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.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the essay that observed the moment when all of this began: Tom Wolfe’s August 1976 cover story for New York, published under a headline that lodged itself permanently in the language: “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” It was Wolfe at his most gleeful and profanely merciless, a 10,000-word safari through Human Potential Movement talks, encounter groups, Aquarian communes, and the new therapeutic religions, which pointed toward a single insight. Americans had discovered a subject more absorbing than God, country, or class: themselves. The great national project of the age was self-actualization. “Let’s talk about Me,” Wolfe wrote, and he meant it as the era’s Lord’s Prayer.      

Fifty years later, the Me Decade is best understood as more than just a diagnosis for the 1970s, that itchy, sweaty waiting room wedged between the revolutionary ’60s and the acquisitive ’80s. The essay now feels like a Rosetta Stone for understanding the shift to permanent navel-gazing that followed the collapse of the postwar order. The ’60s promised to remake the world, and when the world declined to be remade, the great “we” of the New Left splintered into 1,000 private quests for meaning. In the mid-2020s, after the hyperpolitics and populist moments of the late 2010s and early 2020s burned out, Wolfe’s Third Great Awakening has returned in the form of self-care and therapeutic identity on the Left; and looksmaxxing, longevity, and personal sovereignty on the Right.

Rereading the essay now, it’s clear that Wolfe, the thin white duke of New Journalism, wasn’t simply mocking the narcissists. Across his books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, the author, who died in 2018, had watched the New Left and the counterculture at close range and seen the dream of political revolution giving way to the search for private revelation. By the bicentennial of the United States, he was performing what he called a “social autopsy” on the ’70s. Wrote Wolfe: “The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality — remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!).” 

Wolfe’s deeper claim was that this was something genuinely new under the sun. For most of human history, he argued, ordinary people had no self to speak of — not in the way we mean it. They understood themselves less as sovereign individuals than as a link in what he called the “great biological stream,” living not only their own lives, but those of their ancestors, their children, their neighbors. The self was a vehicle, not a destination. What changed, he believed, was money.

America’s postwar bargain between capital and labor had handed the working and middle classes — unevenly, and with enormous racial exclusions, but on a mass scale — more leisure, privacy, mobility, and bodily freedom than their grandparents could have dreamed of. The great question posed by midcentury American abundance was: now that the masses have security, leisure, and disposable income, what would they do with it? 

The hope, Jefferson’s hope and the labor movement’s hope and the hope of every civics teacher who ever lived, was that they would use it to become enlightened citizens. Some did, perhaps, but the rest — Wolfe said — bought ranch houses, ever-larger televisions, diet books, and the right to be left alone. “Once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s,” he wrote, “they did an astonishing thing, they took their money and ran … they discovered and started doting on Me.”

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Wolfe called this the Third Great Awakening because the self-serious seminars and encounter groups and Diet Coke Buddhisms had the structure of religion but had inverted its ancient formula. Where the old faiths began with self-abasement before something larger — God, the congregation, children, the dead — the new religion began, in his phrase, “with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short.” The sacred object was the self. You did not join to submit but to be affirmed or, as the kids say now, to be seen. It was the miserable little Protestant sinner reborn as buried treasure.

Denominations appeared across the ideological spectrum. On the Left, the energies of the ’60s diffused into the human-potential movement, mass-market psychology, communes, feminism, gay liberation, racial identity, and a boutique marketplace of occult and imported spiritualities. Among conservative Americans came charismatic Christianity, born-again politics, and the Jesus People, movements that spoke the language of salvation but placed enormous weight on personal testimony, personal crisis, and personal rebirth. For yuppies and upper-middle-class strivers — on both the Left and the Right — came the cult of the body: dieting, jogging, aerobics. These groups often hated one another, but all shared the belief that the inherited self was inadequate and the chosen self might be glorious.

By the end of the decade, Wolfe wasn’t alone in sensing that something had cracked in America. In mid-1979, Jimmy Carter delivered what history lazily remembers as the “malaise” speech, although the 39th president never used the word. Officially an address on energy, it became a diagnosis of a country losing its appetite for sacrifice, common purpose, and the future. That same year, the heterodox historian and social critic Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism, which offered a darker, Freudian analysis of the Me Decade. 

Lasch’s narcissist wasn’t simply vain, because vanity is almost too healthy a word for the creature he described. Lasch’s American, rather, was psychically dependent on recognition, terrified of aging, suspicious of the future, estranged from the past, and unable to locate himself inside any stable order beyond therapeutic self-preservation. Carter, Lasch, and Wolfe differed enormously, but all three understood that the old postwar world was giving way to a society in which the individual self would become the central arena of politics, religion, consumption, health, and meaning (as it happens, Carter staffers hosted Lasch at the White House to discuss his runaway best-seller; to have been a fly on the wall!).

What none of them could have known was how durable — and how renewable — that hyperindividualism would become. The obvious objection is that the ’70s ended, and the ’80s, ’90s and everything since have looked rather different. The hippies got haircuts and jobs. Reagan arrived to explain that the void in your private life was actually a tax problem, and “Morning in America” turned a spiritual crisis back into a consumer proposition. The yuppies swapped mantras for corporate mergers. Conservatives found purpose in the flag after 9/11; liberals found purpose in Obama. The inward turn looks, from a distance, like one phase among several.

But ultimately, what the last 50 years have proved is that freedom from society — freedom from the human chain, from the obligations of the democratic experiment — has only been part of the ideal. What people also wanted was recognition — to be seen not by the neighbor or the congregation, whose gaze came bundled with obligations, but by the only thing that now seems to confer reality: the spectacle, the media discourse, the national screen. 

That craving for recognition found a perfect delivery mechanism in the smartphone and social media. Your phone’s central demand — the thing it asks of you dozens of times a day — is that you perform, curate, optimize, and, above all monitor, the self. And while “phones bad” may be the most exhausted take in America, the point isn’t that social media rotted our brains. It’s that social media offer the infrastructure the first Me Decade lacked: continuous self-regard with measurable feedback that’s always on, where every injury becomes content, every hobby a possible side hustle, and every political position both an opinion and a costume. It even swallows its own antidote: log off, move to the country, bake bread, cultivate the simple, local life — congratulations, you’re making content about the moral superiority of not making content. The exit door opens into the gift shop.

You can measure the deepening in the negative space left by everything Americans have quietly stopped doing. This is the story Robert Putnam told in Bowling Alone, published in 2000, and every line on his chart has kept sliding. In 2020, membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque fell below half of American adults for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade series. Barely 1 in 10 workers belongs to a labor union. Each week, two local newspapers stop publishing; a quarter of adults told Pew they hadn’t read even part of a book last year; off-cycle municipal elections draw a rounding error of the electorate. The Rotary Club, the Girl Scouts, the precinct meeting — the dense mesh that, for Tocqueville, sustained American democracy — has thinned to gossamer.

The present looks more like Wolfe’s 1976 than we care to admit. The engine of the ’70s was the failure of the ’60s. Fast-forward, and you can see that the years from roughly 2016 through the early 2020s were America’s most feverishly political stretch in generations, an instance of what the historian Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics”: intense politicization without durable organizations or proportionate consequences. On one flank stood a populist insurgency that promised to burn down the establishment and drain the swamp. On the other, the Great Awokening, a convulsion that swept through universities, newsrooms and corporate America promising a national reckoning. Both were maximalist, and both failed to build the transformed society their rhetoric advertised.

And what does thwarted revolutionary energy do when it has nowhere durable to go? As it did after 1968, it goes toward the one realm that still seems transformable, the self. It splinters into private quests for meaning — the pattern documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis keeps tracing in his video essays such as The Century of the Self, and the one Bono identified back in 1981 when he sang, “I can’t change the world / But I can change the world in me.” 

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You can see it split down the familiar seam. On the Left in the late ’70s, disillusion flowed into the New Age and the human-potential movement, into a rediscovered occult, modern art, and academia, and a smorgasbord of invented and imported religions. Today, it flows into many of the same things but rebranded as “self-care,” a term associated with Audre Lorde’s 1988 description of caring for herself during cancer as “an act of political warfare,” and since domesticated into a marketing category for Johnson & Johnson and expensive spas. It now flows into astrology, which is newly commercialized through subscription apps and personalized notifications, and into the figure of the witch reborn as a political identity with the imagined power to “hex” Trump. A generation that lit a candle for George Floyd in 2020 now lights a scented candle in the bathtub.

And on the Right, we see the mirror image. The ’70s had the cult of fitness, the sudden national mania for jogging, aerobics and dieting, the body as a project to be perfected. The overlapping worlds of MAHA, the manosphere, and Silicon Valley have looksmaxxing and testosterone infusions, ice baths and the carnivore diet, along with the tech billionaire spending millions to reverse his own aging and streaming his blood work to the world. It is the cult of the body again, but now with the promise cranked up from mere fitness to immortality — forever youth, death itself reframed as a solvable engineering problem. 

For all the tedious arguments about who is and is not woke, both sides now qualify in Wolfe’s older and more useful sense of the word awakening: each is trying to fashion a self strong enough to survive the collapse of everything the self was once supposed to belong to.

This is also why so much of our politics feels counterfeit even when the emotions appear sincere. In the Me Decade, Wolfe sardonically noted that journalists of his own time compulsively applied the F-word (fascism) to hippies, Scientologists, and Moonies, then reminded them that the term derives from the fasces: sticks bound into a single, unbreakable bundle. Whatever else Trumpism may be, including a movement with real authoritarian appetites, it isn’t fascism. It doesn’t ask its followers to dissolve their personalities into a common national will. 

Trumpism offers almost the opposite fantasy: national restoration through the elevation of a man who appears gloriously free from every obligation, inhibition, and shame that binds ordinary people. It is cheap, televisual, consumerist, and American — and it demands no genuine self-abnegation. It is Spirit Halloween nationalism, a longing for the symbols of midcentury cohesion without the institutions that made such cohesion possible. Trump himself is perhaps the purest Me Decade product America has elevated: a man of appetites, brands, and grievances whose supporters love him precisely because he appears unbound, unashamed, and entirely himself.

Likewise, much of what passed for radical Left-wing politics in the last decade consisted of locating yourself on the grid of identity and curating a public self certified as virtuous. It offered the profoundest pleasures of the Me Decade — the look inward, the moral distinction, the separation from the unenlightened — while allowing the seeker to experience all of it as selflessness. 

None of this is a forever destiny. There is a backlash now, a genuine one. You can feel it stirring in the emergence of in-person reading clubs, and the sudden fashions among Zoomers for organized religion, “third places,” and “touching grass.” It’s also visible in the small revolt against phones, AI, and the data centers that power them. I have written in praise of it in these pages. But it is worth being honest about the scale of this counter-movement: withdrawal from society is the mainstream, and the return to it is still a hobby. 

We are now half a century into the inward gaze, and we are not climbing out. We are, at most, coming up for air. Wolfe’s cruel joke was that Americans had discovered Me. Our problem is that, 50 years later, we haven’t found a reason to drop the mirror, and we’re more than ever transfixed.