The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
Author
Christopher Lasch
38 quotations
About Christopher Lasch
Robert Christopher Lasch was an American historian and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester. Lasch's books, including The New Radicalism in America (1965), Haven in a Heartless World (1977), The Culture of Narcissism (1979), The True and Only Heaven (1991), and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy were widely discussed and reviewed. The Culture of Narcissism became a surprise best-seller and won the National Book Award in the category Curren…
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When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective.
Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
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The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left.
Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left.
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.
Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.
The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.
The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.