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.

The Roy family occupies the most rarefied level of globe-trotting oligarchs. Dropping down a rung or two on the pyramid of power, consider the moral ecology inhabited by the broader gentility: the salaried decision-makers and ideas-managers who service the global arrangement from various departments of the ideological apparatus. They may work in NGOs, the governing bodies of the EU, corporate journalism, HR departments, the celebrity-industrial complex, the universities, Big Tech, etc. They, too, enjoy a kind of freedom, but it is decidedly not that of the high-spirited criminals depicted in Succession. So far from living “beyond good and evil”, this broader class of cosmopolitans asserts its freedom through its moralism, precisely. In particular, they have broken free of the claims of allegiance made upon them by the particular communities they emerge from.

How does this work, psychologically? The idea of a common good has given way to a partition of citizens along the lines of a moral hierarchy – one that just happens to mirror their material fortunes (as in Calvinism). Instead of feeling bound up in a shared fate with one’s countrymen, one develops an alternate solidarity that is placeless. The relatability across national borders that the gentlefolk feel in one another’s company — the gracious ease and trust, the shared points of reference in high-prestige opinion — has something to do with their uniformly high standing in the moral hierarchy that divides citizen from citizen within their own nations. The decision-making class has discovered that it enjoys the mandate of heaven, and with this comes certain permissions; certain exemptions from democratic scruple.

The permission structure is built around grievance politics. Very simply: if the nation is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, I owe it nothing. More than that, conscience demands that I repudiate it. Hannah Arendt spelled out this logic of high-minded withdrawal from the claims of community in the essays she wrote in response to the protest movements of the 1960s. Conscience “trembles for the individual self and its integrity,” appealing over the head of the community to a higher morality. The latter is discerned in a highly subjective, personal way. The heroic pose struck by Thoreau in Civil Disobedience is the model for this kind of moralistic anti-politics of conscience, in which the good man may be quite opposed to the one called a good citizen.

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In The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch spelled out in greater detail the role that claims of racial and sexual oppression play in securing release from allegiance to the nation — not just for those who identify as its victims, but for those with the moral sensitivity to see victimisation where it may not be apparent, and who make this capacity a touchstone of their identity. It becomes a token of moral elevation by which we recognise one another, and distinguish ourselves from the broader run of citizens. Both Lasch and Arendt argue that black Americans serve a crucial function for the white bourgeoisie. As the emblem and proof of America’s illegitimacy, they anchor a politics of repudiation in which the idea of a common good has little purchase.

This illegitimacy transcends any particular historical facts about slavery and segregation. Indeed it transcends America, as one can surmise by the ease with which American grievance politics has been exported throughout the Western world. In this we sometimes see the use of American historical references that have been weirdly transposed, as when a house once lived in by Rosa Parks was relocated from Detroit to Berlin, the financial seat of the European Union. (Under the empire of Christendom, the market for material relics from the Passion of Christ was similarly global; they left the holy land and ended up in various seats of earthly power.) Most recently, the transatlantic festival of George Floyd attests to the fact that it isn’t simply America that stands accused.

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The social order is corrupt, then. The labour movement once had an alternative order to offer in its stead, drawing on the socialist tradition. It was one that included African-Americans – not as African-Americans but as workers. And this movement was fairly successful. The pressures that organised labour brought to bear on business and the state helped to secure America’s brief period of shared prosperity, lasting roughly from the end of WWII to the 1970s.

What happened then? The new prominence of the term “repressed” in the 1960s is significant, and marks a shift into a new terrain of psychologised politics. The object of attack for the “new Left” was no longer laissez-faire capitalism but “society”, the Freudian superego more or less, with its insistence on standards of behaviour that are binding on all. Arendt and Lasch both identify this attack on shared standards as the decisive inflection point in our turn away from a politics of the common good. Society is taken to be inherently oppressive, and discredited in the name of liberation.

One can find such an idea in a selective reading of Freud, for whom there is an inherent conflict between self and society. But for Freud, reconciling oneself to this conflict and entering into the world of shared meaning and exchange, indeed identifying with it, is how one becomes an adult. The world does not love you simply for being you, as your mommy does. One holds oneself accountable to prevailing norms, or else remains trapped in infantile narcissism.

The Left’s posture of liberationism provided an interpretive frame in which the deadly riots and wider explosion of urban crime in the 1960s was to be understood as political rather than criminal. This interpretation played a key role in the wider inversion: it is “society” that is revealed to be criminal. The utility of urban rioting for the new Left lay in the fact that it was thought to carry an insight into the illegitimacy of even our most minimum standards of behaviour. The moral authority of the black person, as victim, gave the bourgeoisie permission to withdraw its allegiance from the social order, just as black people were gaining fuller admittance to it.

Consider the images that had so impressed the nation in the 1950s and lead to the passage of civil rights legislation: marchers demanding equal treatment, and being willing to go to jail as a demonstration of this allegiance to the rule of law, impartially applied. The civil rights movement began as an attack on the injustice of double standards; it was a patriotic appeal to the common birthright of citizenship, as against the local sham democracy of the South. Notably, the civil rights activists of this time wore suits and ties, the costume of adult obligations and standards of comportment. But in a stunning reversal achieved by the new Left working in concert with the Black Power movement, Lasch points out, “the idea of a single standard was itself attacked as the crowning example of ‘institutional racism’.” Such standards were said to have no other purpose than keeping black people in their place. This shift was fundamental, for shared standards are what make for a democratic social order, as against the ancien régime of special privileges and exemptions.

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For the new Left, then, it was not capitalism but the democratic social order altogether that was the source of oppression — not just of black people, or of workers, but of us, the college bourgeoisie. The civil rights movement of black Americans became the template for subsequent claims by women, gays and transgender persons, each based on a further discovery of moral failing buried deep in the heart of America. Hence a further license, indeed mandate, granted to individual conscience, as against the claims of the nation.

But the black experience retains a special role as the template that must be preserved. The black man is specially tuned by history to pick up the force field of oppression, which may be hard to discern in the more derivative cases that are built by analogy with his. Therefore, his condition serves a wider diagnostic and justificatory function. If it were to improve, denunciation of “society” would be awkward to maintain and, crucially, my own conscience would lose its self-certifying independence from the community. My wish to be free of the demands of society would look like mere selfishness.

The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained, African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. Somehow these free agents, ostensibly guided by individual conscience, have coalesced into something resembling a tribe, one that is greatly angered by rejection of its moral expertise.

The notion of expertise is important. There appears to be a circle of mutual support between political correctness, technocratic administration, and the bloated educational machinery. Because smartness (as indicated by educational credentials) confers title to rule in a technocratic regime, the ruling class adopts a distinctly cognitivist view: virtue does not consist of anything you do or don’t do, it consists of having the correct opinions. This is attractive, as one may then exempt oneself from the high-minded policies one inflicts upon everyone else. For example, the state schools are turned into laboratories of grievance-based social engineering, with generally disastrous effects, but you send your own children to expensive private schools. You can de-legitimise the police out of a professed concern for black people, and the explosion of murder will be confined to black parts of the city you never see, and journalists are not interested in. In this way, you can be magnanimous while avoiding the moral pollution and that comes from noticing reality.

With this clerisy’s systemic lack of “skin in the game”, the idea of a common good becomes a weak abstraction. Maintaining one’s own purity of opinion, on the other hand, has real psychic consequence, as it is the basis for one’s feeling of belonging — not to the community one happens to reside in, but to the tribe of the elect.

If the ideal of a de-moralised public sphere was a signature aspiration of liberal secularism, it seems we have entered a post-secular age. Populism happened because it became widely noticed that we have transitioned from a liberal society to something that more closely resembles a corrupt theocracy.

The book had been published in Britain in the spring of 1995 but as February and then March 2020 came and went, we were all rather distracted. For a few months the pandemic was so overwhelming that even normal politics died down — only for it to inflame again, more incendiary and toxic than ever, at the beginning of June.

Across the US — and around the world — graduates and young professionals took to the streets, leading a bizarre anti-revolution in which immigrant shops were ransacked and working-class neighbourhoods forced to defend themselves from violent college-educated protesters and their allies.

Here was a revolution backed by almost all billion-dollar businesses and public institutions bar the US presidency, and whose leaders had almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment. Their demands were for more diversity and racial equality, already sacred ideas among the cognitive elite, all of it accompanied by bizarre, quasi-religious public declarations of faith.

It was the Revolt of the Elites.

Christopher Lasch never lived to see his great work published, but since his death from cancer in February 1994, it has developed a cult following among unorthodox sections of Right and Left. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy warned of a growing cultural and social divide caused by a rapacious free market and the radical politics of the Sixties, one that would lead to extremism and division.

Yet what Lasch saw in 1994, but which has only now reached its apogee in 2020, was how social revolution would be pushed forward by the radical rich and resisted by the rest. “It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution,” he wrote: “their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators.” If this continued, then the top strata of society would become increasingly alienated by their society and country, and turn against it, something that has come to pass with the first corporate-backed revolutionary movement in history.

Lasch was born in 1932 in Omaha, Nebraska, the heart of the original populism movement in the Midwest, and it was populism and the progressive era that would be the focus of his teaching, at the University of Iowa and later Rochester, New York.

He came from one Left-wing intellectual family and married into another; his father Robert was a Pulitzer-winning journalist, and after Harvard the younger Lasch married Nell, the daughter of Harvard historian and prominent liberal intellectual Henry Steele Commager (who, like Lasch’s father, outlived him).

Lasch was thoroughly on the Left during the 1960s, indeed he moved further in that direction, but as Alan Ryan wrote soon after his death, he “emphasised what many on the Left have thought to be the guilty secret of American liberalism: its affection for corporate organisation, and a thoroughly manipulative view of the relationship between the new social sciences and the populace whose lives the liberals wanted to improve”.

Lasch’s most successful book, the 1979 The Culture of Narcissism, was highly critical of American society’s self-obsession and was hugely influential, partly thanks to the support of President Jimmy Carter. Indeed, Carter so liked the book that it inspired his election speech on “the American malaise”, a misjudgement said to have cost him support against the cheery, optimistic Ronald Reagan.

The Culture of Narcissism is still read and widely quoted, although the heavy reliance on psychoanalysis seems somewhat dated (or at least out-of-fashion) today. Yet Roger Kimball wrote of it that “What one witnessed in its pages was the spectacle of an intelligent, politically committed man of the Left struggling to make sense of a culture in the grip of a radicalism that had turned out to be almost entirely bogus.”

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As the Reagan era went on, Lasch was increasingly critical of, and criticised by, both of the mainstream camps in American thought. His opposition to divorce alienated feminists, as did his assertion that economic integration into the workforce did not necessarily mean emancipation; but neither did his thinking chime with the mainstream conservative movement then dominated by the legacy of William Buckley.

Tragically, by the time that Lasch came to write his great work, he was dying of leukaemia, and the book was completed only with the help of his daughter Elizabeth. The title was a play on Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, written in the inter-war period when it seemed reasonable to worry that liberal values might not survive democracy and the rise of the workers. Yet by the end of the century Lasch observed that it was the rich who threatened democracy.

Revolt of the Elites comprises 13 essays on America’s “democratic malaise” — he liked that word — divided into three parts, the “intensification of social divisions” in America, the decline of public discourse and finally the spiritual core of the country’s crisis, headlined “The Dark Night of the Soul”.

Throughout the book runs Lasch’s moral core, his support for the average man, something which inspired his hostility to the dominant ideologies of Left and Right. He strongly opposed economic inequality because it was corrupting; highly unequal societies tend to bring with them graft, extremism, violence and outside interference, eliminating Republican virtue. Lasch lamented that in America, the top tenth owned more than half the country’s wealth, a warning that now seems as quaint as newspapers in the placid 1950s worried about Teddy Boys. The decline of pensions and savings, and the rise of what we now call zero-contract hours, would lead to the collapse of the middle class and with it the decline of the nation.

Lasch also saw that the eroding of a common culture, values and standards, which was the major legacy of 60s cultural radicalism, ended up creating a gulf between social classes. If there were no common values to hold people together, what was to stop the rich and powerful trampling over the rest of society, cloaking their self-interest in furious self-righteousness?

And so it has come to pass, with the rise of woke capital, an amoral business model in which CEOs make thousands of times more than their lowest earners, all the while distracting attention with support for therapeutic but increasingly extreme politics.

It was Lasch who saw more clearly than anyone that the New Left had a symbiotic relationship with the culture of modern corporate capitalism — emphasising choice, therapy, self-actualisation, narcissism and the rejection of limits, not just physical but financial and moral.

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Lasch also saw meritocracy as a sham, or at least “a parody of democracy”, because neither social nor geographic mobility were adequate substitutes for real social justice. “Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites,” he wrote: “if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognise so few obligations to their predecessors of to the communities they profess to lead.”

Although not a Marxist, Lasch saw politics through the prism of class, arguing that elites of both Left and Right had the same economic interests. “Even when they disagree about everything else,” he argued, they “have a common stake in suppressing a politics of class.”

Indeed, the fashionable social causes of the 21^st century not only ignore class, but actually further increase hostility to the poor. Evidence suggests that thinking about “white privilege” reduces sympathy for people struggling in poverty, while the association of bigotry with the non-college educated has normalised snobbery to an almost pre-modern degree. People once might have sneered at less educated people, but they would have done so privately at least; now comedy routinely makes the less educated and less geographically connected its punchline.

“The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare,” he wrote: “in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) 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.”

Yet whereas conservatives at the time saw the market as the solution, Lasch often viewed it as a problem, capitalism being in symbiosis with radicalism. By encouraging instant gratification and the ephemeral, especially when it came to jobs, the market undermined the family, which he called “a haven in a heartless world”. The very things that radicals attacked — “the authoritarian family, repressive sexual morality, literary censorship, the work ethic, and other foundations of bourgeois order” — have already been “weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself”.

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Because of the expansion of higher education, elites had also developed a stronger sense of their own identity and culture, spoke increasingly to each other and began to see the “people” not as a cause to sponsor but as the problem, something well-observed already during the 1968 protests.

Wealthy families had traditionally settled in one location, often over several generations. Many economic leaders were exploitative or cruel, but many others had a sense of responsibility and pride in their home towns; proximity and the idea of posterity encouraged a mindset in which elites felt some responsibility to those who worked for them, and this helped to reduce income inequality to its lowest level at mid-century. With the growing free movement of capital and of people what little connection was gone, and with it any sense of sympathy.

Lasch wrote: “The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it; a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middle-brow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy. Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture.”

In contrast multiculturalism “suits them to perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar in which exotic cuisines, exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic tribal customs can be savoured indiscriminately, with no questions asked and no commitments required”.

All of these trends, towards knowledge economy winners cut off by geography, education and sensibility, would lead to a situation where “The talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues.”

Worse still Lasch, while not a practising Christian, understood the importance of religion, and that without it politics would inspire “the feeling of self-righteousness that is so commonly confused with religion”. It would bring all the negative hallmarks of faith, the fanaticism and intolerance, but none of the devotion, the selflessness, the agonising.

The trends that Lasch observed would only accelerate after 2001, following China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation, the further erosion of America’s manufacturing base, the collapse of its skilled working class, and the increasing radicalisation of elites who benefited from globalisation and came to identify with it. This would result in the election of perhaps the most grotesque narcissist to ever lead Lasch’s country, and when Trump was about to be inaugurated Ross Douthat identified Revolt of the Elites as one of two books that foresaw the era, calling it a “polemic against the professional upper class’s withdrawal from the society it rules and a critique of the ways in which multiculturalism and meritocracy erode patriotism and democracy”.

Lasch has also come to gather a following in Britain where thinkers vaguely described as post-liberal, Blue Labour or Red Tory follow his analysis of capitalism, radicalism and the decline of the family. But his influence has seeped into mainstream British politics, too, as the Conservative Party has begun to attract voters alienated by the increasing values divide the great social critic wrote about. This weekend, Michael Gove cited Lasch as one of the thinkers who foresaw the failures of meritocracy, the great divide between the city and the town, and the mutual alienation it would bring. A quarter of a century after his prophetic book, we’re all living in Lasch’s world now.