A useful starting point for those unfamiliar with Lasch might well be Patrick Deneen’s analysis of his thought and contributions, in First Things (2004).

Deneen, himself a pretty consequential thinker in these days and the author of Why Liberalism Fails, sums up Lasch thus: “Christopher Lasch’s untimely death in 1994 deprived America of its most loving critic, a man who in his intellectual work followed John Winthrop’s counsel, ‘We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities’.

PIGEONHOLE

“Impossible to pigeonhole politically, Lasch seemed to be simultaneously to the Left and to the Right of most people. Possessed of a deft pen and a blessed impatience, he exposed cant and false posing among intellectuals, and railed against the false constraints of contemporary political discourse.

“But his polemicism was always directed to a clear end: the end was to revive, for a democracy prone to rely on mere optimism, the great Christian virtue of hope, in both its expectant and humble forms.”

The title of Lasch’s book – and he did have some pretty famous other books, like The Culture of Narcissism, The True and Only Heaven and The Agony of the American Left – is more than a little relevant to our own time.

The 2020s are marked by the global elite rule of puppeteers, moral incontinence in politics, big corporatism (big government + big capitalism), widespread alienation, policy failure on a grand scale, rule by decree and propaganda and, most significantly, the collapse of Western democracy and popular political influence on governance.

These were great concerns of both MacIntyre and Lasch, not to mention other major thinkers of our lifetimes like Samuel P Huntington – he who coined the phrase “Davos Man” – and Daniel Bell, for example.

Not too many “public intellectuals” today are on the right page, sadly.

Those with a modicum of potential are probably too busy attending unconscious bias training mandated by their administrative masters on campus, or are constrained by their ideological blinkers, or the need to chase research funding grants from corrupt corporates.

I am not aware of any great (impactful) political theorists born after (say) 1980. Modern Leftists have abandoned the working class and their once cherished intellectual inheritance, only to simply embrace woke.

Meanwhile, most modern conservatives are arguing among themselves over who is really conservative and who isn’t, and I am not aware that any libertarian thinker has introduced any new philosophical contributions since the days of Hayek, Nozick and Milton Friedman.

There have simply been philosophical mergers and acquisitions and the emergence of new hybrid forms, like the accommodation between free marketeers and postmodernists.

Hence the return to the likes of Christopher Lasch, who is as fresh in 2025 as he was when he penned his farewell book 30 years ago. And who is addressing real issues in political thought and practice.

The following two statements from Lasch’s book struck me immediately, in the context of today’s multi-polity failures and the alienation that at least a third of the modern electorate feels:

“The Enlightenment’s reason and morality are increasingly seen as a cover for power, and the prospect that the world can be governed by reason seems more remote than at any time since the eighteenth century.” (p 93, Norton paperback edition)

And second: “Milton Friedman himself admits that a liberal society requires ‘a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge’, along with a ‘widespread acceptance of some common set of values’. It is not clear that our society can meet even these minimal conditions, as things stand today, but it has always been clear, in any case, that a liberal society needs more virtue than Friedman allows for.” (pp 94-95)

So, a modern liberal regime requires rationality and virtue. Whatever has caused their dual disappearance, we do not have either now. Deneen’s book explains why liberalism failed. These quotes from Lasch provide a succinct summary.

DENIGRATING

And just in case anyone thinks Lasch is just a common or garden Leftie denigrating the free market, he also excoriates the communitarian State. His virtue lies in the inability to neatly place him in an ideological box. A rare virtue.

If ever Lasch’s lament over the incapacity of contemporary capitalism to exhibit, let alone promote, civic virtue and moral public behaviour was proven correct and given contemporary relevance, it was during the COVID era.

The corrupt collaboration between the military industrial complex (which drove the global COVID response), the Deep State, the meek, puppet politicians and (of course) Big Pharma sealed the fate of modern democracy.

Ordinary citizens lost the capacity to resist tyranny when practised by elected officials – that is to dissent without jail-time.

Lost were core democratic principles of consent of the governed and consequential political obligation.