“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.”
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Author detail
In his wide-ranging books and essays, Mr. Lasch offered a leftist analysis of industrial capitalism and its effects on American politics, social arrangements, modes of thought and personal psychology. As a counterpoise to the alienation and despair he saw as pervasive in American life, he proposed a progressive program that, paradoxically, relied heavily on the values of community, family and self-discipline. Diagnosing a Malaise "The Culture of Narcissism"(W. W. Norton) is his best-known work. In the 1979 book, which was on the New York Times best-seller list for seven weeks, he described postwar America as a society of dangerously self-absorbed individuals, fixated on personal goals, fearful of their impulses and easily controlled by power elites. President Jimmy Carter asked Mr. Lasch to advise him on Mr. Carter's speech, delivered in July 1979, on the nation's "crisis of confidence." It became known as the "national malaise" speech. (Obituary, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/15/obituaries/christopher-lasch-is-dead-at-61-wrote-about-america-s-malaise.html). See also: "The Writings of Christopher Lasch: A Bibliography-in-Progress", Compiled by Robert Cummings Social Science Division, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO 63501 https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/3271 See also: https://www.domusweb.it/en/opinion/2020/03/31/from-beauty-to-beauticians.html (Forty years ago, the historian and sociologist Christopher Lasch “foresaw the dramatic transformation of a world where the loss of all concept of the past destroyed all hopes for the future”, writes the editorial director Walter Mariotti. Watch the interview with Christopher Lasch on DailyMotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x33apgj https://towardfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/220px-Christopher_Lasch.jpg
Quotes
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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.”
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“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.”
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“The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.”
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“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.”
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“Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.”
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“The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.”
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“Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.”
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“The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.”
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“Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.”
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“Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.”
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“The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.”
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“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.”
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“Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.”
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“The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.”
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“We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.”
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“Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.”
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“Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.”
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“It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.”
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