Christopher Lasch

In all fairness, it should be said that even probing critics of contemporary liberalism ascribe it to an exce- excessively long genealogy.

Christopher Lasch, John P. Diggins, and the ethical philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, have all written critically on the liberal heritage, which they believe has descended more or less intact from early cen- earlier centuries.

Yeah.

I think-

It was a transition into more consumerism, more self-help, more accessible entertainment, and more self-expression.

In fact, writers like Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe called out this generation as actually being narcissistic with the same exuberance we hear people calling out the millennials as narcissistic now.

The baby boomers are largely the parents, interestingly, of the millennials, with a few Gen X parents thrown in there, so one is left to wonder, for baby boomers to call millennials narcissistic seems a bit ironic, since they were the generation with whom this narcissistic name-calling began, and now they're sticking it on their own kids.

I think it is risky and problematic to stick one generation with this label of the narcissistic generation.

I think...

I mean, I included in the sources, I don't know if either of you looked, it really wasn't worth your time if you didn't, but, um, Christopher Lasch in the '60s, who is, like, kind of a notoriously, like, critical of feminism for various reasons, some valid, but, um, wrote this article in 1967 in The New York Review of Books called Emancipated Women, which was about, like, a slew of biographies that came out in that period of the first wave of feminism about figures like Woodhull, like, um, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, uh, and, um, Mary Eddy Baker, who started Christian Science.

And he was basically like these women had colorful lives, but they weren't, like, articulating anything meaningful, which is just, like, patently not true.

Mm-hmm.

Then we subsequently learned that we shared these little rites of passage on the American left.

We also share a strong admiration for Christopher Lasch, which is somewhat unique because he's usually owned by the, what we call the post-left.

And Derek and I have said to ourselves, this is a bit of a travesty given that Lasch was, for most of his career, a Marxist.

So what would it look like to represent Lasch's ideas from a Marxist point of view? So as you know, the book has a lot of ...

So the contradictions are almost seen as external to society itself, not internal to it.

Um, and that makes it very different than Marxism, because the, the Marxist analysis of this is that the class antagonisms are structurally necessary for the system to work, whereas the populist analysis is that if you got better leaders in that reflected the public will, this could work without direct violent antagonism.

And what's interesting about Christopher Lasch is he dies a populist, but, uh, in the '60s, '70s, and even the early '80s, he was an an- he was critical of populism because he said it didn't understand the culture of the working class, it, uh, was too malleable in who it saw the subjects of and was given towards replacing the working class with other classes, and then that m- most importantly, it was given to conspiracy thinking as opposed to systemic structural thinking about capitalism.

The result of that is that you will see focus on individual malfeasance, you will see focus on the 1%, but the conflicts both within the working class and with the working class in general society at large because of the structures of capitalism are largely left out.