Christopher Lasch and the revolting elites

Written for Kosovo Online by Srdjan Garcevic, founder of The Nutshell Times

This year marks thirty years since the passing of Christopher Lasch, the great American historian and cultural critic, whose works from "The Culture of Narcissism" and "The True and Only Heaven" provided a novel look into the problems with the American and the wider Western, society and politics. His last work, the posthumously published "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy," seems especially prescient on the eve of the US elections.

Leafing through this three-decade-old book, one finds many causes of the current collapse of trust in the elites: from technocratic aversion to responsibility and even accepting basic limits of reality to academia's reluctance to be open to scrutiny and provide analysis rather than activism in society.

In Lasch’s view, the technocratic, progressive elites have proven to be less willing to face the responsibilities of power and guiding the society not only compared to their aristocratic predecessors but also compared to the masses, who, in his view, tend not only to be more disciplined but also more realistic. This realism of the non-elites – their belief that there is something to the social structures of yore – was mocked and derided as "conservative" and even "fascist" by the elites, whose belief in constant progress meant that many of those structures were dismantled without anything to replace them and most commonly to the benefit of the elites.

This is most practically illustrated in how the elites embraced globalization in the 1990s. Local manufacturing in the US (and throughout the West) was off-shored as the former industrial workers were promised to be almost magically reskilled. While the already educated elite class benefited from the freed-up capital, the majority of the locals were left with decaying towns, ruptured social fabric, and little to give them joy apart from opioids, which were again pushed on them by the medical expert complex. In the course of a decade, they ended up being derided as “bitter” for having anti-immigration and anti-trade sentiment, then called “deplorable," and finally “garbage," by the elites who promised "hope" and "joy," along with care for the vulnerable.

However, while Lasch foresaw the danger that the narcissist progressivism, freed from noblesse oblige and responsibility, can wreak on non-elites, he also warned how elite institutions are rendered useless and how they can lead to an unstable society. Given his academic career, it is unsurprising that he primarily took aim at academia, which he saw as growing increasingly self-satisfied and unable to provide any guidance to the broader society. Lasch also saw the increased focus on racial politics as an attack on common standards necessary for meritocracy and the system's functioning. At the same time, he found the (psycho-)”therapeutic culture” particularly pernicious for healthy social bonds, as it encouraged narcissism.

Ultimately, burdened by these issues, society stops working even for the elites. The solution for Lasch is populism.

He sees it as “the authentic voice of democracy” with its "plain manners" and "straightforward speech," and most importantly because "it assumes that individuals are entitled to respect until they prove themselves unworthy of it, but it insists that they take responsibility for themselves." This, for him, is a good corrective for the overly permissive "humanitarian concern," which for him is just another way of refusing responsibility for the state of society.

In the decades following Lasch’s death, the US and the West have seen tremendous technological progress. However, they were also rocked by multiple financial crises, several unwinnable wars, and ultimately a pandemic that saw a worrying, if temporary, clamp down on civil liberties with no obvious benefit. All of these have left societies less equal and less prosperous for the median citizen, while those responsible have not faced any real consequences for their blunders. The rise of the non-Western powers who have avoided some of the pitfalls that Lasch warned about has added pressure on the Western elites. Still, almost thirty years after "The Revolt of the Elites," academia and established media in the West and the US wonder what makes their citizens turn towards populism and the plain-spoken people who dismiss fake concern and outrage culture.