Very interesting, notwithstanding the obligatory and gratuitous dig at Trump. Is there a rule stating that every single article written by every single journalist on every single forum most contain a cheap dig at Trump?
That aside, the response to the Brexit vote was obviously an exemplary example of the Revolt of the Elites. Of course, on this occasion – and at least for the moment – the Elites lost.
I logged on to make that very point, but you’ve made it already, and more eloquently! It’s an interesting article spoilt only by the ‘narcissism’ comment, which serves to instantly revise ones opinion of its apolitical balance. The comment ironically comes across as a petty dig by a ‘wealthy elite’. It’s also irrelevant to Ed’s argument, in fact distracts from it, and could have been left out completely.
It’s stopped me from sharing this otherwise excellent article with a few Trump supporting friends who will no doubt stop reading at that point. IMO Trump is no better or worse than every other elite American president, and certainly no or more less narcissistic as well. The daily attacks on him at this point must be some type of psyop, mass hysteria or proof we are living in a simulation after all.
I thought that Lasch was the most perceptive book on politics I read in my youth so it is great to see Ed repurposing it for the present. Two recent books – Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism and Michael Lind’s The New Class War – have a similar theme from a UK and US perspective respectively and are well worth reading. When one is influenced by them, one of the few possible positives in the current situation is financial pressure leading to the shrinkage/restructuring of first the arts/media and then the conventional higher ed elites – both essential enablers of the Laschian master class.
Yes, let’s hope the MSM continues to whither and die. And let’s hope that governments everywhere slash arts funding as part of the savings that will, eventually, have to be made post-Covid.
They must also “slash and burn” at the so called Universities, starting with Cambridge. Preserve and fund the Science Departments, bin the rest. Preserve the few buildings of any architectural merit, demolish the remainder. Repeat the motion with Oxford and so on. The hysterical reaction to Dr David Starkey is but the harbinger of worse to come, unless remedial action is taken now. The fiscal catastrophe we are now facing, is the perfect excuse for root and branch reform. “England Expects”, Mr Cummings. Do not fail to grasp the nettle, you will have overwhelming public support
I don’t think the most helpful response to left-wing radicalism is any form of Tory Leninism. If institutions have gone astray, the solution is to bring them back to the right path.
Unfortunately, as you well know, it was “Tory Leninism” under the perfectly charming, but utterly useless John Major, that wrought mortal damage to our Universities. Turning forty odd Polys into Universities at the stroke of a pen was probably the most disastrous incidence of ‘dumbing down’ this country has ever seen. A classic case of quality being sacrificed for quantity. It has been further compounded by rampant ‘degree inflation’ of which I am sure you are fully aware. Bringing them “back to the right path”, as you so prosaically put it, will be harder than cleaning the Augean stables. However if the financial cost of C-19 is anything like that predicted, it will be a perfect opportunity to both withdraw grants and initiate Privatisation do you not agree?
The Elites lost? If so, they are crying all the way to the bank. We know that wealthy fund holders were encouraging investors to take their wealth abroad, and also that some were actively betting against UK prosperity post-Brexit.
But the problems of society cannot be summed up in binary classifications like this. I haven’t read Lasch (though I may do so now), but this description of radical progressive elites reminds me of Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose”, which missed the point and suggested the answer to every problem was free market capitalism. Doesn’t look so good after 10 years of austerity.
wbfleming
3 years ago
Before the virtue signaller came the moral exhibitionist and before the moral exhibitionist came the Pharisee.
The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not as other men.’ (Luke 18:11)
You should have continued with the famous tract from the Talmud “Blessed are you Lord, our God, King of the universe, who has not created me as a woman “. (as one translation puts it so prosaically).
Simon Newman
3 years ago
“This would result in the election of perhaps the most grotesque narcissist to ever lead Lasch’s country”
In 2008, right?
mrgrahammarklee
3 years ago
It is a prescient book.
Robert Forde
3 years ago
The notion that snobbery used to be expressed only in private is frankly risible. It used to be accepted as a fact of life that the “lower” classes were inferior in just about every way.
John Taylor
3 years ago
Lasch’s concept of narcissism was not the common use of the word but instead referred to the then-new tendency to withdraw from responsible citizenship into private cultivation of what by now was a weakened, fragile self. All of his books are absolutely brilliant but especially the last several. His premature death ranks among the intellectual tragedies of the last century.
Robin P
3 years ago
This article is so confused I hesitate to even start on the task of trying to unpick its confusions. I’ll just put here a few hints of how I understand it myself.
No, the last few weeks have not been “the revolt of the elites”. A revolution BY elites is by definition a load of nonsense – a revolution overthrows elites such as happened in France and Russia.
All we are seeing is the continuation of the dominance of the ideology/religion of Greed-Globalism (EXACTLY THE SAME AS Political Correctness) which has been totally dominant since its violent victory in 1945 Berlin.
The ideology was never founded on facts or truth and has consequently become increasingly insane, with examples of the insanity I hardly need to point out.
Meanwhile of course the big global corporations support the Greed-Globalist ideology. And likewise do the “students” emerging from the brainwashing centres commonly referred to as universities.
And when you have a load of young people heavily convinced that they have ALL Truth and Goodness on their side, then of course they then reckon that there are no limits to violence and deceit in their cause.
And meanwhile…. Communities of “black” (or whatever the correct term is this week) people, or more accurately the more criminal elements in those communities, see another opportunity for looting shops and amusing themselves by burning down the shops owned by other ethnicities…. that is nothing to do with elites and nothing to do with revolution.
In my view, people need to read fewer “prophetic” books and do more critical thinking. Anyway at least we don’t have yet another tribute to the stupendous brilliance of “End of history” Fukuyama here!
Russ Littler
3 years ago
I don’t know why I bother to read this garbage. That “grotesque, narcissistic, leader” that Ed West obviously despises, is the only man who can, (and will,) bring the remedy that we so desperately need. He is actually fighting for us all, (and you too Mr West,) and you cannot even see it. Why do we allow uninformed talking heads to spread their blinkered version of enlightenment, when they don’t even understand what’s really going on.
simon taylor
3 years ago
I had not heard of Lasch, thanks to this article, I shall now seek him out.
Chris Waghorn
3 years ago
“Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life”. [Cecil Rhodes]
A similar epithet could, I suspect, be found in every country in the world; and it is from this tribal loyalty that the ‘elites’ draw their power. But it is a bit special being born an Englishman 🙂
I tend to view the elites as walking a very long plank, they don’t realise the precarious position they are in with relation to society. Historically whether they know it or not eiltes have always governed with the consent of the masses as John Michael Greer put it in one of his essays..
‘One of the repeated lessons of history is that when Potemkin politics become standard operating procedure in a nation, no matter how powerful and stable that nation might look, it can come apart with astonishing speed once somebody provides the good hard shove. The sudden implosion of the Kingdom of France in 1789 and the equally abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 are two of the most famous examples, but there have been many others. In every case, what happened was that a government that had stopped solving its nation’s problems, and settled for trying to manage appearances instead, discovered the hard way that governments really do derive their power from the consent of the governed—and that this consent can be withdrawn very suddenly indeed’.
swallis
3 years ago
Good points – I too was looking also for a remedy at the end of the essay (and at the end of the book – still on my shelf from my long-ago undergrad years). I’ve been looking for the remedy for decades. Finding none (or, more accurately, finding very many recommendations that were of little value), I began my own investigation. I came to realize that we, as individuals and as a society, simply lack the _knowledge_ for how to govern our nation and our lives. OK, no big surprise there. So, I went on to study what counts as useful knowledge and developed a method for evaluating the “structure” of knowledge.
Tracing the progress of knowledge (as represented by theories of physics, psychology, sociology, and other fields) it seems that we are on a path to reach a really deep understanding in about 200 years. Not soon enough for my preferences.
So, by using structure as a kind of compass for improving our knowledge, we can accelerate that advance; instead of spinning around from one view to another in a whirlwind of alternative perspectives and irrational argumentation. https://projectfast.org/res…
Storm Shadow
3 years ago
What you’re describing is the exilic liberal Jew culture adopted by the entire elite. Our WASP forefathers never thought or acted like this.
LCarey Rowland
3 years ago
Thank you, Ed, for shining the light on Lasch’s prescient work.
Dave Tagge
3 years ago
The Bell Curve (published in 1994) touched on some of the same points about elites separating from the rest of society. Public discussion of it was dominated by controversy regarding the portion of the book that discussed racial/ethnic differences in average IQ.
That’s really a shame, because that discussion was far from the entirety of the book, whose full title is “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life”. The book talked about how a “cognitive elite” was becoming increasingly separated from the rest of the society.
As I recall, a key point of that discussion was that a meritocratic framing for their success has made this cognitive elite more dismissive of the rest of the society than America’s traditional WASP elite. The latter – however imperfectly this worked in practice – were expected to live up to a certain public-spiritedness and patriotism in acknowledgement of the good fortune of their birth. If one’s self-perception is having earned success through meritocratic achievement, however, there’s less sense of responsibility and humility toward the rest of the society.
swallis
3 years ago
As when Cuba ‘revolted’ against their corrupt US-installed leaders… only to replace them with home-grown corrupt leaders.
Be that as it may, I like to think that a great benefit of the US was for independence was a good thing because they replaced a monarchy with a constitutional and representative government. That, I see as a kind of social progress. Obviously, we have to make more progress. While written by some of the best minds of the time, that time was 200 years ago. The constitution does not take into account the social situation we face today, so we are unable to govern ourselves effectively.
And, as a sad result, the masses are swayed by high-volume rhetoric. Whoever yells the most or promises the most, gets elected.
Very interesting, notwithstanding the obligatory and gratuitous dig at Trump. Is there a rule stating that every single article written by every single journalist on every single forum most contain a cheap dig at Trump?
That aside, the response to the Brexit vote was obviously an exemplary example of the Revolt of the Elites. Of course, on this occasion – and at least for the moment – the Elites lost.
I logged on to make that very point, but you’ve made it already, and more eloquently!
It’s an interesting article spoilt only by the ‘narcissism’ comment, which serves to instantly revise ones opinion of its apolitical balance. The comment ironically comes across as a petty dig by a ‘wealthy elite’. It’s also irrelevant to Ed’s argument, in fact distracts from it, and could have been left out completely.
It’s stopped me from sharing this otherwise excellent article with a few Trump supporting friends who will no doubt stop reading at that point. IMO Trump is no better or worse than every other elite American president, and certainly no or more less narcissistic as well. The daily attacks on him at this point must be some type of psyop, mass hysteria or proof we are living in a simulation after all.
I agree. Trump is less narcissistic than Obama, who never wrote a book that wasn’t about himself.
I thought that Lasch was the most perceptive book on politics I read in my youth so it is great to see Ed repurposing it for the present. Two recent books – Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism and Michael Lind’s The New Class War – have a similar theme from a UK and US perspective respectively and are well worth reading. When one is influenced by them, one of the few possible positives in the current situation is financial pressure leading to the shrinkage/restructuring of first the arts/media and then the conventional higher ed elites – both essential enablers of the Laschian master class.
Yes, let’s hope the MSM continues to whither and die. And let’s hope that governments everywhere slash arts funding as part of the savings that will, eventually, have to be made post-Covid.
They must also “slash and burn” at the so called Universities, starting with Cambridge. Preserve and fund the Science Departments, bin the rest.
Preserve the few buildings of any architectural merit, demolish the remainder.
Repeat the motion with Oxford and so on.
The hysterical reaction to Dr David Starkey is but the harbinger of worse to come, unless remedial action is taken now.
The fiscal catastrophe we are now facing, is the perfect excuse for root and branch reform.
“England Expects”, Mr Cummings. Do not fail to grasp the nettle, you will have overwhelming public support
I don’t think the most helpful response to left-wing radicalism is any form of Tory Leninism. If institutions have gone astray, the solution is to bring them back to the right path.
Unfortunately, as you well know, it was “Tory Leninism” under the perfectly charming, but utterly useless John Major, that wrought mortal damage to our Universities. Turning forty odd Polys into Universities at the stroke of a pen was probably the most disastrous incidence of ‘dumbing down’ this country has ever seen. A classic case of quality being sacrificed for quantity. It has been further compounded by rampant ‘degree inflation’ of which I am sure you are fully aware.
Bringing them “back to the right
path”, as you so prosaically put it, will be harder than cleaning the Augean stables.
However if the financial cost of C-19 is anything like that predicted, it will be a perfect opportunity to both withdraw grants and initiate Privatisation do you not agree?
The Elites lost? If so, they are crying all the way to the bank. We know that wealthy fund holders were encouraging investors to take their wealth abroad, and also that some were actively betting against UK prosperity post-Brexit.
But the problems of society cannot be summed up in binary classifications like this. I haven’t read Lasch (though I may do so now), but this description of radical progressive elites reminds me of Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose”, which missed the point and suggested the answer to every problem was free market capitalism. Doesn’t look so good after 10 years of austerity.
Before the virtue signaller came the moral exhibitionist and before the moral exhibitionist came the Pharisee.
The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not as other men.’ (Luke 18:11)
You should have continued with the famous tract from the Talmud “Blessed are you Lord, our God, King of the universe, who has not created me as a woman “.
(as one translation puts it so prosaically).
“This would result in the election of perhaps the most grotesque narcissist to ever lead Lasch’s country”
In 2008, right?
It is a prescient book.
The notion that snobbery used to be expressed only in private is frankly risible. It used to be accepted as a fact of life that the “lower” classes were inferior in just about every way.
Lasch’s concept of narcissism was not the common use of the word but instead referred to the then-new tendency to withdraw from responsible citizenship into private cultivation of what by now was a weakened, fragile self. All of his books are absolutely brilliant but especially the last several. His premature death ranks among the intellectual tragedies of the last century.
This article is so confused I hesitate to even start on the task of trying to unpick its confusions. I’ll just put here a few hints of how I understand it myself.
No, the last few weeks have not been “the revolt of the elites”. A revolution BY elites is by definition a load of nonsense – a revolution overthrows elites such as happened in France and Russia.
All we are seeing is the continuation of the dominance of the ideology/religion of Greed-Globalism (EXACTLY THE SAME AS Political Correctness) which has been totally dominant since its violent victory in 1945 Berlin.
The ideology was never founded on facts or truth and has consequently become increasingly insane, with examples of the insanity I hardly need to point out.
Meanwhile of course the big global corporations support the Greed-Globalist ideology. And likewise do the “students” emerging from the brainwashing centres commonly referred to as universities.
And when you have a load of young people heavily convinced that they have ALL Truth and Goodness on their side, then of course they then reckon that there are no limits to violence and deceit in their cause.
And meanwhile…. Communities of “black” (or whatever the correct term is this week) people, or more accurately the more criminal elements in those communities, see another opportunity for looting shops and amusing themselves by burning down the shops owned by other ethnicities…. that is nothing to do with elites and nothing to do with revolution.
In my view, people need to read fewer “prophetic” books and do more critical thinking. Anyway at least we don’t have yet another tribute to the stupendous brilliance of “End of history” Fukuyama here!
I don’t know why I bother to read this garbage. That “grotesque, narcissistic, leader” that Ed West obviously despises, is the only man who can, (and will,) bring the remedy that we so desperately need. He is actually fighting for us all, (and you too Mr West,) and you cannot even see it. Why do we allow uninformed talking heads to spread their blinkered version of enlightenment, when they don’t even understand what’s really going on.
I had not heard of Lasch, thanks to this article, I shall now seek him out.
“Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life”. [Cecil Rhodes]
A similar epithet could, I suspect, be found in every country in the world; and it is from this tribal loyalty that the ‘elites’ draw their power. But it is a bit special being born an Englishman 🙂
Hear, hear!
I tend to view the elites as walking a very long plank, they don’t realise the precarious position they are in with relation to society. Historically whether they know it or not eiltes have always governed with the consent of the masses as John Michael Greer put it in one of his essays..
‘One of the repeated lessons of history is that when Potemkin politics become standard operating procedure in a nation, no matter how powerful and stable that nation might look, it can come apart with astonishing speed once somebody provides the good hard shove. The sudden implosion of the Kingdom of France in 1789 and the equally abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 are two of the most famous examples, but there have been many others. In every case, what happened was that a government that had stopped solving its nation’s problems, and settled for trying to manage appearances instead, discovered the hard way that governments really do derive their power from the consent of the governed—and that this consent can be withdrawn very suddenly indeed’.
Good points – I too was looking also for a remedy at the end of the essay (and at the end of the book – still on my shelf from my long-ago undergrad years). I’ve been looking for the remedy for decades. Finding none (or, more accurately, finding very many recommendations that were of little value), I began my own investigation. I came to realize that we, as individuals and as a society, simply lack the _knowledge_ for how to govern our nation and our lives. OK, no big surprise there. So, I went on to study what counts as useful knowledge and developed a method for evaluating the “structure” of knowledge.
Tracing the progress of knowledge (as represented by theories of physics, psychology, sociology, and other fields) it seems that we are on a path to reach a really deep understanding in about 200 years. Not soon enough for my preferences.
So, by using structure as a kind of compass for improving our knowledge, we can accelerate that advance; instead of spinning around from one view to another in a whirlwind of alternative perspectives and irrational argumentation. https://projectfast.org/res…
What you’re describing is the exilic liberal Jew culture adopted by the entire elite. Our WASP forefathers never thought or acted like this.
Thank you, Ed, for shining the light on Lasch’s prescient work.
The Bell Curve (published in 1994) touched on some of the same points about elites separating from the rest of society. Public discussion of it was dominated by controversy regarding the portion of the book that discussed racial/ethnic differences in average IQ.
That’s really a shame, because that discussion was far from the entirety of the book, whose full title is “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life”. The book talked about how a “cognitive elite” was becoming increasingly separated from the rest of the society.
As I recall, a key point of that discussion was that a meritocratic framing for their success has made this cognitive elite more dismissive of the rest of the society than America’s traditional WASP elite. The latter – however imperfectly this worked in practice – were expected to live up to a certain public-spiritedness and patriotism in acknowledgement of the good fortune of their birth. If one’s self-perception is having earned success through meritocratic achievement, however, there’s less sense of responsibility and humility toward the rest of the society.
As when Cuba ‘revolted’ against their corrupt US-installed leaders… only to replace them with home-grown corrupt leaders.
Be that as it may, I like to think that a great benefit of the US was for independence was a good thing because they replaced a monarchy with a constitutional and representative government. That, I see as a kind of social progress. Obviously, we have to make more progress. While written by some of the best minds of the time, that time was 200 years ago. The constitution does not take into account the social situation we face today, so we are unable to govern ourselves effectively.
And, as a sad result, the masses are swayed by high-volume rhetoric. Whoever yells the most or promises the most, gets elected.
Time for a change.