Politics & Power Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch’s line is a cold shower aimed at two opposing fantasies: the utopian left that wants politics to redeem the soul, and the market-liberal right that pretends coercion evaporates when it’s outsourced or politely procedural. “Irreducible measure of coercion” is doing the heavy lifting. He’s not claiming politics is uniquely violent; he’s insisting it’s structurally so. The state doesn’t just persuade. It taxes, drafts, polices, incarcerates, regulates. Even “consensus” becomes coercive the moment dissent meets a fine, a court order, or the quiet threat of exclusion.

The genius of the sentence is its refusal to flatter moral ambition. Lasch doesn’t mock love and justice; he limits what politics can plausibly deliver. The subtext is a warning against a perennial American habit: turning political disagreement into a referendum on virtue. If you expect “perfect love,” opponents stop being wrong and start being wicked. If you promise “perfect justice,” any compromise reads as betrayal. That’s how reforms curdle into purity tests, and how government expands not only in scope but in moral self-importance.

Context matters: writing in a late-20th-century America swollen with therapeutic language, rights talk, and ideological certainty, Lasch was skeptical of institutions claiming to engineer moral wholeness. He’s carving out space for politics as a necessary, blunt tool - one that can reduce cruelty and widen opportunity, but can’t substitute for the thicker bonds of family, community, faith, or civic habit. The point isn’t cynicism; it’s containment: keep politics from becoming a secular church with a police power.