Lasching Out
“Everything in Trumpworld happens twice,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole wrote recently—“the first time as performance and the second as reality.” He was commenting on the deployment of the U.S. National Guard and U.S. Marines in Los Angeles against protesters challenging President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. If Trump’s victory in 2016 was performance, the aftermath of his 2024 victory is reality. And that reality, now manifest daily, is one that most liberals, leftists, or middle-of-the-roaders had not fully anticipated, despite warnings.
Among the most prescient, consistent, and insistent critics to warn the United States of its own frailties was the historian Christopher Lasch.
Some observers were blinded by their belief in the rootedness and resilience of the country’s institutions, its liberal political tradition, and the irreversibility of progress. Others failed to fully appreciate how money would corrode the American political system and would so deepen cultural-cum-class polarization. But beginning several decades ago, Lasch identified the growing divide between the educated managerial elites and the bulk of the lesser educated public.
Writing of “an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself),” he argued that it “seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or ‘alternative’ institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.” American democracy would deteriorate based on “the routine acceptance of professionals as a class apart.”
Lasch was erudite. He was engaged in intellectual conversation with different disciplines, theories, and approaches worldwide, including the Frankfurt School, which inspired his texts from the late 1970s and 1980s. His major works present an archeology of social and political upheavals today: He identified long ago the roots of the current crisis of liberalism in the United States. After arguing that neither socialism nor fascism represented the future, Lasch asserted that “the danger to democracy comes less from totalitarian or collectivist movements abroad than from the erosion of its psychological, cultural, and spiritual foundations from within.”
Lasch’s last book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, was published posthumously, in 1995; he had rushed it into print as he was fighting cancer. In that work, along with what is arguably his most famous book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), and his most substantive one, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), he identified, with alarm, the corrosive influence of markets and bureaucratization on individualism and responsible citizenship. He also tracked the economic and cultural trends that turned citizens into consumers and created an environment in which “indifference, not the fear of deeply divisive disagreements, underlies the public’s refusal to get excited about politics.” And, for Lasch, “this indifference betrays the erosion of the capacity to take any interest in anything outside the self.”
To read Lasch, therefore, is in part to read the history of the transformation of capitalism, class, and cultural conflict in America over the last few decades—the rise of a mainly white, middle-age, and middle-class rebellion with patriarchal leanings—well before all those issues crystallized over wokeness and the inequalities caused by globalization.
Writing The Revolt of the Elites in the heyday of the West’s triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, Lasch questioned its self-congratulatory tone over the supposed victory of liberal democratic capitalism. As a critic of progressivism—an obsession, he believed, of both the right and the left—he called attention to the growing crisis of citizenship in advanced capitalist democracies such as the U.S. and warned, “Having defeated its totalitarian adversaries, liberalism is crumbling from within.” One reason for this, he argued, in keeping with themes he had pursued in the 1970s and 80s, was that: “Liberalism was never utopian, unless the democratization of consumption is itself a utopian ideal. It made no difficult demands on human nature”—and yet, to him, such demands were precisely what made civic virtue.
His solution? Populism. One could say Lasch was a romantic when it came to rectifying an enfeebled democracy. But today the burgeoning literature on populism sees the movement as a threat to democracy. The German political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller has argued that populism is not just anti-elite but also anti-pluralism: Populists believe they are the only true representatives of the people and that anyone who is not with them is not part of the people. This exclusivist approach is inherently authoritarian, and so populism is, on the face of it, against liberalism and democracy.
For Lasch, though, writing in the early 1990s, “at a time when other ideologies are greeted with apathy, populism has the capacity to generate real enthusiasm,” because “populism, as I understand it, is unambiguously committed to the principle of respect.” In his view, respect was the essential ingredient of civic virtue—without it, liberalism loses its constitutive ethos and deteriorates toward “a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” Populism, he wrote, “is the authentic voice of democracy.”
Lasch did recognize that:
“It would be foolish to deny the characteristic features of populist movements at their worst—racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, and all the other evils so often cited by liberal critics. But it would be equally foolish to deny what is indispensable in this tradition—its appreciation of the moral value of honest work, its respect for competence, its egalitarian opposition to entrenched privilege, its refusal to be impressed by the jargon of experts, its insistence on plain speech and on holding people accountable for their actions.”
Considering today’s realities, it turns out that he could have been more circumspect about tooting the positive aspects of populism.
A Leftist Conservative
Lasch was a critic from within, if not at times a contrarian. As a person of the left, he started to ring the alarm for the leftish-liberal New Deal order during social and political turbulence prompted by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and student radicalism in the United States. Though he then remained a leftist in matters of political economy—in particular privileging equality in both economic and especially civic matters—he gradually distanced himself from the social and cultural tenets of the New Left. He believed that the once-hopeful movement of the ‘60s had gradually substituted culture for class and that its sense of individualism had paved the way for the neoliberal order and its egotistic ethos. “Most of us can see the system but not the class that administers it and monopolizes its wealth,” he wrote. “We resist a class analysis of modern society as a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Thus, we prevent ourselves from understanding how our current difficulties arose, why they persist, or how they might be solved.”
In the late 1970s, during the depths of the stagflation years that followed the 1973 oil crisis, Lasch published his cri du coeur about the family, Haven in a Heartless World. The family unit was, to him, the mainstay of a healthy society, because it could instill in children a sense of authority, discipline, and solidarity, as well as responsibility—and now, in his view, the family’s cohesion and sustainability were under threat from the savage attacks of the market and bureaucratization.
The Culture of Narcissism came soon after. The media reported that it inspired President Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise” speech of July 1979, in which Carter attacked consumerism and selfishness. The speech backfired spectacularly in political terms: Soon after, the Iran hostage crisis began and he was seen as a defeatist who could not lead the nation. Lasch later claimed that Carter had misunderstood his work. Still, Lasch’s writings then reflected the overall pessimism of the times, and to this day, they are evidence of his perceptive assessment of the pitfalls of a liberal democracy built on market relations. Those trends only grew stronger in subsequent decades, propelling Trump and Trumpism to power.
Lasch argued that Americans in the 1970s suffered from three structural transformations: the rise of postindustrial modes of manufacturing, the ubiquity of mass media, and the undermining of the role of the family in socializing children and reproducing the community spirit. The market invaded and undermined the family, and the welfare state intruded on its most intimate issues, the better to regulate them. And these forces produced a new, modal type of personality: the narcissist. “The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety,” Lasch wrote; he “has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past”; “the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of the prevailing ideologies… but the poverty of the narcissist’s inner life.”
From the time these words were written to our times today, the structural transformations only deepened. So did the societal and political crises that these changes triggered or exacerbated under the combined weight of the technological and digital revolution, ever-freer trade, the free movement of capital in a hyperglobalized world, and a politics increasingly beholden to capital. I think Lasch would have said that the advent, later, of the internet and social media made only a quantitative difference to the influence of the media, which already was corrosive. As Fred Turner, a professor of communication at Stanford, has pointed out: “it is the need for advertisers to make a profit that has remained constant from Lasch’s time to our own. Together, the spread of electronic media and the arm-twisting habits of advertising, writes Lasch, have made ‘the categories of truth and falsehood irrelevant to an evaluation of their influence. Truth has given way to credibility.’”
The Analyst as Moralist
Lasch was a mid-Westerner with an Ivy League education who did not feel at ease, culturally or socially, in metropolitan and elite environments. He started reflecting much earlier than many on trends in American society that brought about today’s clear and present dangers of illiberal democracy and competitive authoritarianism. And unlike many commentators today, he put the blame squarely on the elites. At the same time, he was almost totally oblivious to the potential darkness in the ways and thoughts of the people he believed were being discounted or ignored by the managerial elites. He believed that they were the true bearers of virtues such as loyalty, honesty, restraint, good manners, a solid work ethic—the building blocks of a healthy democracy. Trumpism has proved him wrong.
Yet the dynamics he analyzed over several decades are now widely accepted as the economic, social, and cultural causes of Trumpism—even though Trump himself is arguably the unlikeliest of personalities to articulate and amplify the resentment of less educated white males. Remarkably—and this symbolizes both the severe erosion of the establishment’s legitimacy and the fury of those who feel to have been left behind, against existing democratic norms—Trump’s re-election as president in 2024 took place after he was convicted as a felon and he had encouraged his supporters to stage a coup after the 2020 election, which he lost but would not concede.
Lasch probably would not have been surprised by Trump’s victories: After all, he wrote back in 1991, in The True and Only Heaven, that “old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action” and that “American society suffered from the collapse of legitimate authority.” He consistently blamed the crisis of democracy on the educated managerial class and its condescension of the lower classes, particularly white workers: “One study after another depicted a working class newly suburbanized, economically secure for the first time but socially at sea, resentful of blacks and other minorities pressing up from below, beset by status anxiety, and ripe for radical demagogues.” The elites looked upon the family structure, approach to education, and democratic values of this class as founts of authoritarianism—as a result, they welcomed its apathy toward political participation. And so Lasch concluded, “the only people who really mattered, it appeared, were the members of the professional and managerial class.”
The main tenets of Lasch’s analysis about economic dynamics, the clash of cultures as a substitute for class struggle, the devastating effects of the crisis of the family, and the quest for social equality and justice did not change over time. His social and cultural views did evolve, in a more conservative direction, as he increasingly came to see the family and religious belief as the bulwarks of a stable and functional society. And yet he did not join the ranks of political conservatism or neo-conservatism. There is an admirable consistency in Lasch’s work, as well as a Coleridge-type of temperament, which does not fear change but instead wishes for change to be rooted in tradition and carried out through the agency of institutions. It is questionable, though, whether what he yearned for—a return to a simpler capitalism, the entrepreneurial spirit, de-bureaucratization, civic responsibility, citizenship not consumerism, social equality—could be attainable today. Then again, for a man who disliked nostalgia, Lasch arguably was being nostalgic about times long gone and that could never return as capitalism transformed itself.
Today’s Gaze
Reading Lasch’s work now reveals a simple truth: Many, if not most, of the analyses in circulation since Trump’s victory in 2016 had been readily available in the past. Trumpism also clearly had political precursors. And yet for decades the trends Lasch identified were not taken with the seriousness they deserved. They were filtered out as anomalies by the prevalent liberal ethos or, in Lasch’s parlance, the “progressive elitist” outlook of the managerial classes.
In fact, though, the 1992 presidential elections—held on the heels of the United States’ first post–Cold War military victory, in Iraq—featured two candidates outside the prevailing consensus on cultural and economic matters: Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. Buchanan’s challenge was staved off in the GOP primaries; the old Republican Party elite still held the reins. But Perot, a businessman like Trump, ran as an independent and received 18.9% of the vote—possibly contributing to Bill Clinton’s victory against George H.W. Bush. He spoke to the anxiety the working classes were feeling about losing jobs, income, and status to free trade, unimpeded capital flows, and immigration. Since his time, these anxieties have only been exacerbated. One must acknowledge, perhaps begrudgingly, that Trump acted as a catalyst in the wake of the great recession of 2008–09 and funneled all that pent-up fury into his campaign.
Lasch lamented that market relations penetrated every sphere of life, destroying civic responsibility, and he disdained the fact that money had become the measure of all activities. He thought that the liberal welfare state eroded individual self-reliance; he claimed that the market weakened the family and its role in sustaining a stable social order. In True and Only Heaven, he wrote:
“I have no intention of minimizing the narrowness and provincialism of lower-middle-class culture; nor do I deny that it has produced racism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, and all the other evils so often cited by liberal critics. But liberals have lost sight of what is valuable in lower-middle-class culture in their eagerness to condemn what is objectionable … : its moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its skepticism about progress.”
He looked upon the family the same way he did the white working class or the populist crowds: He saw in both what he wished rather than what they might actually have thought, felt, or acted upon. He was always a passionate anti-capitalist, opposing in particular the bureaucratic-cum-corporate version of capitalism that relies on a vast managerial class. Public and private bureaucracies alike were, he believed, primarily responsible for creating a culture of dependency and indifference, which ill served a democratic order.
Although Lasch was very good at exposing the educated elites’ condescending views toward those they deemed uncouth, the working- and lower-middle classes, he left many questions open. For all his relentless critique of nostalgia, he offered no way to restore the family as the “haven” he thought it was supposed to be in ways that would respond to changes in gender roles, women’s participation in the work force, and the marketization of all social relations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. That failing might tempt some to equate his alarm about the fate of the family with the reactionary proposals of Project 2025, by the Heritage Foundation, whose sole purpose appears to be to reestablish control over women. This was not Lasch’s point, nor was it his aspiration.
He would have lashed out at the regressive, repressive, and inegalitarian propositions of Project 2025. His understanding of the function of the family was not at all the same: On political economy as well as ethics, Lasch stood almost at the opposite of the Heritage Foundation’s report. But because his work remained unfinished at his death, he did not have a chance to propose a fuller picture of how to restructure the family for the 21st century while maintaining its core attributes in a way that would build a civic culture.
“Does Democracy Deserve to Survive?”
Such is the title of one of Lasch’s essays anthologized in The Revolt of the Elites, first written in 1992, and this question remains, or recurs, as the second Trump administration disproves the comforting political notion that America’s institutions can hold the line against any assault on liberal democratic principles and practices. We now know better. A determined and unscrupulous executive, combined with a subservient legislature and a Supreme Court ideologically committed to the theory of the unitary executive, can and do forcefully disrupt the balance among the branches of government, trample the rule of law, and weaken democratic norms.
Lasch saw this coming 30 years ago, when he argued: “Liberals have always taken the position that democracy can dispense with civic virtue. According to this way of thinking, it is liberal institutions, not the character of citizens, that make democracy work.” And I have no doubt Lasch would say that democracy does deserve to survive. After all, he relentlessly criticized the elites out of anger that they were betraying democracy. He railed against them and their “revolt,” as he put it, precisely for undermining the democratic ideal, abusing meritocracy, and caring nothing about either income or social inequality. In his anger, though, he downplayed the nature of the potential counter elite—the one that now holds the reins of power in America and is paving the way for an authoritarian and regressive system. Despite his consistent warnings about the power of capitalist classes, Lasch was unable to foresee how a plutocracy could adjust to new circumstances and adopt an inward-looking political, economic, and cultural program.
The real question, though, is one that he posed this way: “For all its intrinsic attractions, democracy is not an end in itself. It has to be judged by its success in producing superior goods, superior works of art and learning, a superior type of character.” It is through this lens that the decline in popular support for democracy in all advanced capitalist democracies ought to be assessed.
The social and political agenda of Trumpism, its intellectual backdrop (including Project 2025), and certainly the second Trump administration’s record to date go against the grain of a liberal democratic order. Yet so far, the people whom Lasch, the Midwesterner, championed for their commitment to the civic virtues he cherished—equality, co-existence, constructive political engagement—have failed to show up to defend them.
Time will tell if the calamitous economic consequences of the One Big Beautiful Bill for the poor and the lower-middle classes will lead to a revolt against the plutocracy and a search for a more meaningful democratic system predicated on equality and civic virtues. Now for the stress test. In 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got: a republic or a monarchy?” He famously answered, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
If you can keep it.
Soli Özel, a political scientist, is a senior fellow at L’Institut Montaigne, in Paris, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), in Vienna.
