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. – Christopher Lasch
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice. – Christopher Lasch
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. – Christopher Lasch
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it. – Christopher Lasch
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters. – Christopher Lasch
The left has come to regard common sense – the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community – as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment. – Christopher Lasch
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs. – Christopher Lasch
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. – Christopher Lasch
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction. – Christopher Lasch
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure. – Christopher Lasch
Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend. – Christopher Lasch
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. – Christopher Lasch
Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don’t already want to buy. – Christopher Lasch
The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction. – Christopher Lasch
Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising. – Christopher Lasch
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language. – Christopher Lasch
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. – Christopher Lasch
A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction. – Christopher Lasch
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business. – Christopher Lasch
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. – Christopher Lasch
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage. – Christopher Lasch
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images. – Christopher Lasch
The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types. – Christopher Lasch
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction. – Christopher Lasch
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order. – Christopher Lasch
Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics. – Christopher Lasch
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media. – Christopher Lasch
