Daily Inspiration Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch is picking a fight with the very people who think they’re fighting for him. The sting in this line is that it doesn’t treat conservatism as an ideology with coherent priorities; it treats it as a category error. “Modern capitalism” isn’t the small-town shopkeeper fantasy conservatives like to sentimentalize. It’s a restless system that liquefies local attachments, monetizes intimacy, and turns “choice” into a moral alibi. Lasch’s intent is to argue that you can’t defend tradition while cheering the machine that dissolves the conditions tradition needs to survive.

The subtext is accusatory and, in Lasch’s hands, almost pastoral: conservatives claim to defend family, faith, and community, yet align themselves with corporate power, consumer culture, and managerial elites whose incentives run directly against those goods. His phrasing implies that the conservative imagination is stuck in a pre-corporate picture of markets - thrift, self-reliance, productive citizenship - while the actual economy has moved toward finance, advertising, and a culture of permanent appetite. If you don’t grasp that shift, your “values” talk becomes costume drama.

Context matters: Lasch wrote as the postwar consensus was giving way to deregulation, deindustrialization, and the rise of a professional-managerial class. He distrusted both left technocracy and right-market romanticism, seeing them as two dialects of the same modern project: liberation from limits, sold as progress. The line works because it flips the script. Conservatism’s self-image is realism; Lasch casts it as naivete, defending an idea of the past while underwriting the forces that ensure it won’t return.