The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch

The Revolt of the Elites was written at the end of Christopher Lasch's life and it reads like it: He pulls no punches in telling the chattering classes what he thinks about them and the cultural trends they are presiding over. Elites of all types effectively live in their own world, he argues, and have created a parallel intellectual sphere for themselves while leaving the general public on its own. The original ideal of an American public sphere imagined people of all classes being on a relatively level playing field in terms of education, having mutual access to one another, and debating ideas as respected equals.

That egalitarian ideal has been utterly erased today by economic inequality and educational credentialing, which have together created a rigid new class hierarchy. People are not just separate from one another. They speak totally different languages and have different cognitive assumptions based on the educations that they received. It’s gone so far at this point that it even seems implausible to those who are not old enough to remember that there really used to be an erudite working-class that conversed on the same terms as elites. Instead of a level playing field, we now have highly-credentialed elite lording it over cognitive plebeians, whom they view with patronizing contempt. The peasants meanwhile periodically seem to confirm their low status by expressing themselves in a way that reflects their lack of education. We can see this in the Trump movement, which was undeniably both populist and asinine.

One thing social media has shown us is that people at all levels of society truly do love to debate and are hungry for knowledge. Our elites have unfortunately decided to close themselves off from society into various towers of academic language, elitism, and pure snobbishness. They are no longer part of the public sphere, which many seem to consider beneath them. Into the void that they left behind have emerged all types of populist commentators who are satisfying the public’s need to know things and find meaning. They are of varying quality, and some are indeed charlatans. But at least they are there. I have no doubt that there are YouTube hosts who have had a bigger impact on more peoples intellectual lives than the most rarefied philosophy professors, just by virtue of making themselves available. I can certainly attest that there are lots of online writers and even anonymous social media users from whom I have learnt much of value over the years. Meanwhile, I cannot even remember the names of any teachers I had as a student.

Lasch may not have identified as a conservative, but this certainly came across as a conservative critique of modern culture. He writes strongly against moral and intellectual relativism and accuses contemporary liberalism of living off the sturdier moral capital of the systems that it replaced, particularly Christianity. He also notices how people have tried to fill the spiritual void left by religion with a mixture of art and psychotherapy, with even social and political crises like racial inequality now assumed to have therapeutic solutions. This book was really written like a polemic, which I guess is what happens when someone is at the end of their career and decides to say what they really think. It’s still worth a read and is far better than most of liberal skeptic literature we get today.