"Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom"
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Lasch needles conservatives for choosing the laziest possible posture: not opposition to specific policies, but a reflexive allergy to the mood of environmentalism itself. “Taking environmentalism away from the left” isn’t a call for greenwashing; it’s a strategic dare. He’s pointing out that conservation, in the older Burkean sense, should have been a natural conservative home field: stewardship, limits, reverence for inherited landscapes, suspicion of runaway industrial appetites. Instead, he observes, the right often treats ecological warning as a kind of secular sermon - “a counsel of doom” - and dismisses it as moral blackmail.
The line works because it frames the political failure as psychological, not merely ideological. “Counsel” implies preaching; “doom” implies joyless scolding. Lasch is diagnosing a culture-war reflex: if environmentalism is coded as left, it must be melodramatic, anti-growth, anti-human. That move lets conservatives defend the status quo without having to defend its consequences. Better to ridicule the messenger as apocalyptic than to grapple with pollution, resource depletion, or the fragility of shared commons.
Context matters: Lasch wrote as a heterodox critic of both technocratic liberalism and market triumphalism, suspicious of elite promises that progress would outrun limits. His barb lands in the late Cold War/early neoliberal era, when “growth” became a moral imperative and ecological restraint looked like heresy. He’s not romanticizing the left’s green politics so much as exposing a missed political inheritance: a conservatism capable of saying no - to waste, to hubris, to the fantasy that the earth is infinite.
The line works because it frames the political failure as psychological, not merely ideological. “Counsel” implies preaching; “doom” implies joyless scolding. Lasch is diagnosing a culture-war reflex: if environmentalism is coded as left, it must be melodramatic, anti-growth, anti-human. That move lets conservatives defend the status quo without having to defend its consequences. Better to ridicule the messenger as apocalyptic than to grapple with pollution, resource depletion, or the fragility of shared commons.
Context matters: Lasch wrote as a heterodox critic of both technocratic liberalism and market triumphalism, suspicious of elite promises that progress would outrun limits. His barb lands in the late Cold War/early neoliberal era, when “growth” became a moral imperative and ecological restraint looked like heresy. He’s not romanticizing the left’s green politics so much as exposing a missed political inheritance: a conservatism capable of saying no - to waste, to hubris, to the fantasy that the earth is infinite.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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