"The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types"
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Lasch is doing what he always did best: turning a cultural squabble into an argument about power and attention. The sentence sets up a deliberate asymmetry. One side “talks about collapse,” the other “talks instead about emergence.” Collapse is moral drama; emergence is managerial optimism. By choosing those verbs, Lasch isn’t neutrally describing different emphases - he’s accusing the left of linguistic alchemy, swapping loss for novelty, grief for taxonomy.
The subtext is that naming is politics. “Diversity of family types” reads like bureaucratic language, the kind that converts a lived social rupture into a celebratory demographic trend. Lasch implies this isn’t just a disagreement about data; it’s a refusal to sit with consequences. When family life fractures under economic stress, mobility, and the churn of consumer culture, calling the result “diversity” can sound like progress while sidestepping who pays the costs: children, isolated adults, communities stripped of durable obligations.
Context matters because Lasch was no simple culture-war scold. He criticized both laissez-faire markets and elite liberal complacency, arguing that modern capitalism corrodes the very private institutions it claims to leave alone. In that frame, the “left” he targets is less a working-class coalition than a professional class fluent in therapeutic and sociological vocabularies, eager to validate choice but hesitant to confront how economic precarity limits it.
The line works because it compresses a broader Lasch move: skepticism toward elite narratives that rebrand instability as liberation, and a demand that cultural approval not substitute for social repair.
The subtext is that naming is politics. “Diversity of family types” reads like bureaucratic language, the kind that converts a lived social rupture into a celebratory demographic trend. Lasch implies this isn’t just a disagreement about data; it’s a refusal to sit with consequences. When family life fractures under economic stress, mobility, and the churn of consumer culture, calling the result “diversity” can sound like progress while sidestepping who pays the costs: children, isolated adults, communities stripped of durable obligations.
Context matters because Lasch was no simple culture-war scold. He criticized both laissez-faire markets and elite liberal complacency, arguing that modern capitalism corrodes the very private institutions it claims to leave alone. In that frame, the “left” he targets is less a working-class coalition than a professional class fluent in therapeutic and sociological vocabularies, eager to validate choice but hesitant to confront how economic precarity limits it.
The line works because it compresses a broader Lasch move: skepticism toward elite narratives that rebrand instability as liberation, and a demand that cultural approval not substitute for social repair.
Quote Details
| Topic | Family |
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