Daily Inspiration Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch’s jab lands because it treats “the left” not as a set of policies but as a failed relationship with its own supposed constituency. “Common touch” is an old, slightly condescending phrase: it implies not just knowledge of ordinary life, but the instinct to speak its language without flinching or performing. By saying the left has “lost” it, Lasch suggests a betrayal by drift, not an outright conversion - a movement that once knew the cadence of shop floors, churches, and union halls now talking like a committee memo.

The intent is diagnostic and chastening. Lasch is warning that moral authority doesn’t come from being correct on paper; it comes from credibility earned in the everyday. The subtext is that late-20th-century liberalism traded solidarity for expertise: professionals, administrators, and cultural tastemakers replacing organizers, local institutions, and a thick sense of mutual obligation. “Lost” also implies something irretrievable if not fought for - a kind of cultural amnesia.

Context matters: Lasch wrote amid deindustrialization, the fraying of unions, and the rise of a credentialed class increasingly comfortable with mobility, abstraction, and therapeutic individualism. His critique anticipates today’s fights over “elitism” and “real America,” but it’s not just a right-wing talking point. It’s an internal warning flare: when politics becomes a language game of enlightened positions, it leaves a vacuum that demagogues can fill with a cruder, more legible authenticity. The line works because it accuses the left of forgetting that people don’t live in arguments; they live in places, jobs, families, and loyalties.