Politics & Power Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch is picking a fight with the reflex that turns politics into a mirror match: right proposes, left counters, the public gets a familiar script with different costumes. His line refuses the comfort of “reply.” It’s not just that the left’s answers are inadequate; the very choreography of rebuttal is a trap, because it keeps the argument inside a shared set of assumptions about progress, expertise, markets, the state, and what counts as a “solution.” The sting is that conventional categories don’t merely describe politics, they police it. They tell you which grievances are legitimate, which loyalties are backward, which communities are obstacles, and which institutions are untouchable.

The intent is insurgent and diagnostic: Lasch wants a politics that doesn’t treat “left” and “right” as natural facts but as exhausted branding. That doesn’t mean a vague centrism; it’s closer to a refusal of managerial ideology, whether it arrives as technocratic liberalism or market triumphalism. The subtext is populist in the older sense: suspicion of elites who claim to speak in the name of rationality while dissolving local attachments and democratic control.

Context matters. Writing in the late Cold War’s long shadow, with New Deal coalitions fraying and culture-war alignments hardening, Lasch saw both parties converging on a professionalized, expert-led model of governance. His provocation anticipates today’s “realignment” chatter, but with sharper teeth: if you keep answering the right on its terms, you inherit its map. Lasch is daring readers to redraw the terrain entirely, starting from civic competence, community power, and limits that neither side loves to admit.