On the rare occasion when a serious thinker finds a wide audience, the basic reasons tend to be simple: They’ve captured some reality that many people have intuited but failed to articulate fully. Discovering a thinker who gets it feels like a homecoming, like the landscape has finally clicked into clear focus.
When that thinker has been dead and largely ignored for 20 years and the finders were children when he died, something more interesting is going on. This is the situation with the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, who died in 1994 but whose work has enjoyed a particular revival since 2016, especially among the young and politically engaged.
Lasch was never entirely forgotten. Some writers, including the great essayist George Scialabba, have been beating the Laschian drum for decades. Lasch was positively famous in his lifetime, and his sharp, idiosyncratic work cuts such a distinctive figure in American intellectual history that he has always maintained a small coterie of disciples. In the past few years, however, Lasch reading groups have sprung up among young Capitol Hill staffers, several new books have been published that were strongly influenced by his thought, and the millennial-staffed journal the Point now sells “Lasch 2020” t-shirts.
Why is Lasch having such a moment? His work offers a serious, unsparing criticism of liberalism — but launched on an unusual number of fronts. He was concerned for the future of the family, for instance, and like any good reactionary, he blamed its dissolution on heedless, individualistic lifestyle liberalism. But at the same time, like any good leftist, he also blamed the solvent power of economic liberalism. His thought traces the thread of selfish laissez-faire assumptions through a broad swath of American thinking and living and is skeptical alike of consumerism, capitalism, the welfare state, and the infantilizing role of the “helping professions,” such as social work and therapy. There’s plenty here for everyone to argue with.
Lasch’s target was, he wrote in his bestseller The Culture of Narcissism, the pox 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.” He believed that multifarious “liberations” have left us paralyzed, separated from the families, neighborhoods, and churches that might have given us stability and purpose. People no longer matured into citizens as they aged but rather became atomized consumers who were “perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious and bored.”
For Lasch, none of this sprang into being ex nihilo. As a Freudian, he saw our social arrangements, mistaken as they may be, as disguised stabs at fulfilling perennial human desires and thus read them with sympathy. Jacob Siegel, news editor at Tablet, told me that this is the source of Lasch’s lasting power: “After cutting through illusions, Lasch keeps going until he arrives past mere critique at an insight into the authentic human need, which the modern, illusory solution had hidden and left unsatisfied.”
Lasch was also a historian by training. He was attuned to the fact that our contemporary order emerged from a previous order, which emerged from an order before that. There is no illusion, in his work, that we have fallen to our current state from some prelapsarian Eden or that we are moving toward utopia. If, for instance, he feared for the future of the nuclear family, he also knew that it had itself displaced an older arrangement of multigenerational homes, for better and worse.
This ability to see better and worse, gains and losses, made Lasch a remarkably perceptive observer, locating small, hopeful glimmers in oft-overlooked places. Jon Baskin, a founding editor of the Point, said that one of Lasch’s deepest lessons for us might be “cultivating a humility toward the values of what he called ‘petty-bourgeois culture.’ You don’t do this merely because these people are needed for political reasons but because they know things — including, most importantly, about the realistic limitations to ‘progress’ — that we,” the educated and allegedly sophisticated, “are inclined to forget.”
Lasch reserved much of his hottest fury for elites who condescended to those “below them” in socioeconomic status and meddled in their culture. According to the writer Angela Nagle, young people are attracted to this critique of “a progressive elite in revolt against the masses,” an elite that perpetuates “the destruction of popular institutions of social support and family sold as progress and individual freedom.”
Nagle is an instructive example of a contemporary Laschian. A self-described socialist, she initially made her name publishing in left-wing magazines but has found herself alienated from much of the Left over its attachment to the dogmas of “woke” identity politics. In Lasch, she and many others find a thinker who combines leftist distaste for oligarchy and oppression with a humane, sensible defense of community, especially those forms of community forged in the slow furnace of tradition.
The resurgence of interest in Lasch is, for this reason, a matter of some consequence. His devotees are occupying nuanced ideological ground unoccupied by the vast, vast majority of our electoral politics. As Baskin explains, “Contrary to what used to be the conventional wisdom, the majority of Americans are not ‘economically conservative and socially liberal,’ but something closer to the opposite.”
During the 2016 campaign, of course, Trump ran on a platform of social conservatism and economic protectionism that has broadly been referred to as “populist” — a label Lasch happily applied to himself. But the revival of interest in Lasch is less an outgrowth of Trumpism than an expression of disgust at the hollowness of contemporary life. As Matt Ellison, a young research associate at the Hoover Institution, put it to me: “We now live for the moment in our culture of narcissism, in which the old politics of organized communal action is replaced by the spectacle of performative, individualist self-expression — consumerism substituting for citizenship.”
These are tall, thundering words for a young man. They are probably right, but you need a mentor to help you speak with that kind of gravitas right out of college. For a growing segment of young thinkers, that mentor, in absentia, is Lasch.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a writer, academic, and entrepreneur in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
