The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy Revised ed. Edition

The chapter on the “Revolt of the Elites” reads like a prophecy fulfilled almost 30 years after Lasch’s death. This book is highly recommended for the day and time that we live in. Christopher Lasch offered an explanation for the elites’ antipathy toward nationalism. He identified the elites as “a new class” of “symbolic analysts” whose livelihoods “rest not so much on the ownership of property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise.” Members of this new class are found in a wide variety of occupations, including “brokers, bankers, real estate promoters and developers, engineers, consultants of all kinds, systems analysts, scientists, doctors, publicists, publishers, editors, advertising executives, art directors, moviemakers, entertainers, journalists, television producers and directors, artists, writers, university professors.” Lasch pointed out that the market in which the new elites operate is international in scope, their fortunes tied to enterprises that operate across national boundaries. Having “more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not yet plugged into the network of global communications,” the elites’ loyalties are international rather than national.Unlike the old aristocratic ruling class with their noblesse oblige, however, today’s cosmopolitan elites lack that sense of moral obligation, priding themselves on being suis generis meritocracy of the intelligent. As Lasch put it:Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts.In effect, globalization has turned the new class of elites into tourists in their own countries. According to economist and former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich, the new elite see themselves as “world citizens, but without accepting . . . any of the obligations that citizenship in a polity normally implies” because without national attachments, people have little inclination to make sacrifices or to accept responsibility for their actions. Their ties to the international culture of work, information and leisure render the new elites indifferent to the prospect of national decline. Instead of financing public services and the public treasury, the new elite invest their money in “self-enclosed enclaves” of private schools, private security guards, and even private systems of garbage collection. Having removed themselves from the common life, many of them have ceased thinking of themselves as nationals—as Americans, British, French, or Italian—altogether.Then there is the new elite’s unqualified contempt for the masses. Some elites go beyond contempt to a spitefulness toward their fellow countrymen—the viciousness of which takes one’s breath away—for no reason other than a difference in policy preference. As Christopher Lasch put it, when confronted with resistance to their ideas, the elites “betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. . . . Simultaneously arrogant and insecure, the new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension.”There is another dimension in the elites’ treatment of the masses which is more troubling than contempt and which puts democracy in peril. Ortega y Gasset had described the uppity masses as oppressively intolerant, “crushing” beneath them “everything that is different,” and imposing their banal notions on the elite with the “force of law.” In our time, however, Ortega’s characterization is more indicative of the elites’ attitude toward those who hold contrary beliefs and values.The proper functioning of a democratic polity depends on pluralism or marketplace of ideas, wherein a variety of beliefs and opinions freely are aires, jostling and competing in the public arena. From this competition, the best ideas are most likely to emerge and triumph. It is that pluralism that is compromised by the elites’ intolerance for populist movements and their concerns.Then there is the elites’ categorical rejection of and efforts to overturn electoral outcomes not to their liking. In the United States, Democrats refused to accept the results of the 2016 presidential election, insisting that Donald Trump fraudulently had won by conspiring with Russians. But on March 22, 2019, after a two-year, $25 million investigation, the long-awaited report from Robert Mueller, Special Counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded there was no evidence of a Trump-Russia collusion, nor had Trump committed any crime of obstruction of justice.So alarmed was Christopher Lasch by the elites’ authoritarian impulse that he devoted his last work, Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, to that subject as a warning to us that democracies are being endangered from within. In Lasch’s words:Once it was the “revolt of masses” that was held to threaten social order and the civilizing traditions of Western culture. . . . Today it is the elites, however—those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate—that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West. . . . “Diversity”—a slogan that looks attractive on the face of it—has come to mean the opposite of what it appears to mean. In practice, diversity turns out to legitimize a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion. . . . How much longer can the spirit of free inquiry and open debate survive under these conditions?

I finished The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy at the beginning of March. Since then, I've chewed on certain sections and continue to marvel at how prescient Lasch's book is in light of our current condition. Before diving into Lasch's central thesis, his book came out in 1995 after his death. Each chapter had been published as an essay in the early 90s. Lasch slightly reworked these essays in order to publish them in book form. Usually books like these tend to live or die on the strength of each essay. Somehow Lasch's book avoids that pitfall as these chapters flow together.Now to Lasch's central thesis -- in my opinion, he nailed the key issue that plagued our nation's constitutional republic in his day, which ravages our nation today. What is that central thesis? Here's Lasch in his own words:"...in our time, the chief problem seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses...today it is the elites, however--those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate--that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West..." (25-26).Form this central thesis, Lasch then shows how the elites have corrupted every avenue of culture, society, politics, education, and even leisure. His critique comes from the populist camp. Lasch defines populism as the defense of small proprietorship (92). He sees this as the best solution going forward for turning around our nation. I believe Lasch is right.Populism of a sort is what propelled Bernie Sanders' rise and fall within the Democrat Party back in 2015-2016. Populism fueled Trump's campaign and victory in 2016. The elites (political establishment, the technocratic elites like Bill Gates and Bezos, et al) know this and view populism as a threat to their way of life. Why is populism such a threat to the elites? Here's Lasch's vision for how populism or its lack thereof impacts democratic society in the U.S.:"Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state. Not that democracy should be equated with rugged individualism. Self-reliance does not mean self-sufficiency. Self-governing communities, not individuals, are the basic units of democratic society...It is the decline of those communities, more than anything else, that calls the future of democracy into question. Suburban shopping malls are no substitute for neighborhoods" (7-8).There are so many more priceless nuggets in Lasch's book. I highly recommend his analysis of our nation even though it came out in 1995. Lasch saw our future and wrote about it with chilling precision.

Spectacular and clear eyed, what can happen when you're not married to defending liberalism (looking at you IDW types.) I know solutions are hard but always hungry for them and light here.

The author describes how our society is divided now, into symbolic, in-person and repetitive workers, their origins and attitudes. This replaces the class structure of the past, and seems to describe well who we are by what we do, 20% symbolic, the rest :workers.Symbolic analysts, = bankers, advertising makers, government employees, those who think doing something on a laptop is ‘creative’ . In-person workers being those who have to be there: haircutting, care workers, nurses, shop assistants. Finally, at the bottom: repetitive workers, factory employees who do the same task over and over. Their reward amounts not neceeccessary in that order.The author gives very good descriptions of the groupthink of the symbolic analysts, their world of whatever happens to be Correct at the moment, their nomadic enclaves around the world where they only meet others of the same views. The book describes how their cultural Marxism has taken over democracies with activists ensuring there is no other view on race, gender and sexuality: the only lenses any issue can be seen through.If you want to read how this diaspora came about, the rise of the people now in charge, this is the book for you.

Fast shipment, bookin perfect shape! Perfect!

Debería estar traducido y ser de lectura obligatoria para la clase política española, es un libro que pone de relieve que la oposición al pensamiento único, lleva tiempo gestándose en EEUU, critica la visión monolítica de una "progresía" elitista que es el origen de la mayoría de las discrepancias en el seno de la sociedad occidental y obstáculo para alcanzar un equilibrio entre los diversos puntos de vista, al pretender anular toda la tradición y las profundas raíces que constituyen en esencia el orgullo y bases más destacadas del proyecto político revolucionario original norteamericano, donde el concepto de democracia revestía unas características y objetivos bastante diferentes de los actuales. ..

yeah it was good

This was Christopher Lasch's final book before his untimely death, and it's depressing to see that the patterns he identified two decades ago are still with us, and indeed are stronger than ever. Today's elites, unfazed by the total collapse of their economic ideology and the near-death of the banking system, are even stronger and less self-aware than they were when he wrote.But that's not all. The Left, or what remains of it, has swallowed the same rat poison and joined the elites, abandoning ordinary people for elitist ideas and the gobbledegook of "isms" which have proliferated like weeds. Ordinary people simply don't count any more.Not all of Lach's criticisms are fair: like a lot of Anglo-Saxons he doesn't really understand post-modernism, and looking back now, it's clear that it never had any real influence outside University literature departments.That said, a book which is even more important today than it was when it was written, given that the elites have, pretty much, now won.