Daily Inspiration Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch’s jab lands because it’s less about “family values” than about the credibility gap he thinks liberalism creates when it tries to honor every arrangement while still speaking the language of protection and permanence. The line is engineered as an accusation of moral improvisation: if “family” is endlessly flexible, then “defending families” becomes a PR posture, not a serious commitment. He’s not arguing that pluralism is false; he’s arguing it dissolves the emotional and political force that once came from treating the family as a thick, obligation-heavy institution rather than a customizable lifestyle.

The subtext is classic Lasch: modern society, intoxicated by choice, corrodes the bonds that buffer people from market pressures and bureaucratic management. A “pluralistic definition” sounds humane, but in his framing it conveniently aligns with a culture that wants individuals unencumbered, mobile, and self-inventing. The family becomes a soft concept, easier to praise rhetorically while abandoning materially. “Carries no conviction” is the tell: he’s diagnosing a tone, a hollowness, the way political language can sound like care while acting like retreat.

Context matters. Writing in the late Cold War decades, Lasch watched Democrats shift from New Deal material solidarity toward a rights-and-recognition vocabulary, and he distrusted the professional-managerial class that spoke it. This sentence is a wedge aimed at that class: it suggests liberals can’t defend families because they’ve stopped believing families make binding claims. It’s a provocation designed to force an uncomfortable question: when everything counts as family, what, exactly, are we defending against the world outside the door?