I'm convinced that Lasch's intelligence limited his appeal. Being ahead of your time is a lonely occupation. Lasch is very much neglected in the realm of public and intellectual debate because his views would only serve to remind elites of how overrated they are. It would also serve to remind them of how their current political programs are intellectually and morally bankrupt. Lasch rightfully questioned the increasingly suicidal themes guiding Western civilization and no one was prepared to think at this level. It seems quite evident that modern societies increasingly show contempt for realities.
Besides being an exceptionally bright and perceptive man, I would describe Lasch as one of the last representatives of the wisdom of the elders in a rapidly declining white world. The waning of this authority has left us with an increasingly chaotic world that mindlessly embraces change and seems unable to appreciate the reality of limits. Eric Miller, while not necessarily exploring Lasch's ideas in great depth, does provide an interesting biographical account of the life of a man that embodied integrity and decency. We ignore such examples at our peril.
To get a taste of Lasch's political insightfullness, just read this article written in Tikkun in 1987:
In order to understand what's wrong with the right, we must first understand the basis of its appeal. The conservative revival cannot be dismissed as a "simple political reaction," as Michael Miles wrote some time ago, "whose point is to suppress a radical movement which by its nature poses a threat to the status quo distribution of power and wealth." Contemporary conservatism has a strong populist flavor, having identified itself with the aspirations of ordinary Americans and appropriated many of the symbols of popular democracy. It is because conservatives have managed to occupy so much of the ground formerly claimed by the left that they have made themselves an important force in American politics. They say with considerable justification that they speak for the great American middle class: hard working men and women eager to better themselves, who reject government handouts and ask only a fair chance to prove themselves. Conservatism owes its growing strength to its unembarrassed defense of patriotism, ambition, competition, arid common sense, long ridiculed by cosmopolitan sophisticates, and to its demand for a return to basics: to "principles that once proved sound and methods that once shepherded the nation through earlier troubled times," as Burton Pines puts it in his "traditionalist" manifesto, Back to Basics.
Far from defending the existing distribution of power, many conservatives, especially those who stress so-called social issues, deplore the excessive influence allegedly exercised by educated elites and see themselves as embattled defenders of values that run counter to the dominant values. They attribute most of the country's ills to the rise of a "highly educated, relatively affluent group which benefits more from America's riches than its less educated fellow countrymen" yet condemns the "values and institutions responsible for producing these riches." Members of this new class, according to Jeanne Kirkpatrick, "shape debate, determine agendas, define standards, and propose and evaluate policies." It is they who allegedly advocate unlimited abortion, attack religion and the family, criticize capitalism, destroy general education in the name of unlimited freedom of choice, replace basic subjects in the lower schools with sex education and values clarification, and promote a new ethic of hedonism and self-exploration. From a conservative point of view, a return to basics demands a democratic movement against entrenched interests, in the course of which traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
Even if it could be shown that conservatives misunderstand American society, exaggerate the power of the so-called new class, underestimate the power of the business class, and ignore the undemocratic implications of their own positions, it would still be important to understand how they can see themselves as underdogs in the struggle for the American future. The left, which until recently has regarded itself as the voice of the "forgotten man," has lost the common touch. Failing to create a popular consensus in favor of its policies, the left has relied on the courts, the federal bureaucracy, and the media to achieve its goals of racial integration, affirmative action, and economic equality. Ever since World War II, it has used essentially undemocratic means to achieve democratic ends, and it has paid the price for this evasive strategy in the loss of public confidence and support. Increasingly isolated from popular opinion, liberals and social democrats attempt to explain away opposition to economic equality as "working class authoritarianism," status anxiety, resentment, "white racism," male chauvinism, and proto-fascism. The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum. The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine. It has come to regard common sense--the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community--as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment. Because it equates tradition with prejudice, it finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language. Increasingly it speaks its own jargon, the therapeutic jargon of social science and the service professions that seems to serve mostly to deny what everybody knows.
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them "dialectically" as the birth pangs of a new order. The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of "alternative life-styles" and the growing new diversity of family types. Betty Friedan expresses the enlightened consensus when she says that Americans have to reject the "obsolete image of the family;' to "acknowledge the diversity of the families people live in now;" and to understand that a family, after all, in the words of the American Home Economics Association, consists simply of "two or more persons who share values and goals, and have commitments to one another over time." This anemic, euphemistic definition of the family reminds us of the validity of George Orwell's contention that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech. The plain fact of the matter--and this is borne out by the very statistics cited to prove the expanding array of "lifestyles" from which people can now choose--is that most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage. "Blended" or "reconstituted" families result from divorce, as do "single-parent families:" As for the other "alternative" forms of the family, so highly touted by liberals--single "families," gay "marriages," and such-it makes no sense to consider them as families and would still make no sense if they were important statistically, as they are not. They may be perfectly legitimate living arrangements, but they are arrangements chosen by people who prefer not to live in families at all, with all the unavoidable constraints that families place on individual freedom. The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement (one among many "alter-native" living arrangements) grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time, avoiding any constraints or demands as long as they don't make any demands of their own or "impose their own values" on others. The left's redefinition of the family encourages the illusion that it is possible to avoid the "trap" of involuntary association and to enjoy its advantages at the same time.
The question of the family, 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, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense. The presumption behind the older definition of the family is that ties of kinship and even of marriage and adoption are likely to be more demanding than ties of friendship and proximity. This is precisely why many people continue to value them. For most Americans, even for those who are disenchanted with their own marriages, family life continues to represent a stabilizing influence and a source of personal discipline in a world where personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger. A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals, rather belatedly, to concede that "`family' is not just a buzz word for reaction," as Betty Friedan puts it. But since these same liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family, their defense of families carries no conviction. They ask people to believe, moreover, that there is no conflict between feminism and the family. Most women, according to Friedan, want both feminism and the family and reject categorization as pro-family or anti-family, pro-feminist or anti-feminist. Most women are pragmatists, in other words, who have allowed "extremists" on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes and to create a "political polarization between feminism and the family.
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