Almost 40 Years Ago, Christopher Lasch Diagnosed The Rise Of Trump And Anti-Trump As Narcissism The historian and social critic knew that the political and cultural movements of the Sixties would have long-lasting consequences for American democracy.
By Gilbert T. Sewall
June 22, 2017 In his best-known book, “The Culture of Narcissism,” historian and social critic Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) outlined an emergent personality and style that have since taken control of elite and mass political culture. Appalled by the exploding therapeutic sensibility that promised freedom, creativity, and mental health, he argued prophetically in 1979 that self-expression and radical individualism could yield disastrous social results.
Lasch was surveying “a way of life that is dying—the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.”
Twenty-five years later, in his collection of essays, “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” he discerned the “venomous hatred” of sophisticates toward yeoman America. But only since his death has their revulsion toward “clingers” and “deplorables” become relentless and undisguised. Furthermore, despite all its blessings, the internet has changed the game, as it enables self-absorption and retreat from nature in ways that we still barely understand.
The Sixties Brought Us A New Class Of ElitesThe Sixties counterculture was not a proletarian or worker’s revolt, Lasch understood. The middle-class children of nation builders, patriots, and World War II fighters rejected “materialism” and cashiered bourgeois nationalism for the Magical Mystery Tour. By the end of the 20th century, they were steering institutions into a new regime. To these postwar elites, said Lasch, family values, mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, white racism, and retrograde views of homosexuals and women stood in the way of progress.
“Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language,” Lasch observed in 1987. “The question of the family,” he added, “which now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about, illustrates and supports the contention that the left has lost touch with popular opinion.”
In matters of family and more, advertising and pop psychology had created the “modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.” There was a basic conflict between family and feminism, Lasch contended.
In “The Revolt of the Elites,” Lasch argued that high-end liberals wanted to live in “a global bazaar” to be savored “with no questions asked and no commitments required.” Identities are post-national. “They send their children to private schools … and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them.” Many have “removed themselves from the common life” and “ceased to think of themselves as Americans.”
Our Cultural Revolution and Its ConsequencesBefore the 2016 election, Harvard University historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore recommended Lasch’s volume to explain current events to distressed liberals, and for good reason. Abandoning the left’s original intent to protect the common man, Lasch had concluded more than 30 years earlier, post-Sixties liberals went in for diversity, secularism and cultural revolution, forsaking interest in ordinary Americans.
Distressed by the left’s changing social priorities, and concerned by their devaluation and denial of the past, Lasch previewed the emerging priorities with alarm. “Hedonism, self-expression, doing your own thing, dancing in the streets, drugs, and sex are a formula for political impotence and a new despotism, in which a highly educated elite through its mastery of a modern society rule over an indolent population that has traded self-government for self-expression,” he wrote in 1969. “Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order,” he added later.
As did some other early critics of the Sixties, Lasch deviated from the prevailing countercultural critique of family, sex, sobriety, the work ethic, and other foundations of bourgeois order. He pointed to consumer capitalism’s voracious appetites and lure. “It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life—and much else besides.” On one hand, progressives wanted to set rules of enlightened political thought, Lasch realized; collaterally and unwisely, in his estimation, they sought to “extend the range of personal choice where most people feel the need for solid moral guidelines.”
The Post-War Generation Redefined America’s Virtues<..snip..>
http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/22/almost-40-years-ago-christopher-lasch-diagnosed-rise-trump-anti-trump-narcissism/
