30 Years Ago, This Book Saw the Coming Backlash Against Elites

New York Times

04-04-2025

If you want to understand what Christopher Lasch was trying to say in his 1995 book 'The Revolt of the Elites' — and why what he said then matters now — take a walk through the Hudson Yards development on the West Side of Manhattan. When I worked there, the area was dominated by rail yards and warehouses. A decade later, the neighborhood is a soaring ode to luxury. There's a hotel by the high-end gym chain Equinox. One skyscraper's ground floor is dominated by an 'unprecedented space' (per website copy) from the celebrity chef José Andrés. It's supposed to be a bustling market in the style of Barcelona's legendary Boqueria, but its sterile opulence is closer in sensibility to the nearby Fendi boutique, only with ham.
'There has always been a privileged class, even in America, but it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings,' Lasch wrote in the first of the 13 essays that make up this lacerating indictment of the United States published posthumously, a year after his death. The book's title alludes to 'The Revolt of the Masses,' the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset's 1929 excoriation of 'mass-man.' The rebellion Lasch bears witness to is the obverse of Ortega y Gasset's, because it has been carried out by scornful elites who see the rest of the country as 'a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy.'
People tend to notice when they are the objects of contempt. This is the book I turned to after the presidential election, so perfectly did it capture the resentments that have made Trumpism a mainstay of American politics. A substantive reckoning with his return to power should begin here.
No one embodies the elite's mixture of loathing and preening more spectacularly or perversely than Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis's scandalizing 1991 novel 'American Psycho.' Bateman is a Harvard-educated banker who moonlights as a serial killer. The novel's dark genius is in treating Bateman's bespoke consumerism as the deeper psychosis. You can practically see him pushing past Hudson Yards tourists on his way to the development's IWC Schaffhausen watch boutique. Waiting at his deluxe apartment for the arrival of a dinner date, he sips champagne poured from a bottle 'on ice in a Spiros spun-aluminum bowl which is in a Christine Van der Hurd etched-glass champagne cooler which sits on a Christofle silver-plated bar tray.' He decides he won't kill his date in part 'because I don't want to ruin this particular Alexander Julian suit by having the bitch spray her blood all over it.'
We tend to think of the 1990s as a quiescent, prosperous decade, the last good time. Lasch is forcing us to rethink our nostalgia for the moment when entertainment and spectacle decisively triumphed. Only today are the costs of our apathy fully apparent. 'The Revolt of the Elites' has the rare subtitle that is actually useful: 'And the Betrayal of Democracy.'
Then there's the title of the fourth chapter: 'Does Democracy Deserve to Survive?' Posed at the height of the Pax Clintoniana, this question must have seemed obscene. It turned out to be prescient. 'The old dispute between left and right has exhausted its capacity to clarify issues and to provide a reliable map of reality,' Lasch writes. Citizens become consumers, civic life takes on the rhythms of cable news. 'In some quarters the very idea of reality has come into question, perhaps because the talking classes inhabit an artificial world in which simulations of reality replace the thing itself.'
Lasch was a 'left conservative' in the style of Norman Mailer and would have found little to celebrate in today's identitarian progressivism. In a chapter on 'academic pseudo-radicalism,' he denounces the professoriate for its 'incomprehensible jargon' and 'contempt for the general public.' Yet he concludes by warning that 'it is corporate control, not academic radicalism,' that has ruined higher education.
Born in Nebraska to liberal parents, Lasch went east, to Harvard, in 1950. His roommate in Hollis Hall was a Pennsylvanian with surging literary ambitions: John Updike. Later, at Columbia, he studied with the historian Richard Hofstadter, who would soon write 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics,' an essay about our tendency to conspiratorial thinking that has also lost none of its punch since its publication, 60 years ago.
Lasch witnessed the infusion of psychology into politics throughout the 1960s and '70s with great dismay. Therapy called for tolerance, while popular democracy required rigor. A liberal and a libertine were not the same thing. 'When every expression is equally permissible,' he wrote, 'nothing is true.'
His growing concern coalesced into 'The Culture of Narcissism,' an unlikely 1979 best seller. In the age of disco balls, Lasch threw lightning bolts. President Jimmy Carter invited him to the White House, where Lasch offered advice for what would become Carter's 'malaise' speech. In those much misunderstood remarks, Carter captured a central Laschian conviction: 'All the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America.'
Hofstadter was suspicious of populism, not unlike Ortega y Gasset. Lasch, on the other hand, argued that 'the necessary basis of civic virtue' was 'rooted in the defense of small proprietorship.' A robust and informed middle class, he believed, could be a bulwark against oligarchy and demagoguery. By the '90s, the American middle class was in the midst of a decline — and increasingly willing to entertain the toxic politics of resentment.
Lasch's brand of populism is also a recognition that we are bound by culture and tradition. A society geared to always hunt for opportunity would be full of people alienated from everything but the market they were trying to game. Fields like investment banking and technology created a new elite beholden to no tradition, convinced that virtues and valuations were one and the same: 'The thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.'
I consider Lasch the American counterpart to Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish political philosopher whose powerful mind synthesized the pathologies of the first half of the 20th century. Lasch took the second half. If they did not explicitly converse with each other, they nevertheless found common foes in solitude and isolation. 'What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience,' she wrote in 1951.
True to his roots on the old left, Lasch complained that 'New York needs a tax base and full employment; instead it gets words and symbols and lots of restaurants.' Those restaurants were not the kind of taverns and cafeterias where New Yorkers of all classes and backgrounds could come together for the most basic democratic activity of all: conversation. 'What democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information,' he believed — in other words, people talking, not scrolling; arguing, not trolling. He would have laughed at Elon Musk's assertion that he was turning X into the internet's public square, only to flood the platform with the crudest conspiracy theories and most vicious vitriol.
After the 2016 election, Steve Bannon revealed that 'The Revolt of the Elites' was one of his favorite books. How ironic, then, that he helped elect a man who routinely treats the U.S. Constitution like a Burger King napkin. Bannon must have missed the page where Lasch wrote, 'Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves,' not at the behest of an autocrat.
As an alternative to a society engorged on self-gratification, Lasch posits a culture of 'populist cosmopolitanism,' his biographer Eric Miller writes, 'a way of participating in the republic of letters that pries and guards first of all the actual Republic.' It's never quite clear what this means, or how we get there. Nor can I say with confidence that such a society would be committed to racial integration or women's liberation. If we are to be generous, the Laschian ideal is a planned community like Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, which allows for modest but comfortable living in proximity to others.
But good luck getting Patrick Bateman to move to Skillman Avenue. He is in the penthouse of the Equinox Hotel, snapping glam selfies and checking his Instagram mentions. A news alert flashes on his smartphone screen, something about Trump installing Ivanka on the Supreme Court. Seems troubling, but Patrick doesn't care. A ping on his phone: Helicopter's ready! He bought the Bridgehampton 'cottage' for times like these. Even psychos need self-care. Democracy can wait.