Discussion #34: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, by Christopher Lasch

Welcome to Citizen Scholar! Since launching six months ago we&#8217;re reaching people all over the world, so we thank you for your support. If you enjoy our writing on civic virtue and individual excellence, we humbly ask you to share Citizen Scholar with your family members and friends who may enjoy it. The content of the audio and text formats are identical and meant to accommodate your preferences. Please let us know if you have any feedback - we&#8217;re always looking for ways to improve!<br/><br/>Introduction<br/><br/>This week, we&#8217;ll conclude our mini-series on quietly influential books of the 1990&#8217;s with The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. While The Fourth Turning is especially influential among investors and The Sovereign Individual is required reading for techno-libertarians or crypto / Web 3.0, The Revolt of the Elites is often invoked by populists of the right and left. This is all the more remarkable given that the author was a professor of history and not an unabashed critic of the academy. We will revisit the futility of putting Lasch&#8217;s thought into a neat ideological box later in this post.<br/><br/>The Revolt of the Elites was published in 1994, the year that Lasch passed away; it is a collection of essays that he had written throughout his storied career. Taken together, they serve the goal that Lasch set for much of his writing: investigating whether democracy has a future. Discontent with the existing order was bubbling up to the surface of American public life even then. Lasch called this phenomenon &#8220;The Democratic Malaise&#8221;. The opening shots of his argument are evergreen today:<br/><br/>&#8220;The decline of manufacturing and the consequent loss of jobs; the shrinkage of the middle class; the growing number of the poor; the rising crime rate; the flourishing traffic in drugs; the decay of the cities &#8211; the bad news goes on and on. No one has a plausible solution to these intractable problems, and most of what passes for political discus