Daily Inspiration Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch is swinging at a comfortable liberal reflex: the belief that history naturally ratifies the left, and that dissent is just ignorance waiting to be educated. His line isn’t a valentine to conservatism; it’s an indictment of how political credibility gets built. “Popular opinion” here isn’t a poll number, it’s a lived sense of reality - wages, neighborhoods, schools, crime, religion, family - the everyday institutions where people test whether elites understand what’s happening to them. When the left speaks in the idiom of credentialed expertise or moral purification, it can sound like it’s arguing with the public rather than for it.

The phrase “party of common sense” is doing the real work. Lasch is naming politics as branding, not philosophy: the right doesn’t have to win on policy merit if it can win on tone. “Common sense” implies a world where problems are obvious and solutions are straightforward; it flatters the audience as competent and sane, while casting opponents as detached, doctrinaire, even contemptuous. If the left is perceived as policing language, re-litigating symbols, or outsourcing judgment to institutions people no longer trust, the right gets to pose as the adult in the room - even when its answers are simplistic or punitive.

Context matters: Lasch wrote in the long shadow of post-1960s liberalism, deindustrialization, and the rise of a professional-managerial class. He saw a left that talked emancipation while drifting away from the solidarities and limits that make mass politics possible. The subtext is brutal: you don’t lose elections only by being wrong; you lose by sounding like you don’t like the people you claim to represent.