Christopher Lasch pisses me off half the time, but I still read him. I’d better get this biography, too (dammit):
Before his tragic death from cancer (at the young age of 61), Lasch worked on The Revolt of the Elites. Here he elaborated on prior arguments, with a focus on an angle that had preoccupied him his entire career: the exposure of elitism. He particularly called out liberals, saying that their condescension towards the values of ‘Middle America’ created a space for Republicans to appear on the side of the masses. Liberalism had ‘no particularly solid and rooted constituency outside of the rootless professional class’ and lacked a vision of society, he said. That meant ‘the ascendancy of the new class rests not on its secure command of an intellectual and political tradition, but on its imagined superiority to the average unenlightened American bigot’. Lasch argued that today’s liberal elites have ‘the vices of the aristocracy without its virtues’.
