The populism of Christopher Lasch

I have lately been fixated on the work of Christopher Lasch, having just finished his Revolt of the Elites after reading The Culture of Narcissism and The True and Only Heaven. While much of his work, especially his later work, is critical of the left, Lasch was historically a leftist himself. In the 1960s, he was a Marxist, before drifting more towards a syncretic blend of anti-capitalist populism and moderate moral conservatism.

Despite Lasch's admiration for plain and direct language, he can be somewhat difficult to read. Each chapter of his books is mostly self-contained and written as a historical narrative sprawling across hundreds of different perspectives on some given topic. How he characterizes each author hints at what he thinks of them, but Lasch doesn't always really make his position clear until the last section of each chapter, where he pulls all the various threads together. Lasch has his right-wing admirers, but these "final sections" of his books' chapters make his position pretty clear, and clearly not right wing. In the first division of Revolt of the Elites, Lasch critiques of what we might now call "wokeness," what was then called "political correctness," and by which he broadly means a managerial, reformist attitude towards social "improvement" that emphasizes social division rather than common good. This may make him sound like a member of the right, but his "final sections" always makes it clear: the most important social inequity and the one always ignored in "culture war" discussions: class. Concentrated economic power and its corresponding political power.

Lasch is a severe social critic, railing against the decline of education, the degradation of moral standards, the corruption of our political system, and so on. However, readers will notice that at no point does he criticize the people. He is a moralizer and expects high standards for members of a democracy, and laments, for example, the poor political education of American citizens. But he is clearly and vehemently not an elitist. In his view, it is precisely elitism that has produced a weak civic culture: he instead, in his telling of the intellectual history of some topic of American life, identifies, roughly, his friends (populists) and his enemies (anti-populists), and critiques the latter group, who distrust the common people. In his view, it is the elitists, viewing themselves as the more "responsible" guardians of the public rule and distrusting the capacity of the people that have hollowed out education, media, and American civic life. In the anti-populist outlook he critiques, if the people cannot be trusted, then a culture which invests in civics is simply unnecessary: leave the governance of society to the experts. In other words, despite being a ruthless social critic and taking civic virtue and education seriously, he sounds precisely like the opposite of an out-of-touch academic railing against the failures of the common man.

What is fascinating to me, reading Revolt of the Elites, is how last week, so many of these ideas have been absorbed into the Democratic party: toning down "culture war" issues, with candidates instead focused on excellence of character mixed with economic populism. Take, for example, James Talarico, who recently won an extraordinary victory in Texas: he combines exacting moral (religious) conservatism with left-populist policies, railing against "the elites" and appealing not just to the material, but also moral identity of the common Texan. He does not patronize, nor does he pander: rather, he is, many ways, a populist in the Laschian mold (although Lasch himself is weary to speak highly of any politician), a figure who elevates the common man: both morally and materially. It remains to be seen what the future of this political vision holds.