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The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

Christopher Lasch

Populist social criticism

A prophetic critique, published posthumously in 1995, that inverted the old worry about the masses. Lasch argued that the real threat to democracy now comes from above — from a mobile, credentialed elite that has seceded from common life, abandoned its civic obligations, and grown contemptuous of the ordinary people and places it once served. Hard to classify on the usual spectrum, it anticipated the populist revolts of the twenty-first century with uncanny precision.

About the author

American historian and social critic (1932–1994), professor at the University of Rochester. Moving from the New Left toward a distinctive communitarian populism, Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism and, finished as he was dying, The Revolt of the Elites, which became a touchstone for critics of meritocratic liberalism on both left and right.

Synopsis

Lasch argues that a new aristocracy of brains and money — managers, professionals, symbol-manipulators — has detached itself from national community, living in a borderless world of its own while the middle and working classes bear the costs. He links this secession to the decay of public institutions, debased political debate, the loss of the 'art of association,' and a therapeutic culture that erodes the moral seriousness democracy requires.

Core passage idea

Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted work

Lasch argues that the gravest threat to democracy now comes not from the masses but from the elites — a privileged, mobile class that has withdrawn from common life and lost its sense of obligation to the rest of society.

By relocating the danger to democracy from below to above, Lasch reframed the politics of class and culture and foresaw the populist backlash against a detached meritocratic elite. His diagnosis is now claimed across left and right alike.

To avoid a bubble

Pair with defenders of meritocracy and cosmopolitan openness who see elite mobility as opportunity rather than betrayal, and with critics who find Lasch's nostalgia for older communities romantic or his portrait of 'the elites' too sweeping.

Reading note

Bracing and quotable; read it as a forerunner of today's populism debates, alongside Sandel's Tyranny of Merit and Müller's What Is Populism? Its cross-spectrum appeal is part of the point.

Best paired with

Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit; Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone.

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