Lasch was ahead of the New Right in diagnosing American malaise. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
In the spring of 1979, Jimmy Carter set a place at his table for a radical historian: Christopher Lasch. The author’s book The Culture of Narcissism, published a few months earlier, had become that rarest of objects, a best-selling work of social criticism, with a National Book Award soon to follow. And it had reached a president facing gas lines and a country he no longer felt he understood.
Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell had been pressing the book on the White House for months. So its author came to dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, seated beside First Lady Rosalynn Carter, in company that included the sociologist Daniel Bell, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the broadcaster Bill Moyers, and other diagnosticians of the American soul. Caddell briefed the room on the nation’s darkening mood. By July, Carter would deliver his “Crisis of Confidence” address from Camp David, remembered ever after as the “Malaise” speech. Its most quotable lines echoed Lasch.
The address worked, and Carter’s approval briefly jumped before collapsing along with his Cabinet. Carter had kept Lasch’s diagnosis of a self-absorbed consumer culture and discarded everything that gave Lasch’s diagnosis its power: above all, his focus on corporate concentration and the degradation of work. The analysis, in short, of who holds power and what they do with it.
Lasch protested afterward, in a letter to Caddell, that his target had been the managerial and professional elite, not the ordinary Americans Carter’s speech scolded. It did not matter. The first politician to govern with Lasch in hand had used the book the way a preacher uses a text, for the sermon it could yield rather than the argument it made. Carter was a Democrat. Ronald Reagan, a Republican, mocked the sermon all the way to the White House, and the party of the New Deal has flinched from the word “malaise” ever since.
Forty-seven years later, the borrowing from Lasch continues — only, from the other direction, the Right, and it has become a genre. The conservative writer William Voegeli’s essay in a recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books, “The Political Contradictions of Trumpism,” is an important entry: a patient reading of Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites, published posthumously in 1995, as a book important for understanding Trumpism as an ideological movement, its demonology and its idiom. (Sure enough, a copy of Revolt reportedly once sat on the desk of JD Vance’s speechwriter.) Voegeli, though, is honest enough to concede what he calls the “hard parts,” meaning Lasch’s complete analysis of class power and political economy, which the Trumpians generally decline to inherit.
But these developments raise a question, largely unaddressed by those, on the Right and the Left, who claim ownership of Lasch’s legacy: how does the work of a man formed on the Marxist Left, a historian who spent the 1960s explaining why American socialism died, become devotional reading for the party of the so-called New Right? The answer, in good part, has to do with Lasch’s own refusal to address modern political economy as it actually exists, and the Jeffersonian romanticism he substituted for proper class analysis.
Lasch trained at Columbia under the liberal historian William Leuchtenburg and made his name in 1965 with The New Radicalism in America, which treated intellectuals not as free-floating minds, but as a social type with interests of its own. By the time he published The Agony of the American Left, in 1969, Lasch was working the same seam as the revisionist historians of his generation: the argument, built by C. Wright Mills and elaborated by Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein, that 20th-century liberalism was not capitalism’s adversary, but its administrative wing, and that the professionals who staffed the wing constituted a power formation in their own right.
Lasch’s lifelong villain — the credentialed stratum he would later call the “thinking classes” — descends in a direct line from that critique. This matters, because the genealogy has been quietly repossessed. The anti-elite bludgeon that the Right now brandishes at every university and newsroom was Leftist property first, forged to explain why corporate liberalism absorbed every Left challenge thrown at it.
The Left, in short, held the patent on the villain that now obsessed the Right. In 1977, the year Lasch published his book on the family, Haven in a Heartless World, Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined the term “professional-managerial class” in Radical America, a New Left journal, to explain their own movement’s uncomfortable social base. The phrase the online Right now wields as a slur was minted by socialists as an instrument of self-examination, a fact Barbara Ehrenreich was still patiently explaining four decades later.
The two analyses were siblings with different tempers. The Ehrenreich critique kept the professional class inside a theory of capitalism, a stratum living off the surplus that workers produced. For Lasch, however, the critique of the liberal professionals increasingly took on a moral cast: in his telling, they were a stratum living off the deference that ordinary people no longer owed.
What happened next is that the academic and professional Left became, demographically, the very class that the professional-managerial concept described. And the professionals, it turned out, didn’t like to question their own class origins and function in the system. They had sinecures to protect. Lasch didn’t stop his probing, however. He carried the analysis forward, almost alone through the 1980s, which is one reason he sounded increasingly like a man without a party. He was one.
Meanwhile, the Left began writing his obituaries early. Haven, for example, argued that the helping professions had colonized the family. And that the radical anti-family ideas of the Left really supplied after-the-fact alibis for the market’s corrosion of the traditional family. Likewise, in Narcissism, Lasch diagnosed the supposedly emancipated American personality as a product of consumer capitalism. He was, in other words, poking at his own side.
The fights that followed were almost entirely intramural, and the fiercest were with feminists who heard in his defense of the besieged family a defense of its hierarchies and said so at length; in the Village Voice and the feminist journals, his name became shorthand for nostalgia, and the charge stuck in the seminar rooms even. By the time his critical history of progressivism, The True and Only Heaven appeared, in 1991, Left critics treated him as a moralist in exile from his own side, while conservative ones circled his body of work with wary interest. That book assembled his counter-tradition, the social forces he would celebrate: the producers, the farmer and the artisan, the small proprietor, the petty-bourgeois lineage whose ethic of “competence” and limits he upheld against the technocratic religion of progress.
The Revolt of the Elites, completed with his daughter Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, the Syracuse University historian, as leukemia killed him at 61, arrived a year after his death with the inversion of Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses that everyone now quotes. Harper’s ran the title essay months before publication, so the professional classes got to read their indictment in one of their own house organs.
The Right began claiming him before the estate was settled. In his last years, Lasch himself published in First Things, telling conservatives in a 1990 essay headlined “Conservatism Against Itself” that the market they worshiped devours the traditions they mourn; the essay reads today like a warning label the New Right has declined to heed. Then, conservative thinkers set about completing the adoption process, to make Lasch one of their own. Roger Kimball gave Revolt a long, respectful accounting in The New Criterion in 1995, disagreements included. Patrick Deneen wrote an admiring essay in 2004.
Through the Bush years, while the academic Left remembered Lasch mainly for what progressives saw as his retreat, the paleoconservatives kept him in circulation: Jeremy Beer’s “The Radical Lasch” in The American Conservative in 2007; the Front Porch Republic circle; the Intercollegiate Studies Institute reading lists; and, in 2010, the standard biography, Eric Miller’s Hope in a Scattering Time, issued not by a university press or Big Five imprint, but by Eerdmans, an evangelical house. In short, the Right — or the faction of it that would become today’s New Right — had completed its ownership claim to Lasch a decade before Donald Trump’s fateful ride down the escalator.
The Trump era only underscored Lasch’s significance to the Right. Ross Douthat put Revolt on his reading list for the incoming era in December 2016. Two months later, Axios reported that Steve Bannon counted it among his favorite books, which drew a furious rebuttal in The Baffler from Chris Lehmann, a former graduate student of Lasch’s, who insisted that Trumpism would have appalled his teacher.
Josh Hawley’s keynote to the first National Conservatism conference in 2019 foregrounded Laschian themes: an American middle betrayed by a leadership class loyal to the globe. By the time Compact, co-founded by UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari, launched in 2022, the formula was recognizably Lasch’s: a strong social state, a conservative culture. Law & Liberty convened an anniversary forum in 2021. With a few honorable exceptions, these conservative adopters of the Lasch legacy dropped his anti-capitalist political economy.
Why is the operation so easy? The problem is that Lasch’s populism has no workplace in it. For a writer whose great subject was the fate of ordinary people under corporate capitalism, the employment relation is almost entirely absent from his books. Read The Culture of Narcissism beside any book about workers of its decade, and the silence becomes glaring: the book anatomizes the manipulated consumer and the therapized client on every page. But the supervised employee barely appears. The workplace as a domain of social domination finds little place in the Laschian corpus.
His moral exemplars are owners in miniature, the freeholder and the master craftsman, members of a class that had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist before he was born. Compare Lasch to another Left academic who studies the same issue, C. Wright Mills. The latter’s white-collar Americans were employees to the bone, people whose class position consisted precisely in having a boss. Lasch, by contrast, barely noticed the boss.
When wage earners do appear in The True and Only Heaven — a rare exception — they arrive as 19th-century labor republicans and syndicalists, men who wanted the trade to make them proprietors of their own craft; they matter to Lasch, that is, exactly insofar as they resemble owners. Lasch elided, however, the 20th-century employee: the person who clocks in at somebody else’s firm and will retire, or be discarded, from somebody else’s firm. Unions in their 20th-century form figure as one more bureaucracy, a managerial stratum administering workers, rather than as vehicles that allowed workers to pool their bargaining power and thus improve their wages and working conditions.
His defenders will answer that the omission was the argument; that in the Jeffersonian tradition Lasch championed, permanent wage labor is the disease and proprietorship the cure. It follows, the thinking runs, that organizing on the employment relation would only ratify the disease. Perhaps. But a serious politics cannot be based upon the idea that everyone will one day become an owner. The history of political economy in the 19th and 20th centuries, on the contrary, is a story of capital separating the Jeffersonian yeoman and artisan from his land and his tools.
To be sure, Lasch wasn’t wrong in his critique of unions as sclerotic and bureaucratic. But he took this true observation as a permission slip for neglecting the wage relation almost entirely. Which, as it happened, made him congenial to the elements of the Right which were happy to have his critique of the globalist professionals at a cultural level, but which remained averse to collective bargaining and the redistribution of power within the firm.
A class politics anchored in ownership and Jeffersonian virtue carries none of this. It asks only that you resent the credentialed, and that is an appetite the American Right has never lacked. The Right could adopt Lasch’s villain whole, the arrogant professional stratum, without having to consider what defending the villain’s victim would mean on a material plane: at the level of wages and labor law. Ultimately, nothing in The Revolt of the Elites is unassimilable by a party of capital.
Yet the Right’s near-full adoption of Lasch doesn’t do justice to the Left position he actually held, its shortcomings notwithstanding: a Left that could distrust the professional stratum without falling in love with the market; a Left that took the moral world of working people seriously as something other than false consciousness.