The chapter on the “Revolt of the Elites” reads like a prophecy fulfilled almost 30 years after Lasch’s death. This book is highly recommended for the day and time that we live in. Christopher Lasch offered an explanation for the elites’ antipathy toward nationalism. He identified the elites as “a new class” of “symbolic analysts” whose livelihoods “rest not so much on the ownership of property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise.” Members of this new class are found in a wide variety of occupations, including “brokers, bankers, real estate promoters and developers, engineers, consultants of all kinds, systems analysts, scientists, doctors, publicists, publishers, editors, advertising executives, art directors, moviemakers, entertainers, journalists, television producers and directors, artists, writers, university professors.” Lasch pointed out that the market in which the new elites operate is international in scope, their fortunes tied to enterprises that operate across national boundaries. Having “more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not yet plugged into the network of global communications,” the elites’ loyalties are international rather than national.
Unlike the old aristocratic ruling class with their noblesse oblige, however, today’s cosmopolitan elites lack that sense of moral obligation, priding themselves on being suis generis meritocracy of the intelligent. As Lasch put it:
Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts.
In effect, globalization has turned the new class of elites into tourists in their own countries. According to economist and former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich, the new elite see themselves as “world citizens, but without accepting . . . any of the obligations that citizenship in a polity normally implies” because without national attachments, people have little inclination to make sacrifices or to accept responsibility for their actions. Their ties to the international culture of work, information and leisure render the new elites indifferent to the prospect of national decline. Instead of financing public services and the public treasury, the new elite invest their money in “self-enclosed enclaves” of private schools, private security guards, and even private systems of garbage collection. Having removed themselves from the common life, many of them have ceased thinking of themselves as nationals—as Americans, British, French, or Italian—altogether.
Then there is the new elite’s unqualified contempt for the masses. Some elites go beyond contempt to a spitefulness toward their fellow countrymen—the viciousness of which takes one’s breath away—for no reason other than a difference in policy preference. As Christopher Lasch put it, when confronted with resistance to their ideas, the elites “betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. . . . Simultaneously arrogant and insecure, the new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension.”
There is another dimension in the elites’ treatment of the masses which is more troubling than contempt and which puts democracy in peril. Ortega y Gasset had described the uppity masses as oppressively intolerant, “crushing” beneath them “everything that is different,” and imposing their banal notions on the elite with the “force of law.” In our time, however, Ortega’s characterization is more indicative of the elites’ attitude toward those who hold contrary beliefs and values.
The proper functioning of a democratic polity depends on pluralism or marketplace of ideas, wherein a variety of beliefs and opinions freely are aires, jostling and competing in the public arena. From this competition, the best ideas are most likely to emerge and triumph. It is that pluralism that is compromised by the elites’ intolerance for populist movements and their concerns.
Then there is the elites’ categorical rejection of and efforts to overturn electoral outcomes not to their liking. In the United States, Democrats refused to accept the results of the 2016 presidential election, insisting that Donald Trump fraudulently had won by conspiring with Russians. But on March 22, 2019, after a two-year, $25 million investigation, the long-awaited report from Robert Mueller, Special Counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded there was no evidence of a Trump-Russia collusion, nor had Trump committed any crime of obstruction of justice.
So alarmed was Christopher Lasch by the elites’ authoritarian impulse that he devoted his last work, Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, to that subject as a warning to us that democracies are being endangered from within. In Lasch’s words:
Once it was the “revolt of masses” that was held to threaten social order and the civilizing traditions of Western culture. . . . Today it is the elites, however—those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate—that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West. . . . “Diversity”—a slogan that looks attractive on the face of it—has come to mean the opposite of what it appears to mean. In practice, diversity turns out to legitimize a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion. . . . How much longer can the spirit of free inquiry and open debate survive under these conditions?
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Join or create book clubs
Choose books together
Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Frequently bought together
$10.07
Get it Apr 10 - 11
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Total price:
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Choose items to buy together.
Similar items that may ship from close to you
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Top reviews from other countries
M. M
Superb, essential reading for anyone who lives in the 21st century.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 2, 2022Woullllnboouboule
Fast shipment, bookin perfect shape!
Reviewed in France on February 25, 2020Cliente Amazon
Lectura imprescndible para comprender lo que está ocurriendo en EE.UU. en estos momentos
Reviewed in Spain on March 2, 2017