How a 1990s book predicted 2020 - "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy "

[cc]

https://unherd.com/2020/07/the-book-that-predicted-2020/"> "Revolt of the Elites" - How a 1990s book predicted 2020

Christopher Lasch

The book had been published in Britain in the spring of 1995 but as February and then March 2020 came and went, we were all rather distracted. For a few months the pandemic was so overwhelming that even normal politics died down — only for it to inflame again, more incendiary and toxic than ever, at the beginning of June.



Across the US — and around the world — graduates and young professionals took to the streets, leading a bizarre anti-revolution in which immigrant shops were ransacked and working-class neighbourhoods forced to defend themselves from violent college-educated protesters and their allies.



Here was a revolution backed by almost all billion-dollar businesses and public institutions bar the US presidency, and whose leaders had almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment. Their demands were for more diversity and racial equality, already sacred ideas among the cognitive elite, all of it accompanied by bizarre, quasi-religious public declarations of faith.



It was the he Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy that warned of a growing cultural and social divide caused by a rapacious free market and the radical politics of the Sixties, one that would lead to extremism and division.



Lasch saw in 1994, but which has only now reached its apogee in 2020, was how social revolution would be pushed forward by the radical rich and resisted by the rest. "It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution," he wrote: "their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators." If this continued, then the top strata of society would become increasingly alienated by their society and country, and turn against it, something that has come to pass with the first corporate-backed revolutionary movement in history.



he "emphasised what many on the Left have thought to be the guilty secret of American liberalism: its affection for corporate organisation, and a thoroughly manipulative view of the relationship between the new social sciences and the populace whose lives the liberals wanted to improve".



Lasch's most successful book, the 1979 The Culture of Narcissism, was highly critical of American society's self-obsession



Lasch also saw that the eroding of a common culture, values and standards, which was the major legacy of 60s cultural radicalism, ended up creating a gulf between social classes. If there were no common values to hold people together, what was to stop the rich and powerful trampling over the rest of society, cloaking their self-interest in furious self-righteousness?



And so it has come to pass, with the rise of woke capital, an amoral business model in which CEOs make thousands of times more than their lowest earners, all the while distracting attention with support for therapeutic but increasingly extreme politics.





Late last year I began working on a piece marking 25 years since the publication of what I believed to be the most prescient work of the age.



The book had been published in Britain in the spring of 1995 but as February and then March 2020 came and went, we were all rather distracted. For a few months the pandemic was so overwhelming that even normal politics died down — only for it to inflame again, more incendiary and toxic than ever, at the beginning of June.



Across the US — and around the world — graduates and young professionals took to the streets, leading a bizarre anti-revolution in which immigrant shops were ransacked and working-class neighbourhoods forced to defend themselves from violent college-educated protesters and their allies.



Here was a revolution backed by almost all billion-dollar businesses and public institutions bar the US presidency, and whose leaders had almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment. Their demands were for more diversity and racial equality, already sacred ideas among the cognitive elite, all of it accompanied by bizarre, quasi-religious public declarations of faith.



It was the Revolt of the Elites.



Christopher Lasch never lived to see his great work published, but since his death from cancer in February 1994, it has developed a cult following among unorthodox sections of Right and Left. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy warned of a growing cultural and social divide caused by a rapacious free market and the radical politics of the Sixties, one that would lead to extremism and division.



Yet what Lasch saw in 1994, but which has only now reached its apogee in 2020, was how social revolution would be pushed forward by the radical rich and resisted by the rest. "It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution," he wrote: "their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators." If this continued, then the top strata of society would become increasingly alienated by their society and country, and turn against it, something that has come to pass with the first corporate-backed revolutionary movement in history.





Lasch's most successful book, the 1979 The Culture of Narcissism, was highly critical of American society's self-obsession and was hugely influential, partly thanks to the support of President Jimmy Carter. Indeed, Carter so liked the book that it inspired his election speech on "the American malaise", a misjudgement said to have cost him support against the cheery, optimistic Ronald Reagan.



The Culture of Narcissism is still read and widely quoted, although the heavy reliance on psychoanalysis seems somewhat dated (or at least out-of-fashion) today. Yet Roger Kimball wrote of it that "What one witnessed in its pages was the spectacle of an intelligent, politically committed man of the Left struggling to make sense of a culture in the grip of a radicalism that had turned out to be almost entirely bogus."

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Why the rich are revolting



Revolt of the Elites comprises 13 essays on America's "democratic malaise" — he liked that word — divided into three parts, the "intensification of social divisions" in America, the decline of public discourse and finally the spiritual core of the country's crisis, headlined "The Dark Night of the Soul".



Throughout the book runs Lasch's moral core, his support for the average man, something which inspired his hostility to the dominant ideologies of Left and Right. He strongly opposed economic inequality because it was corrupting; highly unequal societies tend to bring with them graft, extremism, violence and outside interference, eliminating Republican virtue. Lasch lamented that in America, the top tenth owned more than half the country's wealth, a warning that now seems as quaint as newspapers in the placid 1950s worried about Teddy Boys. The decline of pensions and savings, and the rise of what we now call zero-contract hours, would lead to the collapse of the middle class and with it the decline of the nation.



Lasch also saw that the eroding of a common culture, values and standards, which was the major legacy of 60s cultural radicalism, ended up creating a gulf between social classes. If there were no common values to hold people together, what was to stop the rich and powerful trampling over the rest of society, cloaking their self-interest in furious self-righteousness?



And so it has come to pass, with the rise of woke capital, an amoral business model in which CEOs make thousands of times more than their lowest earners, all the while distracting attention with support for therapeutic but increasingly extreme politics.



It was Lasch who saw more clearly than anyone that the New Left had a symbiotic relationship with the culture of modern corporate capitalism — emphasising choice, therapy, self-actualisation, narcissism and the rejection of limits, not just physical but financial and moral.





Lasch also saw meritocracy as a sham, or at least "a parody of democracy", because neither social nor geographic mobility were adequate substitutes for real social justice. "Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites," he wrote: "if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognise so few obligations to their predecessors of to the communities they profess to lead."



.. Although not a Marxist, Lasch saw politics through the prism of class, arguing that elites of both Left and Right had the same economic interests. "Even when they disagree about everything else," he argued, they "have a common stake in suppressing a politics of class."





... Indeed, the fashionable social causes of the 21st century not only ignore class, but actually further increase hostility to the poor. Evidence suggests that thinking about "white privilege" reduces sympathy for people struggling in poverty, while the association of bigotry with the non-college educated has normalised snobbery to an almost pre-modern degree. People once might have sneered at less educated people, but they would have done so privately at least; now comedy routinely makes the less educated and less geographically connected its punchline.



"The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare," he wrote: "in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate."



....  This weekend, Michael Gove cited Lasch as one of the thinkers who foresaw the failures of meritocracy, the great divide between the city and the town, and the mutual alienation it would bring. A quarter of a century after his prophetic book, we're all living in Lasch's world now.

[Anonymous]

I am hooked. I must get this book for my e-reader.

[cc]

I posted it as it is spot on "today"



and greatly counter to what media and "experts" are putting forward as the poor and oppressed being behind it all

[Anonymous]

I posted it as it is spot on "today"



and greatly counter to what media and "experts" are putting forward as the poor and oppressed being behind it all

It is not a bottom up revolt by the proletariat.

[Anonymous]

graduates and young professionals took to the streets, leading a bizarre anti-revolution in which immigrant shops were ransacked and working-class neighbourhoods forced to defend themselves from violent college-educated protesters and their allies.



Here was a revolution backed by almost all billion-dollar businesses and public institutions bar the US presidency, and whose leaders had almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment. Their demands were for more diversity and racial equality, already sacred ideas among the cognitive elite, all of it accompanied by bizarre, quasi-religious public declarations of faith.

It is an anti-socialist revolution.

[Anonymous]

Corporations, billionaires and the political elites are at war with working people.

[Anonymous]

I frickin hate elites almost as much as they hate people that work for a living.

[Anonymous]

"Revolt of the Elites" - How a 1990s book predicted 2020

Christopher Lasch

The book had been published in Britain in the spring of 1995 but as February and then March 2020 came and went, we were all rather distracted. For a few months the pandemic was so overwhelming that even normal politics died down — only for it to inflame again, more incendiary and toxic than ever, at the beginning of June.



Across the US — and around the world — graduates and young professionals took to the streets, leading a bizarre anti-revolution in which immigrant shops were ransacked and working-class neighbourhoods forced to defend themselves from violent college-educated protesters and their allies.



Here was a revolution backed by almost all billion-dollar businesses and public institutions bar the US presidency, and whose leaders had almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment. Their demands were for more diversity and racial equality, already sacred ideas among the cognitive elite, all of it accompanied by bizarre, quasi-religious public declarations of faith.



It was the he Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy that warned of a growing cultural and social divide caused by a rapacious free market and the radical politics of the Sixties, one that would lead to extremism and division.



Lasch saw in 1994, but which has only now reached its apogee in 2020, was how social revolution would be pushed forward by the radical rich and resisted by the rest. "It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution," he wrote]It was the Revolt of the Elites.[/b]



Christopher Lasch never lived to see his great work published, but since his death from cancer in February 1994, it has developed a cult following among unorthodox sections of Right and Left. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy warned of a growing cultural and social divide caused by a rapacious free market and the radical politics of the Sixties, one that would lead to extremism and division.



Yet what Lasch saw in 1994, but which has only now reached its apogee in 2020, was how social revolution would be pushed forward by the radical rich and resisted by the rest. "It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution," he wrote: "their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators." If this continued, then the top strata of society would become increasingly alienated by their society and country, and turn against it, something that has come to pass with the first corporate-backed revolutionary movement in history.





Lasch's most successful book, the 1979 The Culture of Narcissism, was highly critical of American society's self-obsession and was hugely influential, partly thanks to the support of President Jimmy Carter. Indeed, Carter so liked the book that it inspired his election speech on "the American malaise", a misjudgement said to have cost him support against the cheery, optimistic Ronald Reagan.



The Culture of Narcissism is still read and widely quoted, although the heavy reliance on psychoanalysis seems somewhat dated (or at least out-of-fashion) today. Yet Roger Kimball wrote of it that "What one witnessed in its pages was the spectacle of an intelligent, politically committed man of the Left struggling to make sense of a culture in the grip of a radicalism that had turned out to be almost entirely bogus."

The author predicted the future in the USA very well.

[Blazor]

[Anonymous]

The author was a prophet.

[Anonymous]

I frickin hate elites almost as much as they hate people that work for a living.

This is the extreme rich revolting against the poor. Progs are pure evil.

[Frood]

Not my cuppa tea.... anyone who is critical of meritocracy, invariably nurtures sentiments expressed by the likes of BLM, Socialists, Antifa, and Communists...



Can meritocracies be off track sometimes? Sure.... but they can be roped back...



...not with those idiot movements though...

[Anonymous]

Not my cuppa tea.... anyone who is critical of meritocracy, invariably nurtures sentiments expressed by the likes of BLM, Socialists, Antifa, and Communists...



Can meritocracies be off track sometimes? Sure.... but they can be roped back...



...not with those idiot movements though...

I agree about meritocracy. But, some of his predictions came true. That alone would make it an interesting book.

[Frood]

What do you mean? Came late?