The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
Lasch, Christopher
T he late historian Christopher Lasch began as a man of the left, but in later years his blasts against the decline of the family and the flight from communal responsibilities to personal rights...
...America has always had its elites, but in Lasch's view the old-style wealthy class had saving graces that compensated for its remoteness from the common man: In the nineteenth century wealthy families were typically settled, often for several generations, in a given locale...
...Lasch rued the decline of religion in public life, but in his own peculiar way...
...So, too, affirmative action teaches its beneficiaries that they can't fend for themselves...
...Their insistence on the sanctity of private property was qualified by the principle that property rights were neither absolute nor unconditional...
...For Lasch this new class is the latest vanguard of secularization, the product of a spiritually deadening reliance on science, technology, and rationality...
...In this final collection of essays, Lasch argues that Americans are in danger of losing touch with the vital spirit of democracy itself...
...it robs the officially favored of self-confidence while stirring fierce resentment among those not assigned by bureaucratic fiat to the privileged status of favored victims...
...For one thing, he relies on a caricature of classical liberal thinking, and offers the distorted view that the Founders' ideal of individual freedom allowed for no corollary virtue of civic responsibility—as if the political legacy of, say, James Madison amounted merely to an apology for hedonistic consumerism...
...By dire contrast, Lasch tells us, the new elites—a broad group that ranges from lawyers to journalists to investment brokers—engage in a mad pursuit of wealth as a good in itself, with a selfish, narcissistic ardor...
...T he late historian Christopher Lasch began as a man of the left, but in later years his blasts against the decline of the family and the flight from communal responsibilities to personal rights made him seem in spirit a cultural conservative...
...The new elites are in revolt against "Middle America," as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy...
...Where religion steels us against misfortune by spiritual trial, rationalism tempts us to retreat into a cult of objectivity, and thus leads us to undervalue such inner resources as courage and persistence—in short, what we generally call character...
...Modern Americans have lost touch with virtues associated with self-reliance and honest toil—relying instead on the millions of technocrats and service workers who are the caretakers made necessary by our post-industrial sloth...
...The new elites are at home only in transit...
...We have come to accept a passive role in the political order, Lasch tells us, leaving to professional specialists all responsibility formaking "the system" run...
...Hooked into the new cyberculture of information technology and global markets, the new elites are cut off from roots in community, family, faith, or country...
...Rationalism seduces us into believing we can always conquer nature and leaves us impatient and frightened before the unknown...
...We need religion, he says, as a place for graver, deeper doubts: the primal questioning that comes from thinking upon the great mysteries and our own mortal limitations...
...He argues that the familiar ideal of the "classless society," ridiculed by leftists and co-opted by liberal centrists, has virtues that haven't been properly understood by most historians and social observers since the nineteenth century...
...Combine these ideas with that of a paternalistic welfare state, and one has the recipe for alienation from democratic ideals...
...CI...
...To improve the chances of at least some workers doing so, Conant and others created the rationale for scientific testing of school applicants, so that the intellectual cream THE REVOLT OF THE ELITES AND THE BETRAYAL OF DEMOCRACY Christopher Lasch W.W...
...Clearly, Lasch was interested not in "reinventing" government but in rediscovering citizenship...
...The premise of welfare, in his view, is not compassion but condescension, which perpetuates dependency and weakness...
...I asch identifies free enterprise itself, the restless, relentless force of capitalist markets, as the prime culprit...
...Unlike the laboring classes of Europe, illiterate and excluded from the political franchise, American workers prided themselves on their educational and electoral opportunities...
...This conception dovetailed with Walter Lippmann's idea that public opinion was just so much gossip, and that real governing should be left to experts...
...Thus Lasch confounds the evils of greed with those of bureaucratic elitism, by way of what Weber called capitalism's increasing rationalization of society...
...Lasch thinks the left missed the real meaning of the classless society: Citizenship appeared to have given even the humbler members of society access to the knowledge and cultivation elsewhere reserved for the privileged classes...
...Lasch argues that this sort of paternalism was a front for recruiting elites through educational triage...
...Lasch offers the example of James Bryant Conant, the influential president of Harvard, who claimed that America's egalitarian spirit rested on the opportunity to rise through the social order...
...But Lasch was on to something in reminding us that dynamic capitalism, ifnot implacably hostile to the warm glow of hearth and home, does tend to displace the social order from its accustomed forms and habits...
...There is a germ of truth in all of this, but Lasch hardly offers a balanced account...
...The market—made into a quasi-animate, daemonic whirlwind in Lasch's rhetoric—invades every sphere of life, reducing the moral economy of all human institutions to exchanges of cash value...
...From the heady perspective of this "new aristocracy of brains," the traditionalism and prudence of the heartland seem remote and small-minded: Daniel J. Silver is a contributor to Commentary and other publications...
...That this process may exact a toll on our society and in fact endanger "family values" and moral character is something we would do well to keep in mind...
...If, for many, religion means dogma—an end to skepticism—for Lasch it is rationalism that is the cop-out...
...They worship instead technological expertise and the almighty dollar...
...This abdication of American character is at the heart of what Lasch means by a "betrayal of democracy...
...Opportunity, as many Americans understood it, was a matter more of intellectual than of material enrichment...
...Patriotism, certainly, does not rank very high in their hierarchy of virtues...
...It is in this allegedly inexorable leveling process that the market idea becomes dominant and undermines moral character...
...Wealth was understood to carry civic obligations...
...Norton / 276 pages / $22 reviewed by DANIEL J. SILVER 72 The American Spectator May 1995 could rise to the top...
...Thus, for Lasch, are born the twin evils of the welfare state and affirmative action...
...L asch charts our changing notions of citizenship by offering a historical critique of social mobility...
...Even more fundamentally, Lasch ignores that capitalism, by attacking vested privilege, has promoted the growth of democratic ideals far better than any other economic system...
...In a nation of wanderers their stability of residence provided a certain continuity...
...It was their restless curiosity, their skeptical and iconoclastic turn of mind, their resourcefulness and self-reliance, their capacity for invention and improvisation that most dramatically seemed to differentiate the laboring classes in America from their European counterparts...
...Theirs is essentially a tourist's view of the world—not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy...
...It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all...
...By the same token, the "democratization of intelligence was also underappreciated by those liberals who, from the best of motives, helped put in place a meritocracy that became the instrument for new class divisions...
...B ut where conservative critics attack affirmative action for its trashing of meritocratic ideals, Lasch condemns meritocracy itself, with its emphasis on the husbanding of intellectual gifts instead of the true grit of earned self-respect...
...Rather than the promise of brighter material prospects, this ideal, Lasch argues, rested on something else: the idea that Americans, whether endowed with wealth or not, could participate on equal terms in our civic debates...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
