergraduate humanities essay, that is he will string together broken up quotes, then he will quote another figure he disagrees with or who refutes this figure. There will be no throughline of argument throughout. He will not refute both parties with a synthesis of their work. You will be left confused as to his perspective – to the point where you begin to doubt his intellectual merit at all. Does Lasch actually believe the historical aristocracy – and yes that term is as vague as it deserves to be – consistently abided by some honour that saw it symbolically redistribute its wealth into a universally accessible culture? Does he actually think America post-revolution was a classless society? Does anyone believe that?

Where MacIntyre dwells for multiple chapters on the names he invokes for discussion, multiple paragraphs on the meaning of terminology he uses, Lasch brings in psychoanalysts, Victorian diarists, liberal reformers, unstintingly and with no aplomb. It's nice to refine our historical understanding with a broad range of voices, but really who can be expected to believe some romantic 19th century piffle about how enlightened and informed American workers were from a touring bourgeois holidayer? Especially if that assertion is contrasted with actual historical knowledge of the trends of the increasingly radical and articulate European working class at the same time.

If we mathematically break down this work I’m willing to say a good half of it is spent discussing the work of other writers – which is not itself something to condemn, but when considered with his lack of a consistent line of argument starts to again raise the question: who is this book for?

Lasch’s own politics seem to start and stop at a vague investment in ‘democracy’ – but given the chapter ‘Does Democracy Deserve to Survive?’s completely ambiguous conclusion as to its titular question, one starts to suspect his investment stems not from a political belief in the system’s value but in a sentimental attachment to the concept as a relic of historical Americanism. Likewise with his insistence on the value of ‘rugged individualism’. He critiques incessantly proponents of the welfare state – interesting to hear an American who seems to think such a thing exists there – as eschewing the value of personal responsibility, but neglects to address the arguments those proponents base their position on. Maybe the people condemned to poverty by economic cycles really can’t be helpd for that – maybe his fetishism of a historical ‘independence’ is a relic he has to put to bed and get over.

Moreover, maybe some of the beliefs of ‘the majority’ he wants to claim to represent are just wrong. Maybe if Americans think of themselves as self sufficient pioneers, that’s incorrect and they need to unlearn it. The classical citizens Lasch wants to roll into his arguments would shudder at their association with that sort of person, after all. MacIntyre gives us a pretty clear definition of selfhood and identity informed by Aristotelian philosophy and why its revival is valid; to Lasch everything from Ancient Greeks to the revolutionary Americans to their Victorian descendants are of a like, one unbroken chain of Sensible Sorts who now found themselves victimised by an intellectual flash in the pan, a decadent and degenerate lot who don’t like Churches and Borders unlike the rest of us – right?

It is telling that when the author directs his ire on the academy, he chastises them for essentially a lack of social critique. Chapters before having been spent explaining to us that the high minded intellectuals do nothing but undermine western culture in the name of misguided egalitarianism, we are told that the academy is also too insular and self-concerned, too technical and obtuse. If they were really radical, what they would be doing is writing books about how everything is bad, without much of a conception of why – like Lasch!

Effectively this serves as a counterpart to the academic intellectualism he decries. For those put off by liberal hyper cosmpolitanism - here is your heavily cited, wordy justification for your perspective. Do not expect an expansion of that perspective unless it is so vulgar as to preclude the mildest critique of the economic model you exist under; nor expect a theoretical critique of that economic model. Instead look to have your worldview vindicated by extensive quotations from historical diarists with minimal critique of those diarists. Ammunition for the opinions you already had.

[Dobre Cosmin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5☆

[N Perrin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first Lasch. I have been told he is one of the few recent writers adroit enough to sidestep the ideological bindings that tie down both the left and right. That assessment is certainly not wrong.

For Lasch, the rise of the neoliberal elite is nothing like the forms of landed gentry or robber barons of previous eras. This new generation is the landless billionaire class overseeing multinational conglomerates, NGOs, and Epstein-style hedonistic escapades. Because the new elite order of "the best and brightest" has no ties to any particular community or nation, they have no interest in protecting any group of people but merely extracting as much as they can from everyone beneath them.

In addition, these elites suffer (unironically) from the delusion that they really are self-made because the world order is a socially mobile meritocracy. Really remarkable how Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump are so talented and nimble enough to rise so fast off the mere propulsion of their bootstraps! No silver spoon required on this ride, folks.

The issue at play here is the unrelenting tyranny of the market. The right thought that "family values" would operate as a countervailing anchor against the whims of the market, but David French and crew really didn't sit down and have a think about the overwhelming ability of the market to undermine and deconstruct the family.

The family is at best an inconvenience to the market. This is why the industrialists of the 20th century conducted a massive propaganda campaign to coerce women into getting jobs. To drive down wages in the name of progress, to make it impossible for single wage-earners to exist. Two workers for the price of one. (Lasch notes how in 1973, a fresh college graduate could expect to make $32,000 a year. In 2020 dollars, that is $73,216.34. The rich and old squeezing the young of all the cash they can.)

Even outside labor, the right should really have waken up a while ago on the family values thing. After aggressively Reaganiting for so many years, the evangelical right is now astounded and upset when the market so actively advocates for LGBTQIA rights and drag queen story hour at the library, or what have you. But it is all too obvious the logic of consumerism would buy into queer advocacy policies. There is too much money to be had.

Moreover, Lasch identifies how the power of the market would fully transform the news into entertainment, scholarship into careerism, politics into corporate lobby games, etc. The prescience is really impressive.

At the same time, the left is subject to its own forms of stupidity. In Lasch's eyes, political correctness and tolerance rhetoric is a facade the upper-middle-class uses to distract attention from actual material and economic reform for ethnic minorities. Professional psychiatry is another insidious tool for pharmaceutical companies to boost demand, consumption, and revenue with antidepressants.

Elite institutions flood the public with information overload to preclude any productive conversation. Public schools are designed to be sanitized and boring to asphyxiate curiosity, to prevent the next generation from learning how to think about various sides of political thinking. He associates the formation of modern, professional journalism as the downfall of the democratic order.

Lasch advocates for populism, in his words providing citizens with the means for self-sufficiency within the context of thickly bound, local communities--the antithesis of neoliberalism. He traces it to Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1863 and the early American imagination. The goal--and this was achieved for quite some time--was to allow young workers to graduate from being employees to independent owners.

This dream began to die with the turn of the twentienth century and the invention of a "permanent class of hirelings". Employment was no longer a stage to transcend, it was the destined bane of the American worker. The birth of the corporate slave.

Lasch notes that it is not without irony that the phrase "social mobility" emerged at this very same time too. No longer was it important to create a universal pipeline for stability, rather it was more important to let the chosen few have the tools to rise out of poverty if they "work hard enough or smart enough".

In this way, the symbolic ideals of diversity and social mobilitys within the context of meritocracy is a sham designed to drain the lower classes and ethnic minorities of their top talent. When the best and brightest are elevated into the diverse, neoliberal elite, they will no longer defend or protect the interests of the working class or racial minorities. They have been co-opted by the market. And those working classes will be left without a voice or any agency to fight for their own interests.

By inventing useless white-collar jobs, the elites can pay off potential dissidence while also carrot-and-sticking the middle class with promises of social mobility if they pay their dues to the neoliberal system and pay lip service to their much cherished ideological tools of oppression: diversity and tolerance.

Lasch doesn't offer guidance for implementing populist reforms contra neoliberalism, and it is not clear how much of what I have summarized is right or not.

In the meantime, the money will keep flowing upward as pseudo-progressivism gains ground.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok, I think I may be on to something (as a result of reading this book) as to why they hate us so much...its (not surprisingly) about religion... "They", of course, are those on the political right, especially those on the extreme and religious right; "we" are those who consider ourselves to be "liberal", "progressive", "enlightened", "modern", "well-educated" with a "healthy dose of skepticism re. matters of religion..." But what this book made me realize is that they don't hate us solely for what we typically view as their religious fanaticism that reflects and breeds paranoia and intolerance while imposing their beliefs on all of us (our paranoia). Rather, its our use of science, "enlightened"/"liberal" thinking/world view/religious skepticism (what they call "elitist", but what this book confirms what most of us have known all along: that elites are ALL PEOPLE that are well-off, well educated, and span the political spectrum, and dominate the power structures and political debate in this country.) that they find threatening on such a level, that we must STOP poo pooing it, and START taking it seriously.

This book is actually a series of essays and articles that Lasch had written in his final years and were put together as a book by he and his daughter, but published posthumously. It does have a rather fragmented feel, as each chapter, for the most part, stands on its own, as a completed essay about such things as "The Malaise of Democracy", "Racial Politics in NYC", the "History of Common Schools" the "Abolition of Shame" and "The Soul of Man Under Secularism". Each essay is a damming portrait of how fucked up our society is as a result of Elites creating class divisions, though a distortion of the term "social mobility", through the segregation of students through school tracking, through the creation of a completely shameless society, only to have Elites ridicule the rest as a bunch of ignorant know-nothings as the elites go off to live in and run a completely different world..."Revolt of the Elites" ("We're outta here man, you dumb, religious people suck!") Each essay uses language that is as angry as the reader feels reading them as Lasch lambasts any and all dominant political points of view: "You are all a bunch of elitist fucks who deserve each other and everything YOU'VE CREATED!!" (No wonder he's my kind of author!) But all of the essays eventually bring us to his final chapter which is a very compelling denouncement of how power elites (not the religious right) have created a secular society that is not only wrong-headedly divisive, but IS so because it is so wrong-headedly threatening toward a religious culture that is so desperately needed in our lost society; and we've all thrown it off in the names of science, progress, and higher education...we should be ashamed of ourselves for perpetuating this lost world, (we, as a result, are very lost ourselves...I'll plead guilty) and "they" have every right to feel seriously threatened by us...

In that final chapter Lasch argues that religion is so needed in our society because those who believe in it are justified in not wanting to follow the secular path of disillusionment that exists due to our renouncement of religious belief. That generation upon generation of humans have seen (for centuries) the very real hurt, pain, and evil that exists in the world (throughout the history of the world), and that is the main reason religion will never die...people need their faith just to get through their daily lives, and have a very difficult time understanding why/how the elites of the secular world would want them to get rid of it. Lasch argues that secular elites do not own a monopoly on the doubting of faith. For him the difference between those who hang tight to religion despite all of the evil in the world, as opposed to the secular, who renounce religion as a result of it, is that the former have made their peace with it, while the latter have not. While those with a religious perspective will maintain faith in God despite the horrors that they know exist, they do so, not only as way to keep on keep'in on (as Bob might say and is completely valid) but because the alternative is a disillusionment of the world and life that dominates the thought process of the non-believers who refuse to make peace with it, and, in turn, with themselves...

This is compelling stuff folks...and we all need to look at ourselves and think about how much faith we might need in our lives, and if we recognize it, and accept it, it might just be a way of bringing more meaning into our lives, into society,into our world, while serving as a bridge to the other side of the political spectrum, who, we all decided long ago, there was just no talking to.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 2 out of 5]

I definitely need to read less "criticism," although I picked this out mainly because it was cited a lot on the right in the 1990s as part of their argument that the elite of society was replacing an egalitarian culture with a cult of merit and social mobility. You might as well read Bloom or even Brooks' more entertaining Bobos in Paradise to get the same critique of cosmopolitan elites. I found the book to be totally disjoined, as once you get through the first couple of chapters there's not really a connecting thread. Many of the chapters are just critiques of pretty obscure theorists or psychiatrists, and I found myself just kind of flipping through these. This book is mainly a series of catastrophizing, over-intellectualized complaints (critique would imply sustained and organized argument) that reminds me of the bad parts of Bloom without any of the more interesting parts.

To be fair, though, I should spell out what the Revolt of the Elites means. Lasch believes that by the early 1990s the American technocratic, economic, and intellectual elite had become A. so cosmopolitan that they lost any tether to American national life or identity B. incredibly condescending to the lifestyles of ordinary Americans and C. no longer committed to any egalitarian ethos, as they might have been in the New Deal, but only to an ethos of social mobility. The last point means that the elite thought that as long as there were meritocratic ladders that reached down into the lower levels of society to enable the talented tenth, to borrow a phrase, to vault into the upper echelons, society was fair. I tend to agree with this devolution of liberalism narrative, as the working class solidarity that was once present in New Deal and Great Society liberalism has been abandoned by both left-wing identity politics and neoliberalism.

Of course, Lasch hits you with a lot of the big culture war talking points of the 1990s, none of which are terribly original: PC, multiculturalism, hypersensitivity, etc. He doesn't really bother offering a sustained critique of these ideas, like Jonathan Rauch's; he just complains. The big picture for Lasch is that the elite of American society had separated itself spatially, culturally, and intellectually from the masses; this is their revolt. Of course, as a historian I have to wonder when exactly the elite weren't in some kind of "Revolt" in this sense from the rest of society.

I kind of wish I had passed on this one. There's a lot of fancy talk and intellectual showing-off, but just not a lot of there there. I also just can't stand disorganized books that don't bother to link the chapters thematically or chronologically. So I can strongly dis-recommend this one.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is amazingly prophetic and a great analysis of the world as it is today, but was written in the early 1990s. Essentially, the argument is the same as Charles Murray and many others have made -- assortative mating, changes in economics and ideals, etc. have split the "elites" (basically, professionals and anyone involved in information work or "scalable work") from everyone else, and has only gotten more obviously true post-2000 and post-2008.

The book is split into 3 parts. First is the (almost obvious, today) argument about the elite/common split. Second is about historical academia and almost Marxist or at least socialist issues. Lots of arguments against academia, arguments against Diversity/etc. as racism of low expectations, and that it essentially reinforces the rich vs. poor, etc. Third continues this but primarily from a political and academic basis.

It's interesting that these arguments were made very well and yet everything still happened and seemed to be a surprise to everyone as they happened. Oh well.

This would have been 5/5 if split into 3 parts -- the then getting rid of everything but the beginning. The weird academic arguments against academia got tedious and seemed to not really ultimately be about anything meaningful, unlike the simple argument of the schism in society.

Part of the reason the book is a bit jumbled together of various parts is that it was published posthumously and probably consisted of a range of stuff which otherwise would have been in separate books.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christopher Lasch died before this, his last book, was published, twenty-six years ago. Lasch was a man out of time, a refugee leftist who nonetheless refused to embrace what passed for conservatism in the post-Communist false dawn, the main feature of which was idolatry of the invisible hand. No surprise, his message was rejected by its intended audience, America’s intellectual class. Now, however, every one of the problems with our society he identified has grown monstrous, far beyond the power of any dragonslayer to kill. Thus, this book is, at least now, less prescription and more an intellectual history of how we failed as a nation.

Many on the modern Right (and some on the Left) think this book is important; it’s often mentioned, at least, which is why I read it. But I don’t think it is actually an important book. Most of what Lasch discusses here had been discussed for quite some time on the Right. His clever use of José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses as a parallel is muddled, rather than insightful, even if it probably has caused the book to be remembered more than it would be otherwise. Those on the Right who today discuss this book, as in a recent exchange between Nathan Pinkoski and Rod Dreher (in which Pinkoski is the more insightful, and accurately, if delicately, diagnoses Dreher’s usual inability to follow his own premises to their inevitable conclusions), aren’t really discussing Lasch’s book. Rather, for them, his book is a ghostly talisman, proof that the descending arc of America is, in fact, descending.

Moreover, The Revolt of the Elites feels cobbled together. No doubt Lasch’s impending death, to which he glancingly refers in his Acknowledgements, contributed to this feel. Several of the chapters are reprints of stand-alone articles that had already appeared, and are only obliquely related to the putative main theme of the book. One chapter, for example, attacks the early nineteenth-century educational ideologue Horace Mann, which, while it is interesting enough, doesn’t really say anything about today. The reader’s main emotion upon completing the book is therefore not a feeling of integrated insight, but simply sadness for a time when an author, and his then-readers, could optimistically believe the monsters could be kept shut in their cave, if we only worked hard enough. I have not read some of Lasch’s other well-regarded works, such as The Culture of Narcissism or The True and Only Heaven, but those are probably more unified in theme; they are longer, at least, and seem more focused. I’d start with those if you want to explore Lasch.

But I read this book, and here we are today, so let’s make the best of it. We can get something out of it that we can use for the future. For Lasch, democracy meant not so much majority rule as it meant a society that enabled all to fully participate. The “betrayal of democracy” about which he was concerned has many elements, none of them directly connected to electoral politics, but all dictated by our ruling class. The strongest chapter is the first, one of only two new writings done for this book, also titled “The Revolt of the Elites.”

That title, of course, is a direct response to Ortega’s famous book, now nearly a hundred years old, which I have earlier analyzed at some length. Contrary to what is often assumed, Ortega was not making a point about economic or social class. His “mass men” were those, of any socioeconomic level, who refused to acknowledge, seek, and demand excellence, instead exalting mediocrity. Such mass men were, in his eyes, increasingly coming to dominate the upper reaches of society, and crowding out the elites, those who sought and insisted upon excellence and whose actions revolved around duty and obligation. (Among the worst of mass men, for Ortega, were so-called experts who thought a narrow expertise in one area qualified them to be leaders of society; during the Wuhan Plague, his excoriation of such mass men has proved particularly prescient.)

In Ortega’s time, the 1930s, though they had lost ground, the elites were still mostly in charge, but the mass man was gaining fast. Lasch’s claim is that by 1995, as Ortega had feared, the mass man had captured the elite stratum of society. But I think Lasch, unlike Ortega, introduces concepts of class into the idea of the mass man, conflating socioeconomic class with elite status, essentially identifying the elites as what would later come to be called the “professional-managerial elite.” Despite beginning with Ortega, Lasch spends little time on excellence in the sense Ortega used it, and much more on the political divisions and stupidities the new elite has introduced to America. As a result, the attempted parallel ends up more confusing than enlightening to the informed reader.

Lasch, accurately enough, attacks a long list of elite-dictated corrosions of American society. The control of wealth by an ever-smaller slice of Americans. The decline of real wages among the non-elite. Women being driven into the labor force and the consequent deleterious effects on family and children. Assortative mating and geographic sorting by class, both causes of the erosion of organic community. The elite turn to a globalized culture, with concomitant contempt for the average American. Credentialism and putative meritocracy, with the resulting pushing-down of anyone not able to seize a rung of the ladder, the destruction of any feeling of obligation, and again the erosion of organic community. The arrogance of the elites, the opposite of aristocratic pride with a corresponding sense of duty. Every single one of these problems has become dramatically worse since 1995; nothing has been done, or for that matter attempted, to reverse any of these problems, or their social consequences—which for Lasch are, most of all, the erosion of citizen participation in the life of the nation.

Narrowing his first chapter, the second chapter examines social mobility through this prism of elite corrosion. Both Right and Left have seen social mobility for decades as desirable, but Lasch shows how it is misunderstood, with deleterious consequences for democracy. He offers a sociological and historical examination of the concept in American life, with the goal of showing that social mobility is a relatively recent focus of our ruling classes. Until quite recently, in fact, the American ideal was not rising up through the class structure, but succeeding within one’s own community and frame. Most of all, this meant becoming a proprietor, rather than a wage laborer—not someone who had an independent living, but someone who combined a small amount of capital with his labor, and who, in the American conception of democracy, had the opportunity “to mingle on an equal footing with persons from all realms of life, to gain access to larger currents of opinion, and to exercise the rights and duties of citizenship.” This was the American conception, proudly distinct from what Americans saw as the limited and segregated European way of political and community life. Class as dictated by monetary resources was less important than this form of opportunity and participation, and this conception largely prevented elite contempt for the population at large. The ideal was the classless society—to be sure, an ideal that would never be reached, but an aspiration for all Americans.

According to Lasch, education of the populace is crucial to such wide social participation—but not the type of education on offer today, initiated by the Progressives at the turn of the twentieth century, designed to offer social mobility in its new, modern sense. Those able to benefit from the new programmatic education did not form a classless society—quite the opposite, since social mobility allowing entrance to the elite actually reinforces the presence and dominance of that elite, rather than eroding social distinctions. This has made our society “highly stratified and highly mobile,” in the words of Wendell Berry that Lasch quotes. “[T]he concentration of corporate power, the decline of small-scale production, the separation of production from consumption, the growth of the welfare state, the professionalization of knowledge, and the erosion of competence, responsibility, and citizenship have made the United States into a society in which class divisions run far more deeply than they did in the past.” For Lasch, “the most important choice a society has to make” is “whether to raise the general level of competence, energy, and devotion—‘virtue,’ as it was called in an older political tradition—or merely to promote a broader recruitment of elites.” Of course, in the twenty-first century virtue is in very short supply among all segments of American society—but I think there is far more virtue outside the elites than inside the elites, and it should be possible to cultivate it, such that it thrives, once our current elites are entirely removed and replaced with a new elite that assists all levels of society.

If democracy, in Lasch’s sense, is no longer really democracy, does it deserve to survive? Lasch asks this question directly in another chapter, and offers an ambiguous answer. He seems to say that if certain trends continue, democracy does not deserve to survive. Unfortunately for us, those trends are precisely those that have exploded to nightmarish proportions since 1995—the cult of the victim; the belief that hewing to the standards of supposedly privileged groups is a sign of oppression (“a recipe for universal incompetence”); widespread inefficiency and corruption; widening inequality; and “the deterioration of our country’s material infrastructure.” “Formally democratic institutions do not guarantee a workable social order.” A misplaced compassion (which I identify with, though Lasch does not, excessive feminization) pervades social relations, destroying the quest for excellence through the creation of double standards, which are “a recipe for second-class citizenship.” Despite the claims of some that institutions make a democracy work, Lasch says it is actually civic virtue that makes a democracy work—and we’ve been living off civic virtue borrowed from the past. Instead of civic virtue, we get demands for tolerance coupled with a rejection of universal standards, and we get demands for unearned respect of every person, no matter how meager his accomplishments or how great his failings. Once again, all these things have gotten far worse, along the same axes identified by Lasch.

While Lasch’s attacks on the elites in this first part of the book get the most attention, and they are certainly deserved, those attacks are much less important than his affirmative prescriptions for the right kind of society, which occupy the second part of the book. Not because those prescriptions will have any effect on our elites, who are a lost cause, and probably were even in 1995. Rather, because they can inform our new elite, after we wipe clean the slate. Lasch offers thoughts that revolve around, more or less, communitarianism and discourse.

By communitarianism, he does not mean the fake, astroturfed communitarianism of cretins such as David Brooks. Rather, he means the actual reestablishment of lost community. And by discourse, he means how members of society communicate among themselves as a whole society. “Civic life requires settings in which people meet as equals.” Much of what Lasch says has a resonance with the work of Chris Arnade, who in particular focuses on informal meeting places as does Lasch. Where neighborhood social intercourse disappears, and where those who control the levers of financial power of a town no longer live in or have any other connection to the town (as happened to, for one of many examples, Lancaster, Ohio, as chronicled in Glass House), civil society necessarily fractures, completely aside from what the elites of the larger nation may be doing, or not doing. Robust discourse, with its formation of networks, further helps democracy in that it pushes back against the idea that information flow and government action should be reserved to experts. It also helps bridge racial gaps, and in general, binds a society’s divisions. I note that one of the many heinous problems unnecessarily imposed on us by the hyper-feminized reaction to the Wuhan Plague is the destruction of nearly all face-to-face discourse; Lasch would be appalled.

He would also be appalled by how American “conservatives” prostituted themselves to corporate and business interests over the past quarter century. Among the many idols of our elites that Lasch identifies as harmful to community, the divinization of the market is probably the one on which he focuses most, at least as it relates to normal men and women. (Identity politics and similar abominations receive much of his focus as well, but there the focus is the effects on the elites.) His analysis has much in common with Robert Nisbet, Jane Jacobs, and Wilhelm Röpke; he specifically adduces Jacobs. The overly-exalted market corrodes social cohesion, which results in the state inserting itself more and more into private lives and communities, weakening social trust, responsibility, and civic virtue. Lasch did not foresee the parallel idolatry of explosive consumerism, where cheap tat from China has become a substitute for community, a salve for the meaningless and empty lives of most Americans, but he would not be surprised, nor that the combination of the internet and an unwillingness to muzzle the market has exacerbated many of the problems he did identify, in particular increasing the power of those who rule the market.

The Revolt of the Elites was spat on by the elites when it came out; just read the review given to it by the New York Times. A prophet, and less a Jeremiah, and even less an ideological traitor, is never honored among his own. And Lasch pulled no punches in his attacks on precisely the type of person who wrote for the NYT, so they returned the favor. No matter, now; Lasch was proved right, but his enemies won the war.

Lasch asks, at one point, “How much longer can the spirit of free inquiry and open debate survive under these conditions?” Fifteen years, give or take, was the answer; by 2010 free inquiry and debate had taken their first major hits (going beyond the decades-long control by the Left of the major media), and now, with the massive and ever-more-aggressive iron clampdown by the Lords of Tech, we are seeing that the American future will be one of samizdat, just as in the Soviet Union—although, fortunately, of more efficient samizdat, enabled to circulate far faster due to technological aids that help route around censorship. (This week Amazon announced it intends to hugely increase censorship on its Amazon Web Services platform, which powers forty percent of the internet, and whose censorship was a key element of destroying Parler when that service threated the narrative hegemony of the Left.) No matter. We’re going to win the future, because we’re going to win the next war, and while this book may not be crucial in forming the future (I’d point to books like Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue for that), Lasch did what he could to help point the way, for which he should be honored.

[Bakunin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title of this book is a reference to Ortega y Gassets famous book "the revolt of the masses". For those of you who haven't read it Gassets thesis was that the 20th century represented a massive rise of the masses of people which resulted in a major cultural change. There were no longer any lofty ideals to be held sacred; instead technology was to serve the common man and help him enjoy the fruits of past generations labor. Laschs contribution is to take this a step further: today the elite has no allegiance to any historical past (such as tradition, loyalty to country etc) and has instead become global. This global political and economic elite cares little about the common man and is instead completely busy pursuing its own self-interest.

I was thinking of political clans like the Clinton or Bush family when I started reading it. Many of the things stated in this book are quite timely. I did find that Lasch got too much into the nitty-gritty details of secondary literature related to (among other things) the state of education in 19th century america and its effects on the minds of today. It would also seem that Laschs definition av democracy is romantic and entails some communal ideal which is all but forgotten today. I am quite annoyed with authors who carelessly use verbicide in order to get their point across.

Another thing which annoyed me was that it always seemed like Lasch was writing a longer editorial on the subject, rather than trying to be more scientific. He is undoubtedly unto something I am just not sure how right he is. Recommended reading for those who have a keen interest in 20th century America.

[Taylor Pearson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Revolt of the Elites, Lasch argues that the degeneration of Western Democracy has been caused by the abandonment by the wealthy and educated elites of their responsibilities to support culture, education, the building of public facilities, and other obligations in these societies.

A large part of this was the shift from wealth always being tied to the land (agricultural) to increasingly being more mobile. When all your wealth is in a physical place, you are incentivized to make sure that the society around that place is at least functional.

The middle class benefited from the nation-state because the nation state-enforced laws equally and provided a common market that let tradesmen flourish in a way that feudal society did not. This made the middle class jingoistic but their loyalty was communitarian because their wealth was rooted in a place.

Lasch argues that America was not unique because anyone could rise to the top, but, because regardless of your socio-economic class, you were an active participant in democracy. As an ideal, democracy treats people as intelligent adults and they rise to that.

Lasch goes on to trace his version of the major shifts in American culture and political life through the lens of religion, bards

This book was published in the 90's and does read pretty presciently today. Lasch's conclusions are far-reaching and he overstretched at some points. But, I think he is directionally correct, at least in so far as he sees that social, cultural, political and economic decisions are all tightly interlinked. Decisions which improve economic efficiency but at great political and cultural costs, can be net negatives (and vice versa).

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Lasch is one of those public intellectuals (a bit like Christopher Hitchens) who radically changed direction in his political leanings throughout his life; once an avowed Marxist he then became a somewhat curmudgeonly critic of the left from within the left whose thought evolved further into being a man who mostly identified with cultural conservatives but who eschewed their laissez-faire economics. A fierce critic of American capitalism, he saw the decline of American society within both cultural leftism and the New Left and the neoliberal economic policies espoused by the Republican (and to some extent Democratic) Party of the time. Like a much more conservative version of Paul Goodman (himself a member of the New Left) he also offered trenchant criticism of the takeover of many if not most of our governmental institutions and public schooling by an elite upper crust of technocrats, bureaucrats, and Wall St. journeymen, all bastardized and in service of a bloated military-industrial complex.

That all of this has gotten so much worse and has culminated in a criminal grifter like Donald Trump in the White House is something Lasch basically predicted in this book; that we see the Clintons still running the Democratic Party is another piece of the endgame he deftly foretold.

Well worth a read and prescient.

[Anchit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read 3 chapters and then skimmed through. Eventually I had to drop it.

This book suffers from having a bunch of beliefs and opinions with no facts to support it or examples to bring out the context of the opinion. "A time came when the elites were disconnected from the people" - when? who were these elites? who were these ordinary people? AFAIK this has been happening since the age of kings and queens. It doesn't sound like something new. So the first thing that you would have in mind is to get more details of the events around his opinion, but that is not provided.

As the chapters progress, this lack of examples (there is not a single example!) and the lack of context makes it a waste of time.

+1 star because in the beginning he mentions that democracy was born in Rome, when the common man was involved in the senate.

[Gaylord Dold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lasch, Christopher, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

demagogue, n. 1. a person who tries to stir up the people by appeals to emotion, prejudice, etc. in order to become a leader and achieve selfish ends. 2. in ancient history, a leader of the common people.
(Webster’s New World Dictionary, Cleveland and New York, 1959)

What comes from expecting the worst out of politics is that when, on occasion, something worse than the worst happens, the blow falls lightly. Following the heady and noble days of the civil rights movement of the early 60s, the ascendency of the shadowy paranoid and bandbox criminal Richard Nixon to the Presidency was just such an event, with Lyndon Johnson and his war the “worst” out of politics, and Nixon something worse yet. Not a single American was surprised that a besieged Nixon assembled an enemy list, secretly taped his Oval Office conversations (capturing for posterity his rabidly anti-Semitic rants, framed here and there by bourbon-fueled sentiment), funded with cash a massive cover-up of the Watergate affair, and engaged in wildly pathetic self-pity. Having crashed through the stop sign of the worst in American politics, most of us enjoyed the subsequent circus as a cruel necessity. Those days during which the worst was a bungled burglary and got worse only because a paranoid inhabited the White House now seem halcyon indeed. Endless war, now described by our Nationalist fringe as a multi-generational war against “Islamic Terrorism”, social and economic inequality that exceeds Depression era levels, a twenty-four hour news cycle dominated by talking heads, pundits and fake news scams, along with political gridlock and Billionaires who fund outrageous attack ads—coupled with a permanently disengaged, partially employed, and failing underclass, has led to inchoate anger that only recently congealed on the Orange Head of one Donald J. Trump, Reality TV Star, borderline sociopath, narcissist, tax-dodge, habitual liar, bully and all-around dope. His election (in the “Electoral College” at least) has brought up the question again of what happens when the worst is followed by something worse. The worst would have been Hillary Clinton in the White House; something worse was The Donald himself in the White House. A number of our fellow citizens were outraged and vented in public. Others, mostly minorities, held seminars and planned the Underground Resistance. I decided to find out why it happened, and how. This turned out to be not so hard.


In books like “The Agony of the American Left” (1969) and “The Culture of Narcissism” (1979), political and cultural critic Christopher Lasch established himself as a major interpreter of the “post New Deal” American project. In 1995, when Bill Clinton had been in the White House a few years, Lasch wrote a book that brilliantly and convincingly analyzed the American democratic malaise; a malaise characterized by a citizenry “much more sanguine about the future than they used to be.” Alarmed by the decline of manufacturing and the loss of jobs; the shrinkage of the middle class; the growing number of poor and homeless; the decay of cities and the flourishing traffic in drugs, most Americans saw fierce ideological battles being fought in state-houses and in Congress over peripheral issues. It was the central premise of Lasch’s new book “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” that a growing Elite had lost touch with the people and that the unreal and artificial character of American politics reflected their insulation from the common life, plus a conviction that “the real problems are insoluble.”

Of course, Lasch observed, there had always been a privileged class in America. However, in the nineteenth-century, wealthy families were usually settled in one locale over several generations. Old families recognized responsibility to their city and region, endowing libraries and museums, parks, orchestras, universities, hospitals and other civic amenities. These days, Lasch argued, the mobility of capital and the emergence of finance and global markets tended to produce a new rootless elite, bonded only to their common “heritage” of elite universities, elite jobs, and elite bank accounts. Ambitious people understand that “a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead.” Further adumbrating his basic premise, Lasch wrote, “The new elites are in revolt against “Middle America,” as they imagine it; a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middle-brow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy. Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture.” Lasch further observed that “multiculturalism” suited this new elite to a T, conjuring up as it did exotic cuisines, exotic styles and exotic tribal customs with no questions asked and no commitments required. They were at home “only in transit” to a high-level conference, a business meeting, an international film festival, or to an undiscovered resort. Lasch concluded, “Theirs is essentially a tourist’s view of the world—not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy.” The then-current catchwords were not democracy but “self-esteem”, not equality but “diversity, compassion, and empowerment”, locutions that express the hope that the deep divisions in American society can be bridged by “goodwill and sanitized speech.”

To those in the nineteenth-century who gave it any thought, democracy worked best when it rested on a broad distribution of property. An extreme of wealth, set against an extreme of poverty, would give rise to the “mob”, defined as a degraded laboring class, “at once servile and resentful” (in the eyes of the wealthy), lacking the “qualities of mind and character essential to democratic citizenship.” It was important, then, to ensure that self-reliance, responsibility, and initiative, rested in a wide group of citizens whose “competence” resided in the ability to practice a craft and manage a quantum of property. Widely distributed prosperity ensured a smoothly functioning democratic entity. Put another way, democracy works best when people depend mostly upon themselves, their friends and neighbors, functioning as a community. Lasch, citing the rise of segregated (by profession, income and wealth) suburbs, the hollowing out of craft jobs, dwindling public services and disappearing civic amenities, argued that the widening gap between elites who resided in suburbs or rapidly expanding “urban corridors” spelled the end of democracy and the collapse of “civic life.” Lasch concludes, “In our time, however, the democratization of abundance—the expectation that each generation would enjoy a standard of living beyond the reach of its predecessors—has given way to a reversal in which age-old inequalities are beginning to reestablish themselves, sometimes at a frightening rate, sometimes so gradually as to escape notice.”

This changing class structure is taking place all over the “industrialized, democratic” world. In America, people in the upper 20% of the income structure “now control half the country’s wealth”—a figure that has become worse since Lasch wrote those words in 1995. The Walton Family from Arkansas owns more wealth than the bottom 40% of American families taken together. Lasch pointed to a growing “contingent labor force” (part-timers, contract laborers, seasonal workers, undocumented workers), the reduction of jobs covered by pension plans and health insurance, the devaluing of a college education (both by tuition inflation and by unemployment), as well as the inelegant pattern known as “assertive mating” (where wealthy men and women marry each other), as accelerating factors in the de-classing of workers and artisans. It isn’t hard to see why “feminism” appeals to elites, providing as it does the indispensible basis for their “prosperous, glamorous, gaudy, sometimes indecent lavish way of life.”

This new class, tentatively defined as “symbolic analysts” by Robert Reich (then Secretary of Labor for Clinton), consisted of professional and managerial elites, groups whose identity rested not so much on property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise. “Their investment in education and information, as opposed to property, distinguishes them from the rich bourgeoisie, the ascendancy of which characterized an earlier stage of capitalism, and form the old proprietary class—the middle class in the strict sense of the term—that once made up the bulk of the population.” Twenty years ago, at the dawn of the internet, such elites comprised professional brokers, bankers, real estate developers and promoters, engineers, consultants of all kinds, system analysts, scientists, doctors, publicists, publishers, advertising executives, lawyers, entertainers, journalists, television producers and directors, artists, writers, and university professors. The class had always included financiers on Wall Street. Educated at “elite private schools” and “high quality suburban schools”, they enjoy every advantage their doting parents can provide. They get advanced degrees in a cosmopolitan atmosphere. They are “skeptical, curious and creative” (these days, Richard Florida has defined them as the “creative class”), brainworkers who produce “insights” in a variety of fields from marketing to finance and arts and entertainment. They exhibit a “capacity to collaborate” and to “discern larger causes, consequences and relationships.” Since their ability relies on “networking”, they tend to settle in “specialized geographical pockets” populated by people like them. These privileged communities—Cambridge, Silicon Valley and Hollywood (to which now can be added dozens of other “innovation sites” denominated “tech corridors”) represent the epitome of intellectual achievement and attract their own mob of satellite workers, the “in person servers” like voice coaches, yoga instructors, fencing trainers and dancing instructors, among many others. These specialized geographical pockets don’t resemble traditional communities at all. Populated by transients, the pockets and elites who live in them lack continuity.

Here, it is important to note what Lasch calls a “jaundiced observation”, “that the circles of power—finance, government, art, entertainment—overlap and become increasingly interchangeable.” Back then (was it so long ago now?) Robert Reich turned to Hollywood as a compelling example of the “wondrously resilient” kind of community in which there is a concentration of creative types. In Lasch’s words, “Washington becomes a parody of Tinseltown; executives take to the air waves, creating overnight the semblance of political movements; movie stars become political pundits, even presidents; reality and the simulation of reality become more and more difficult to distinguish. Ross Perot launches his presidential campaign from the “Larry King Show.” Hollywood stars take a prominent part in the Clinton campaign and flock to Clinton’s inaugural, investing it with the glamour of a Hollywood opening. TV anchors and interviewers become celebrities; celebrities in the world of entertainment take on the role of social critics.” Reich, an apostate now, back then worshipped the new world of “abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration” and was incongruously made Secretary of Labor, the one category of employment—“routine production” that had no future at all.

Concomitant with the rise of these new professional elites (and very current among financiers) was the theology of Meritocracy. Under Ortega y Gasset’s formulation, mass culture combined “radical ingratitude” with an unquestioned belief in possibility. Owing no debt to the past, mass man was “heir to all the ages” and blissfully unaware of his debt to others. These habits of mind now infest the professional elites who attribute their own rise in the world only to the intrinsic structure of the meritocracy itself. In the nineteenth-century it was thought that “opportunities to rise” were important enough in themselves, but that “dignity and culture” are needed by all “whether they rise or not.” Modern professional elites feed themselves a diet of illusion that their rise rests solely on their own merits. It allows them to “exercise power irresponsibly precisely because they recognize so few obligations to their predecessors or to the communities they profess to lead.” Seeing common schools as sentimental, elites now focus on “self-esteem”. Members of the Labour Party in Britain, who can, send their children to private schools.
Thus, the “aristocracy of talent” (beloved of elites) only appears to distinguish democracies from societies based on hereditary privilege. “The talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues.” Their children attend expensive private schools. They insure themselves against medical emergencies and hire private security guards, and see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. In their gated enclaves, they seem indifferent to national decline. Nationality, when global capitalism holds sway, no longer seems interesting. The movement of money across borders renders the “whole idea of place” fluid. Even back then Robert Reich recognized the “darker side of cosmopolitanism”, reminding us that people have little inclination to make sacrifices or to accept responsibility for others because “we share a common history or culture.”
These folks gladly pay for private and suburban schools, private police, private systems of garbage collection; but they have relieved themselves of the obligation to contribute to the national treasury.

For Lasch, “the world of the late twentieth century presents a curious spectacle.” United now, capital and labor flow freely across borders through the agency of markets. Everywhere the middle class is in decline; but at no time have there been more ethnic, religious and national wars (this was twenty years ago!). It turns out that the fate of nation states was bound up with the fate of the middle classes, whose outlook was always more nationalistic, jingoistic and militarist than elites of any sort. Yet despite its unattractive features, middle class nationalism contributed to the national sense of place and to respect for historical continuity. In sum, Lasch writes, “Whatever its faults, middle-class nationalism provided a common ground, common standards, a common frame of reference without which society dissolves into nothing more than contending factions, as the Founding Fathers understood so well—a war of all against all.”

[John Gurney]

Christopher Lasch was a 1960s Marxist whose views evolved, but not in the typical Left-to-Right way. He retained his criticism of the amoral market, seeing business leaders and highly-compensated professionals as "elites" who are like "tourists" in their own country, walling themselves off in exclusive subdivisions with private schools and the like. Lasch doesn't respect elites worshipping their economic prerogatives, whether luxury goods or experiences. But Lasch moved toward social conservatism, seeing traditional families as essential. Thus, he opposed economic elites as well as Leftwing social elites, especially in academia. All these elites are unconcerned with the average American and game democracy for their benefit. Although this book was written in 1994, Lasch sees (and dislikes) the rise of meaningless worship of celebrity and some of his statements anticipated the rise of celebrity politicians like Donald Trump.

I don't personally agree with many Lasch positions, which sum up to a sort of anti-libertarian social conservatism, but this is a good read. For being nearly three decades old, it is surprisingly timely.

[Schroeder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lasch discusses the malaise of the modern world and the decline of American democracy. His analysis touches upon many symptoms of this malaise, and root causes ranging from the material to the spiritual.

The most striking aspect of this book was the relevance it held even now 30 years after being published. The battlelines of the culture war are largely the same, despite some buzzwords falling in and out of vogue.

[Marcas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant late book by Christopher Lasch, building on his Magnum Opus 'True and only Heaven'. With this, we see there was an evident deepening in his understanding of U.S culture.

Furthermore, Lasch's lucidity as a writer improved over his lifetime- 'True and only Heaven..' and this work together, showing greater style alongside greater depth, readability and sharpened personalistic criticism than earlier work- ''Haven in a Heartless World..' for example.
(* on Personalism, see Nikolai Berdyaev)

His story is one of a remarkable confluence of personal and scholarly integrity and it is implicitly present in his work.
That his work is written in clear style, familiar language and open to anyone willing to make the effort testifies to my point.

In this work from his twilight years, he takes on the 'elites' with a Prophetic claim for Truth and Justice, over and against 'progress', the'therepeutic' and other 'modern' ills. (Pun intended).
...those, who by virtue of their many (unchallenged) superficial and superficially diverse progressive assumptions, spread the disease of our times. (think 'Ideas have Consequences')

God rest him.

[György · Rating 2 out of 5]

"If Rieff is correct in his contention that culture rests on willingness to forbid, a “remissive” culture like our own cannot be expected to survive indefinitely. Sooner or later our remissive elites will have to rediscover the principle of limitation."

I'm distracted. My impression is that really there is no truth, but just different points of views.
A long kaleidoscope, many books lined up to support, to prove or disprove. Somehow I felt that there is a lack of willingness to define, to postulate. The truth is, when ride on social sciences, people must feel the tendency toward social order. At least I do.
One I've learned and thanks for that: There is no bigger danger for a society, but when enlightened politics is losing connection with society and reality...and we must wait next elections to jail them.

Two stars! I didn't enjoyed it.

[Rudyard L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I’ve ever read on the world today

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 2 out of 5]

Detta är ett debattinlägg, inte en bok. Den som väntar sig att komma härifrån med nya insikter kommer bara göra det, om de är främmande för västvärldens intellektuella tradition i dess originalformer, innan isolerade professorer har klippt sönder dem till textböcker.

Det är ett debattinlägg som försöker övertyga mig om att USA och den egalitära kulturen generellt inte är dömd - såsom den väl förtjänar. Argumentet bygger på en intressant tanke - att kulturens förtroende vilar på exkluderandet (förbudet) av beteenden som ses som för avvikande - och att den egalitära kulturkonstruktionen, såsom den framträdde efter första världskriget, och såsom den blommat ut i bildningsfientlighetens och sanningsföraktets moderna USA, inte kan överleva länge. Så långt gott och väl.

Det jag ser som svårsmält är att dess diskussion om intellektuell frihet, och om den klasslösa förmågan att våga tänka görs till en effekt av ett visst system. Visst - i så motto att ett intellektuellt förtryck - ett förnekande av utrymme för brutal sanning, när den är välgrundad, och ett straffande av fiendens retorik istället för deras argument är tecken på en dekadens och en döende kultur; men längre än så går det inte att dra det utan att tappa kontrollen över argumentet. Författaren vill få det till att bara respekt för personskapet kan tillåta samvetsfrihet och små gemenskaper, snarare än att se att det som krävs är förtroende för det egna värdet (och erkännandet av andras).

De argument mot etatism och storskalighet som författaren ställer upp är bara delvis formulerade. De är sociologiskt intressanta, men stannar innan de når den institutionella konkurrens, som var typisk för den intellektuella barndomsrenhet som författaren försöker hitta tillbaka till. Det gör att författarens strävan efter en demokratisk heroism blir omöjlig. Denna bok är därför inte ens i samma liga som Talebs formuleringar av samma sak.

Det är självklart att antiintellektualism och moralisk flathet kommer att självdö. Det är också självklart att Rorty:s ideal inte kommer att tilltala någon, och därför dö i brist på de gemensamma värderingar som möjliggör det. Denna författare ger inga alternativ över huvud taget till vad som vore bättre, och det gör att en läsare kommer att lockas till Guénon snarare än till CS Lewis, de Vitoria eller Popper.

[Jonathan Sargent · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like a collection of essays than an actual book. Unfortunately loses steam with a few chapters, but the rest are gold.

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always found Christopher Lasch to be an interesting writer. I first encountered him in the late 1970s when I was completing a summer institute at Harvard and his book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. This book was written soon before he died in the middle-1990s. It really has two messages. Lasch compares the work of Ortega y Gasset (who I liked a lot as an undergraduate - in books like the Revolt of the Masses) with a new situation which began when the elites began to conscientiously separate themselves from the rest of us in a series of sorting mechanism - some intentional and some not. The most important changes came about because social institutions like schools began to become sorting mechanisms. Those places where Americans used to get to see each other became increasingly less prominent. So for example in earlier times a doctor might well marry someone outside his class - while today doctors or lawyers marry other doctors or lawyers. Other institutions that forced classes to interact have also declined. Gasset talked about "radical ingratitude" (being unable or unwilling to acknowledge contributions of generations past), which in my mind sums up a lot of what is wrong with today's symbolic manipulators. Lasch concludes that economic inequality is less of a problem than social inequality - if people cannot get into the private realm of the elites then their options are severely limited.

The book also has an analysis of the development of alternatives to religious practice which many of today's elites live by. He presents a lot of evidence that the efforts by groups as diverse as the critical theorists to large bodies of the therapeutic community to environmentalists. All substitute religious practice/dogma for their own brand. Lasch argues that the hostility to organized religion from people as wide as Oscar Wilde to Sigmund Freud misconstrues the way that religious people think about the world - there is plenty of room for individual interpretations and doubt to enter into a person's religious practice. (often there is not as much for people who have adopted some of the alternatives approaches to answering questions facing all individuals ultimately about the meaning and purpose of life).

What intrigued me about the book was two things. It is amazing to me how current this book, written more than a quarter of a century ago, is to today's discussions about social organization. At the same time his understandings of the "moral hazards" of elites (what Robert Reich celebrated as "symbolic manipulators") are even more relevant in today's world.

[Ian S]

"Today it is the elites, however--those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate--that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West."

"These groups constitute a new class only in the sense that their livelihoods rest not so much on the ownership of property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise. Their investment in education and information, as opposed to property, distinguishes them from the rich bourgeoisie, the ascendancy of which characterized an earlier stage of capitalism, and from the old proprietary class that once made up the bulk of the population."

"Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts. Even the concept of a republic of letters, which might be expected to appeal to elites with such a large stake in higher education, is almost entirely absent from their frame of reference. Meritocratic elites find it difficult to imagine a community, even a community of the intellect, that reaches into both the past and future and its constituted by an awareness of intergenerational obligation."

"...meritocracy has the effect of making elites more secure than ever in their privileges (which can now be seen as the appropriate reward of diligence and brainpower) while nullifying working-class opposition."

[Andrew Figueiredo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a MUST-READ for those looking to ascertain why populism is on the rise in liberal democracies. Lasch's collection of essays varies in topics but hits a number of prescient and strong critiques of liberalism and postmodernism. I don't agree with everything he prescribes, but there are certain essays that really resonated with me--The Democratic Malaise, The Revolt of the Elites, Does Democracy Deserve to Survive, Racial Politics in New York, Conversation and the Civic Arts, and Academic Pseudo-Radicalism. Some of the essays towards the end did get a little dense for people like me who don't have any background in philosophy/critical theory, so I understood some essays more than others.

Lasch brilliantly picks apart the issues plaguing modern democracy. His emphasis on community is sorely lacking from contemporary political discussions and his critiques of individualism ring truer than ever today. I might actually buy a copy of this book (checked it out of the library) just because there's so much in it I find crucial.

[Marley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I revisited Revolt of the Elites,after more than 10 years and find it more compelling than before. At the same time I'm not sure that his analys is as accurate that it was then. 911 changed everything. Lasch, dissects the rise and takeover of the technological and managerial classes with their lack of roots. geography,and context,but didn't foresee the post 911 proto fascist Amerika. Or maybe he did. Whatever, I think he'be depressed at our current culture of totalitarian ass kissing and liberal state worshipping. Of special interest to me were Lasch's discussions on the tension between Communtarianism and Populism, Conversation and the Civic Arts, The Lost Art of Argument, and Academic Pseudo-Radicalism. Loved the last, in fact.

[Dylan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars because Lasch is able to make the odd interesting point or thing I file away for later. More stars than that would require:
* Evidence from the real world
* The willingness to follow arguments to their conclusions
* A firm definition of "elites"
* Any discussion of economic factors
* The moral courage to take actual hard positions and defend them (on the occasions that he does they prove to be bog-standard social conservatism)

[Cathy Condon bannister · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting theory, which doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Completely full of wrong and unsubstantiated claims about the lives of "the elites", and gave culture war ammunition to John Howard to maintain his Prime Ministership for 11 years. Anti-intellectual nastiness. Worth reading to understand where this narrative came from.