"The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters"
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Lasch lands the insult where conservatives like to claim their home turf: seriousness. “Intellectual debility” isn’t just a jab at bad arguments; it’s a diagnosis of atrophy, a movement losing the ability to think in big categories and therefore retreating into smaller, safer fights. The punch is in “silence.” Lasch isn’t accusing contemporary conservatism of having the wrong answers; he’s accusing it of not even showing up for the exam. In a culture that rewards constant noise, he singles out a quieter failure: evasion dressed up as prudence.
The subtext is that a tradition that once justified itself by defending institutions, limits, and moral order has, in Lasch’s view, stopped grappling with the actual pressures dissolving those things. “All important matters” implicitly points beyond the headline issues of the moment to deeper questions Lasch returned to across his work: the hollowing-out of civic life, the market’s colonization of everyday experience, the loss of shared standards that can’t be reduced to consumer preference. Silence here can mean complicity (benefiting from the status quo), fear (big questions fracture coalitions), or mere exhaustion (outsourcing thought to slogans).
Context matters because Lasch was no campus radical scolding from the sidelines. He was a heterodox critic of liberal technocracy and therapeutic culture who distrusted elites across the spectrum. That makes the line sharper: it’s not partisan trash talk so much as a warning that “conservatism” as an intellectual project is being replaced by a posture - reactive, managerial, and risk-averse. For Lasch, a politics that can’t name what’s truly at stake isn’t just losing debates; it’s forfeiting responsibility.
The subtext is that a tradition that once justified itself by defending institutions, limits, and moral order has, in Lasch’s view, stopped grappling with the actual pressures dissolving those things. “All important matters” implicitly points beyond the headline issues of the moment to deeper questions Lasch returned to across his work: the hollowing-out of civic life, the market’s colonization of everyday experience, the loss of shared standards that can’t be reduced to consumer preference. Silence here can mean complicity (benefiting from the status quo), fear (big questions fracture coalitions), or mere exhaustion (outsourcing thought to slogans).
Context matters because Lasch was no campus radical scolding from the sidelines. He was a heterodox critic of liberal technocracy and therapeutic culture who distrusted elites across the spectrum. That makes the line sharper: it’s not partisan trash talk so much as a warning that “conservatism” as an intellectual project is being replaced by a posture - reactive, managerial, and risk-averse. For Lasch, a politics that can’t name what’s truly at stake isn’t just losing debates; it’s forfeiting responsibility.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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