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.

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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. 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.

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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.

Even armchair psephologists will know it wasn’t always like this. A swing state since before the Civil War, Ohio was once a presidential coin-flip, the national bellwether. As late as 2008, Barack Obama won Ohio by a comfy 4.5 points, with a strong union vote sweeping him along. Then came Trump, who over the last decade has transformed the Buckeye State into something approaching a personal fief, upending electoral wisdom and wonkish certainties as he went. “I wrote a book called The Bellwether about Ohio in advance of 2016,” laughs Kyle Kondik, a long-time electoral analyst, “and the thing was obsolete within a few months.”

That journey, that realignment, has by now been dissected to death. Yet it still feels wholly appropriate that Ohio, that archetypal MAGA conquest, should be voting the same week as the silver jubilee of Nickel and Dimed, published in May 2001. The author, muckraking journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, saw the Trumpian revolution years before Trump. “Someday,” she said of her working-class subjects, “they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth.” A Leftie to her core, the author was hoping her reportage would inspire unions and healthcare-for-all. Instead we got Trumpism — and reading Ehrenreich tells us why.

At its root, Nickel and Dimed is a work of hard-hitting journalism. Going undercover, Ehrenreich threw herself into America’s underbelly, working as a waitress in Florida, a housekeeper in Maine, and a Walmart clerk in Minnesota. What she called “old-fashioned reporting” laid bare the exploited lives of those 30% of American workers who in 1998 earned less than $8 an hour (the equivalent of $16.35 today). Low pay was shadowed by other indignities. From janitors to cleaning ladies to ditchdiggers, the writer discovered, “these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society”.

Through a first-person narrative, Ehrenreich makes these people whole. There’s Holly, the dogged Maine cleaner who scrubs tiles on one foot, and George, the friendly immigrant dishwasher fired for “stealing” saltines from the restaurant storeroom. Divided into three acts, the author narrates her journey across the vastness of America, always on the hunt for low-wage work and a budget-priced hovel. Yet through all this, and as Ehrenreich readily admits, no job, no matter how lowly, is truly “unskilled”. Quite the opposite: whether it’s slinging ham-and-eggs or scouring grout, success requires poise and grit.

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The daughter of a Montana copper miner, Ehrenreich was reared in the postwar working class  — a time when people like her enjoyed real security. In 1975, nearly a quarter of US jobs were in manufacturing, where wages averaged $6.24 an hour. When adjusted for inflation, that’s the equivalent of $80,000, and you didn’t even need a college degree. Post-industrial America changed that equation. Between 1979 and 2005, the wages of those with a bachelor’s or post-graduate degree jumped by nearly 25%; their household wealth leapt by $4 trillion. For their part, the pay of those with mere high-school degrees fell. By 2023, the median weekly wage for a working-class man was, adjusted for inflation, only a smidgen higher than in 1979.

This national story was Ohio’s too. Fifty years ago, the state was the world’s source for rubber, glass, steel. Goodyear, Owens-Corning, and Youngstown Sheet & Tube — these grand Ohio firms employed tens of thousands of people. Justin Gest, an expert on transatlantic working-class despair, tells me that steel in somewhere like Youngstown, a steel center not far from the Pennsylvania border, was the 20th-century equivalent to Silicon Valley. A George Mason University professor and author of a book on the city, he describes how locals used to say that as long as graphite from the mills fell like black snow onto their windshields each morning, they knew times were good. “They would wipe it off with their fingers,” Gest recalls, “and look at each other and say, ‘this is gold dust’.”

In September 1977, the dust dried up. Youngstown Sheet & Tube shuttered. Automation, globalization, and dated, uncompetitive factories meant that 5,000 workers became jobless overnight. Over the next few years, another 41,000 lost their jobs in Youngstown’s Mahoning Valley, alongside another 1.2 million manufacturing posts across the ex-industrial Midwest. From 2000-2011, a further 5.4 million American manufacturing jobs vanished too. Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed chronicles the world of low-paying, low-status gigs that arose in the aftermath.

Perhaps that timing explains the book’s success. The author of 21 books and a regular contributor to all the “right” publications — The New York Times, Harper’s, The Nation — Ehrenreich was for decades a staple of liberal American life. Yet Nickel and Dimed was without doubt her critical and commercial hit, becoming a cultural sensation basically overnight. Educated literati gobbled up so many copies you’d think a tofu smashburger lay hidden in its pages. A Times bestseller for weeks, it became a staple of college courses right across the country.

Yet if we “anywheres” wallowed in the opportunities for performative empathy that Nickel and Dimed provided, former Ohio giants like Akron and Toledo — and Youngstown — remained what Gest calls “post-traumatic” communities. This isn’t merely a question of lost income. Rather, vanished respectability and self-value spawned a kind of spiritual vertigo. “They seemed unmoored, untethered from their families and communities,” says Andrew Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins sociologist, of America’s white working class. Without purposeful labor and social ties, divorce, alcoholism, and anomie enveloped whole towns. Sure enough, Youngstown became famous not for its black gold, but for drugs and divorce. By the Eighties, it had become the murder capital of the United States.

Nickel and Dimed appeared just as the second wave of deindustrialization crested — leaving millions of Americans stranded in its wake. One of Ehrenreich’s most powerful interviews is with a woman called Colleen, who cleans the homes of rich folk in Cape Cod. “I don’t want what they have… But what I would like is to be able to take a day off now and then… and still be able to buy groceries.” Yet if stories like these inspired millions of Americans to wring their hands in tandem, Ehrenreich’s book did not, as its blurb proclaimed, “change the way America perceives its working poor”. Elections came and candidates went and nothing changed for the working class, except for the slow downward spiral. All the while, many liberals were content with putting “Hope” posters in their front-facing windows, safe in the knowledge that Obama’s post-racial utopia was just around the corner. As for economics, it turned out that neoliberalism had its upsides, especially for that class of nimble, educated workers that gravitated towards Ehrenreich’s book in the first place.

At the tail end of the Great Recession, 60% of college-educated Americans described their personal finances as “excellent” or “good”. Non-college whites, and non-college minorities for that matter, felt very differently. Things were especially tough in Ohio. If its footballing woes weren’t bad enough, Cleveland became known as the “ground zero” for the nation’s foreclosure crisis. Once the calamity ebbed, nearly half of the state’s remaining manufacturing jobs had disappeared. By 2013, Ohio’s median income was a fifth lower than what it had been in 2000.

Voting twice for Obama, Ohio’s working-class voters hardly expected miracles. Yet back in 2009, America’s first black president possessed both a mandate and massive congressional majorities. He could have used that authority to empower labor, not least by repealing the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which significantly restricted union activities. And if that was a bridge too far, a robust form of negative income tax could have offered Americans like Colleen a future. A less ambitious subsidized childcare program would, at least, have made low-wage work pay. But if Obamacare was surely a good start, it finally proved rather weak sauce.

And as Ehrenreich warned us, “they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth”. So when Donald Trump came to Ohio in 2015, pledging to bring back jobs — so fervently that even he urged the MAGA faithful not to “sell your house” before the good times returned — the state’s economic losers understandably responded. “They’ve tried absolutely everything,” is how Gest puts it. “And they continue to feel like globalization’s losers. And you can’t really blame them.” Outraged that their lives and communities were upended, they voted for the one candidate who spoke most directly to their concerns. And more than once too: in the three presidential elections from 2016, Trump has won Ohio, that erstwhile bellwether, by an average of nine points.

That first triumph in the Rust Belt shocked America’s liberal professional class. And, in another moment of publishing kismet, it was at this point that Gest’s study of transatlantic working-class populism appeared. He recalls the earnest book tours during Trump’s first term. As he puts of white working-class America: “There was this sort of receptivity to better understanding their viewpoint, their perspectives and their life experiences.” Then came 2020, the Capitol riot, and 2024. In the aftermath, Gest observes a sea change in the liberal professional class. “There was a sense,” Gest suggests, “that no one was prepared to make the political compromises required to appeal to them.” Nearly half of liberal voters refuse to even share the same air as a Trump supporter. I’ve seen this transition myself. To quote one of my former grad-school colleagues: “Fuck you, if you voted for [Trump].”

Sure, Democratic elites say the right words. “The majority of Americans,” the party’s National Committee Chair lately conceded, “now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites.” But words, not action, tell the tale. And, in Congress, the number of working-class Democrats is almost nil. The party’s most high-profile “working-class” avatars, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, are private-school preppies cosplaying in Carhartt and hoodies. Fetterman, a Harvard grad, famously used his mayorship of hardscrabble Braddock, Pennsylvania as a political launching pad. Other than turning an abandoned car dealership into his groovy loft, his adopted town is still on its back.

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As for Ohio, the Democrats’ best hope — and a faint one at that — is Sherrod Brown. To be fair, the gravel-voiced former senator holds policy positions that jibe with working-class voters. An opponent of free trade, he delights what remains of organized labor. Yet Brown is also married to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and recently relocated from blue-collar Cleveland to Bexley, a smart Columbus suburb. The party’s frontrunner for Secretary of State, meanwhile, is a self-funding cancer doctor. At least Amy Acton, the likely Democratic candidate for governor, is a working-class kid from Youngstown. It’s just a pity she led Ohio’s Covid response, gaining praise from The New York Times and earning a “Profile in Courage” prize from the Kennedys. Needless to say, many working-class Ohioans weren’t amused, with public pressure ultimately forcing Acton to resign her post as the state’s public health honcho.

Of course, the midterms are guaranteed for MAGA. Gas is up. Trump’s polls are down. And, more fundamentally, the President’s promises of a heartland revival have proved largely illusory. At the end of his first term, manufacturing jobs had slightly declined from 12.4 to 12.2 million. Even a pro-Trump analyst admits that any pre-Covid surge in industrial jobs happened outside the Rust Belt. A year into Trump’s second term, meanwhile, America is down 100,000 factory jobs. In short, the Democrats could easily score a Buckeye State upset come November. In the long-term, though, a party of, by, and for the professional middle class will lose working-class Ohio, the industrial Midwest, and, with it, America. Kyle Kondik is surely right when he says that “the old labor-Left tradition amongst white [working class] ethnics just died out, and Trump was the kill shot to it”.

To Ehrenreich’s credit, she grasped all this. Growing up working class, and then sweating and toiling with her Nickel and Dimed colleagues, she developed real sympathy for social untouchables. As she admitted of blue-collar support for MAGA: “My tradition — the tradition I come from of white working-class people — did not look well on billionaires or bosses or anybody in charge.” The difference between Ehrenreich and my tribe is that we have no problem with bosses and elites so long as it’s us commanding the heights.

Ehrenreich died in 2022, aged 81, her dream of a new America unrealized. All the same, she remains prophetic — just not in the way she hoped. She had longed for a politics that put the dignity of the working man and woman at the center. What she got was Trump, using hollowed-out factories for photo-ops. Even so, her book remains a vivid chronicle of the nation’s largest voting demographic’s fall from economic stability, social respectability, and existential meaning. Until rich liberals take the time to understand that other America, let alone start fixing things, they’ll remain the Cleveland Browns of politics.