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Introduction
This week, we’ll conclude our mini-series on quietly influential books of the 1990’s with The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. While The Fourth Turning is especially influential among investors and The Sovereign Individual is required reading for techno-libertarians or crypto / Web 3.0, The Revolt of the Elites is often invoked by populists of the right and left. This is all the more remarkable given that the author was a professor of history and not an unabashed critic of the academy. We will revisit the futility of putting Lasch’s thought into a neat ideological box later in this post.
The Revolt of the Elites was published in 1994, the year that Lasch passed away; it is a collection of essays that he had written throughout his storied career. Taken together, they serve the goal that Lasch set for much of his writing: investigating whether democracy has a future. Discontent with the existing order was bubbling up to the surface of American public life even then. Lasch called this phenomenon “The Democratic Malaise”. The opening shots of his argument are evergreen today:
“The decline of manufacturing and the consequent loss of jobs; the shrinkage of the middle class; the growing number of the poor; the rising crime rate; the flourishing traffic in drugs; the decay of the cities – the bad news goes on and on. No one has a plausible solution to these intractable problems, and most of what passes for political discussion doesn’t even address them. Fierce ideological battles are fought over peripheral issues. Elites, who define the issues, have lost touch with the people. The unreal, artificial character of our politics reflects their insulation from the common life, together with a secret conviction that the real problems are insoluble.”
The Dynamics of the Democratic Malaise
Lasch came of age in a time and an intellectual tradition still influenced by the 1929 book The Revolt of the Masses, by Jose Ortega y Gasset. Ortega y Gasset took leftist rhetoric about the “mass-man” seriously and wrote that book to critique the rise to power and action of the masses in society. Lasch contended that society had evolved to the point where the biggest threat to democracy now came from elsewhere.
The emerging elites of the late twentieth century worked, and still work, in professional and managerial roles. Lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers and others manipulate information for a living. Since the market for their skills is global and doesn’t require them to be tied down spatially, these new elites tend over time to relate more with their foreign counterparts than with their domestic compatriots who do more manual or repetitive work for a living. These elites’ revolt takes the form of shirking the sense of responsibility to fellow citizens that elites of the past professed, or even of developing contempt for them and pulling apart into separate segments of society. Lasch’s articulation here is the earliest form of this argument that we’ve seen, and today it is firmly implanted in the firmament of twenty-first century populist thought.
Lasch highlights the nature and consequences of this phenomenon by grouping his essays into three main categories: the intensification of social divisions, the decline in democratic discourse and the “dark night of the soul” or replacement of old spiritual beliefs with more self-serving ones. Within these categories are populist arguments that are very memorable and quotable. Populists of the right and left who have succeeded Lasch have therefore often quoted portions of this book that help their argument. At the late stage of Lasch’s life in which this book was formulated, his political thought had matured into a synthesis of social conservatism and leftist views of economics that critiqued capitalism. Fittingly, this formulation is the opposite of the reigning political attitudes of professional / managerial elites who profess being “socially liberal and economically conservative”.
The Legacy of Lasch
Lasch makes many memorable arguments in this book. One that stands out to us is his critique of the typical argument about social inequality. Lasch contends both that income is the wrong metric by which to measure equality and that the elite focus on social mobility over equality was a historical mistake. The author really believed that the early nineteenth century United States was a basically egalitarian society for most people besides black slaves. This is because Lasch cared more about equality in social life and public affairs, and meritocracy was a dirty word for him that cloaked elitism.
If we heard this argument from a modern commentator, we might assume that they would be soft and forgiving more generally. Instead, the stoic Nebraskan’s railing against modern therapeutic attitudes, lowering standards in education and sliding into moral degeneracy make the reader sit up straight and reflect on his own many shortcomings. We don’t necessarily agree with all of Lasch’s ideas and, in particular, believe that many of the negative developments he frames as reversible societal choices are really just inevitable results of human nature influenced by environmental factors, like greater economic surplus. However, we really enjoy his unique perspective that defies dominant ideological “boxes”. His example doesn’t just tempt us with the idea that some men of the past really did stand ten feet tall. It also helps us ask better questions about the problems he identified, many of which still work against the prospect of successful democratic government.
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
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Discussion #34: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, by Christopher Lasch