The Death Throes of Democracy? ‘The Revolt of the Elites’ at 30

Democracy, the Washington Post warns in every issue and on its website, “dies in darkness.” Whatever does this mean? And who turned out the light? The newspaper adopted the slogan in February 2017. Did something significant happen shortly before then? Ah yes, a certain presidential election, which a certain candidate won in surprising fashion. The WaPo’s slogan seems to suggest that that event was a harbinger of a new Dark Age, one that could prove fatal for our democracy.

In a more direct salvo, George Scialabba writes in Commonweal (Feb.) that democracy “cannot survive a permanently, systematically deluded” electorate that would vote for such a candidate — three times, no less! The man is, after all, “the most immoral, even psychopathic human being ever to occupy the presidency,” he claims, “by many orders of magnitude.”

According to liberals like Scialabba (an apostate Catholic who calls himself an “ethical socialist”), the WaPo crowd, and other denizens of the chattering class, Donald Trump’s political ascendancy has put American democracy in grave peril. They have successfully advanced the notion that anything that runs counter to the prevailing political correctness (or anything Trump and his minions say or do) is an attack on democracy. Conversely, anything that advances the progressive agenda, specifically the interests of “underrepresented minorities,” is an act of democracy. Major news outlets, liberal thought-leaders, talking heads, and rival politicos repeat this theme ad nauseam. It’s basically axiomatic now. The ACLU, that sine qua non of liberal elitism, for instance, called Trump’s rolling back DEI programs “an immediate and sweeping threat to our multiracial democracy.” But it called the racially motivated riots in response to George Floyd’s death in 2020 “essential to protecting our democracy.”

The sense that American democracy is under assault is not new. Thirty years ago, one of the great thinkers of the time highlighted democracy’s betrayal by a different — in fact, rather opposed — group from that identified by Scialabba. That thinker was Christopher Lasch, and the betrayers were the exemplars, beneficiaries, and defenders of the liberal world order — the very ones who now accuse Trump and his followers of undermining democracy.

A prominent public intellectual from the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s, Lasch is best known as the author of The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, which won the National Book Award in 1979. A longtime professor of history at the University of Rochester (and a contributing editor of the NOR), he wrote other well-received books, including Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977), The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984), and The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991). Perhaps his most prophetic work is his final offering, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995). Completed with the aid of his daughter Elisabeth just before his death, it was published posthumously and also rose to the rank of bestseller.

Lasch begins his polemic with a diagnosis of democracy vis-à-vis the emerging cult of diversity — one that has metastasized over the ensuing decades into a full-blown religion, complete with dogmas, liturgies, priests, saints and martyrs, heretics, and a host of true believers. (For a full treatment of this phenomenon, see my column “The Woke Ethic & the Spirit of Protestantism,” Sept. 2023.) Democracy, Lasch wrote, “has come to serve simply as a description of the therapeutic state. When we speak of democracy today, we refer, more often than not, to the democratization of ‘self-esteem.’” The catchwords of the day — diversity, compassion, empowerment, and entitlement — many of which are still bandied about, “express the wistful hope that deep divisions in American society can be bridged by…sanitized speech. We are called on to recognize that all minorities are entitled to respect not by virtue of their accomplishments but by virtue of their sufferings in the past.”

We are living in the world Lasch saw aborning, one shaped by a therapeutic vision of racial redress promoted by an up-and-coming class of liberal elites. That class has since come of age and now commands many of our social, cultural, and political institutions — global corporations, educational bodies, entertainment conglomerates, government agencies — through which they impose this vision. A few notable examples from this summer: Universal Pictures released a film version of The Odyssey in which Helen of Troy is portrayed by a black woman. The director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History was asked during a congressional hearing why some of the museum’s educational materials state that “objective, rational” thinking and being “polite” are aspects of “white culture.” And a Department of Justice probe found that the University of California San Diego School of Medicine violated federal law by using a “shadow application process” to favor black and Hispanic applicants.

Diversity is our strength, the elites are fond of reminding us. But diversity is largely a top-down initiative, not a grassroots movement. Thirty years ago, Lasch recognized the error of equating diversity and democracy. The former is “a fine thing,” he wrote, “but it is only the beginning of democracy, not its destination.” Rather, democracy is a “legal system that makes it possible for people to live with their differences” — not to celebrate their differences but to unite with each other despite those differences, in the interest of the common good. But for “people who are single-mindedly obsessed with racism and ideological fanaticism,” Lasch wrote, “democracy can mean only one thing: the defense of what they call cultural diversity.”

Lasch saw clearly where the obsession with race and racial politics leads. It legitimizes “a new dogmatism,” he said, in which “rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion.” This is ideological conformity masquerading as community, as it “carries with it the insidious assumption that all members of a given group can be expected to think alike.” Why must we presume that, say, each black, Asian, Hispanic, homosexual, or female individual invariably reaches the same conclusion on a given topic as all other black, Asian, Hispanic, homosexual, or female individuals? Is there no diversity of opinion within each group (and subgroup)? Is none allowed? Evidently not, as conformity to group identity is enforced by “self-selected minority ‘spokespersons,’” Lasch observed, who ostracize those who stray from the party line — “black people, for instance, who ‘think white.’” The policing of speech and, therefore, thought — a phenomenon that has intensified under the social-media microscope — is not a feature of democracy but is, rather, detrimental to democracy’s flourishing. That’s because democracy requires the vigorous exchange of ideas. “Ideas, like property,” Lasch insisted, must be “distributed as widely as possible” for a democracy to function. Free “conversation” is the “essence of civic life.”

Where does such conversation take place? In what Lasch, borrowing from Ray Oldenburg, called “third places” — popular hangouts such as taverns, pubs, parish halls, synagogues, and community centers. They are third places because they are midway between the workplace and the home, between the “rat race” and the “womb.” They are “the poor man’s public forum,” Lasch said, where “habits of decency” are formed in dialogue with neighbors in informal settings.

Even in Lasch’s time, those third places were being abandoned. Now they’re just quaint features in old movies and television shows. In the Age of Social Media, people are instead drawn to oxymoronic “virtual communities,” where they can interact with rank strangers who share a hobby, ethnicity, or interest (and whose identities are at times hidden behind avatars and screen names), each isolated in his own private chamber. And those habits of decency? Gone, too, if not entirely then in large measure, as race-based tribalism intensifies and algorithms favor the outrageous.

Third places are disappearing largely because entire neighborhoods are being gutted — by the market economy, that great enemy of authentic community, which hollows out local cultures in favor of broad, bland sameness by, for instance, replacing mom-and-pop shops and eateries with big-box retail stores and chain restaurants. Lasch identified a major cause of the decline of community-based small businesses and a grounded local gentry in the increasing mobility of capital. Whereas “stability of residence” once provided “a certain sense of community,” he observed, local and regional loyalties are “sadly attenuated.” They now mostly manifest in fierce devotion to sports teams — either those from the hometown one abandoned or those of one’s adopted city. Here in the Bay Area, long a major destination for fortune-seekers, two of the baseball teams with the largest fanbases are the San Francisco Giants and the Boston Red Sox. Writing just before the dotcom boom and the emergence of Big Tech as a cultural and economic force that transformed not only this area but the world at large, Lasch lamented the “new aristocracy of brains” for whom success is “closely associated with mobility.” Restless and migratory, they tend to “congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating ties with the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture.” Hence the prevalence of New Englanders in the Bay Area.

Even in Lasch’s time, the bicoastal elites were “in revolt” against Middle America “as they imagine it: technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy” — a description that reads like a parody of the liberal’s conception of Trump supporters. The elites’ loyalties are “international rather than regional, national, or local.” Multiculturalism thus “suits them to perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar in which exotic cuisines, exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic tribal customs can be savored indiscriminately.” The mobile elite have, Lasch noted, “a tourist’s view of the world” — a disposition not likely to encourage devotion to local democracy. They can jet off to some luxury locale and enjoy ethnic flavors, while a night out for the rest of us means “eatin’ good in the neighborhood” at Applebee’s.

For Lasch, the “routine acceptance of professionals as a class apart” was an ominous development. This creative class, the masters of technology — symbolic analysts, as Robert Reich called them — operate in “a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized modes of reality,” such as stock-market quotations and visual imaging (for Hollywood or Madison Ave.). Today we know them as coders and influencers. Their experience of finding fortune by manipulating “artificial environments,” from which everything that resists human control has been “rigorously excluded,” is reflected in their belief that reality itself is a social construct. The result is a supposedly enlightened elite that seeks to create for themselves “parallel or ‘alternative’ institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened,” whom they perceive as “incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic.” By escaping the common life, they are, for the most part, personally unaffected by the racial resentment that arises from the diversity programs they promote.

The common life the elites have left behind represented democracy in its purest form in the American experience. Democracy was a common project for the common man — horizontal (peer to peer) rather than vertical (bureaucrat to client) — and it found form in small, self-governing communities dotted throughout the land. These allowed “everyone to take part in public debates,” Lasch wrote, and, therefore, in the decision-making process that affected them directly — what we Catholics call subsidiarity. It seems obvious, therefore (though many won’t like to hear this), that Lasch would conclude that “the authentic voice of democracy” is populism. Populism, he said, rejects “both the politics of deference and the politics of pity. It stands for plain manners and plain, straight­forward speech. It is unimpressed by titles and other symbols of exalted social rank, but it is equally unimpressed by claims of moral supe­riority advanced in the name of the oppressed.” It “assumes that individuals are entitled to respect until they prove themselves unworthy of it, but it insists that they take responsibility for themselves.”

Populism is anathema in elitist circles, where it is blamed for Trump’s elections. Scialabba encapsulates this arrogance when he writes that Trump’s supporters “seem lost to us” — us being the enlightened liberals whose self-assigned task is to preserve democracy, which they mistakenly equate with diversity, from the new “dark” age that is supposedly descending upon our land. On the contrary, what “calls the future of democracy into question,” Lasch said, is the decline of self-governing communities due to the flight of the elite from the common life.

Three decades ago, in The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch offered a prescient diagnosis. He described the “curious spectacle” of life at the end of the 20th century as one in which capital and labor “flow freely across political boundaries that seem increasingly artificial and unenforceable,” while “tribal loyalties have seldom been so aggressively promoted.” The United States, he said, was at risk of dissolving into a mass of contending factions, a “war of all against all,” goaded by an elite who promote a distorted understanding of democracy while their self-imposed exile from the common life undercuts the real thing. At the quarter pole of the 21st century, his prognosis still obtains. And if the dissolution proceeds apace, then Lasch will have prophesied accurately that, contra the claims of WaPo and Scialabba & Co., our democracy is “more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.”

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