"Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values"
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Lasch’s jab lands because it flips the usual culture-war script: the people who brand themselves as guardians of “tradition” end up running errands for the very machinery that dissolves it. The word “unwittingly” is the knife. He’s not accusing conservatives of conscious hypocrisy so much as of ideological sleepwalking - mistaking familiar slogans for an actual defense of the social fabric.
The target is a particular late-20th-century bargain: moral seriousness on the surface, market fundamentalism underneath. Lasch saw “traditional values” as rooted in thick institutions - family stability, neighborhood reciprocity, religious and civic authority, limits on appetite. Yet the dominant conservative program of his era often championed deregulation, consumer choice, and corporate mobility. Those forces don’t just rearrange the economy; they rewire everyday life. When work becomes precarious, communities thin out. When advertising and entertainment colonize attention, restraint looks quaint. When success is measured by consumption, the old moral vocabulary becomes a costume.
Subtext: the real antagonist isn’t liberal permissiveness; it’s the culture of narcissism produced by modern capitalism and therapeutic individualism. Lasch is poking conservatives where it hurts by saying their favored “freedom” is not morally neutral. It manufactures the very conditions - rootlessness, privatized life, perpetual desire - that make shared norms hard to sustain.
Context matters: writing amid Reagan-era triumphalism and the New Right’s rise, Lasch positioned himself as a heterodox critic of both left and right. His provocation is less partisan dunk than diagnostic: tradition can’t be saved by rhetoric if you keep feeding the engines that eat it.
The target is a particular late-20th-century bargain: moral seriousness on the surface, market fundamentalism underneath. Lasch saw “traditional values” as rooted in thick institutions - family stability, neighborhood reciprocity, religious and civic authority, limits on appetite. Yet the dominant conservative program of his era often championed deregulation, consumer choice, and corporate mobility. Those forces don’t just rearrange the economy; they rewire everyday life. When work becomes precarious, communities thin out. When advertising and entertainment colonize attention, restraint looks quaint. When success is measured by consumption, the old moral vocabulary becomes a costume.
Subtext: the real antagonist isn’t liberal permissiveness; it’s the culture of narcissism produced by modern capitalism and therapeutic individualism. Lasch is poking conservatives where it hurts by saying their favored “freedom” is not morally neutral. It manufactures the very conditions - rootlessness, privatized life, perpetual desire - that make shared norms hard to sustain.
Context matters: writing amid Reagan-era triumphalism and the New Right’s rise, Lasch positioned himself as a heterodox critic of both left and right. His provocation is less partisan dunk than diagnostic: tradition can’t be saved by rhetoric if you keep feeding the engines that eat it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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