Christopher Lasch Quotes
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters. The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information. The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system. The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family. The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types. The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment. The left has lost the common touch. The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense. The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine. The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum. The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction. The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place. 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. The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about. The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images. The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer. Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it. Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left. We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change. 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.
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