Min gamle favorit Christopher Lasch behandlas av Scott Beauchamp i två texter i en för mig ny tidning, The Agonist. Båda texterna är intressanta, även om man kan fråga sig om det är för sent för teoretiska resonemang:
http://www.theagonist.org/essays/201...he-family.html
http://www.theagonist.org/essays/201...her-lasch.html
http://www.theagonist.org/essays/201...he-family.html
http://www.theagonist.org/essays/201...her-lasch.html
I no longer say I’m conservative in mixed company, and my reticence isn’t from what you might expect. I’m not avoiding opprobrium. I’m not quite cultivating tranquility either. It isn’t so much to avoid conflict as to avoid misunderstanding. The last time I mentioned that I’m conservative, casually and in the natural course of a conversation with the friend of a friend, the person asked whether that meant I believed in free market solutions to political problems. I might as well have been announcing a fealty to Gongorism or admiration for Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. I don’t say I’m conservative because I don’t think people will understand quite what I mean.Det är noterbart att Tucker Carlson har kommit in från höger och nu nått samma position som Lasch. Detta är den politiska framtida hemvisten för den inhemska befolkningen i väst.
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Lasch was one of those intellectuals from the provinces who take the moral utterances of the ruling class more seriously than they do themselves, and even have the audacity to judge them against it and find them wanting.
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Early on he considered himself a man of the left, but true to the idiosyncrasies which would define his career, he was from the very beginning critical of the lineage the left chose for itself. In books such as 1965’s The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as a Social Type, Lasch accused American radicals of merely representing a sort of advance guard for socially and psychologically destructive forms of the capitalist ethos. By the 70’s these concerns had become full-throated condemnations of the untenable American left, in books such as Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged and The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminished Expectations. By the time of his death in 1994 it was safe to say that Lasch had made a point of defying easily discernible political categories. He had made a career out of avoiding the team sports aspect of American political writing. And in doing so, he had become one of the most astute American social critics of the Twentieth Century.
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The realization that progress had become reified into an ideology, Lasch explains in the introduction, had a profound effect on his own politics: “My old faith in the explanatory power of the old ideologies began to waver in the mid-seventies, when my study of the family led me to question the left’s program of sexual liberation, careers for women, and professional child care. Until then, I had always identified myself with the left.” It wasn’t so much that Lasch himself had changed all that much, he explains, but that the new iteration of the Baby Boomer left had abandoned the most attractive aspects of its own tradition, exchanging moral seriousness and an interest in communal well-being for the histrionics of “seekers of ‘existential’ authenticity.” Ironically the left, by defining its mission purely against the values of middle-class America, had become reactionary. And in its unqualified embrace of limitless personal freedom, it had become shallow, too.
Lasch believed that this shift in the American left, reverberating through all political positions, was predicated upon a fundamental misunderstanding of progress and a devaluing of limits.
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As Lasch writes, this “producer ethic” is “anticapitalist but not socialist or social democratic, at once radical, even revolutionary, and deeply conservative.” Which is all to say that for the majority, or at least a very large and vocal minority, of Americans, their political and social self-interest is best expressed as a kind of populism critical of both corporatism and the federal government. “Corporate capitalism,” writes Miller in characterizing Lasch’s thought, “buttressed by liberal cosmopolitanism had no chance of leading to a satisfying end. Americans might discover – rediscover – another past, another hope, and another way.”
