bertramonline

Why did we stop reading Chris Lasch and instead consider him something of a non grata? Perhaps he was too heterodox for the seventies and eighties, not Marxist enough, too pessimistic — although heaven should know there was not much reason for optimism even back then. Unless you wore blinders or something. It didn’t help either that he, in some ways, wrote things that could be considered socially and culturally conservative — but he himself rejected any association with the Right, new or old. He was, and remained, a populist in the old sense of American populism.

Something like ‘Revolt of the elites’ rings many bells, seen from where we are now. Like when he writes:

Once it was the “revolt of the masses” that was held to threaten social order and the civilizing traditions of Western culture. In our time, however, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses. This remarkable turn of events confounds our expectations about the course of history and calls long-established assumptions into question.

This seems to be accelerating. You can look up Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Curtis Yarvin if you wish. Perhaps Lasch is still relevant in some ways? Although I am aware that cherry-picking ‘the good stuff’ and glossing over that Lasch also wrote less ‘good stuff’ is somewhat dishonest. Still, many passages in his opus ring clearer now than when they were written.