"The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine"
About this Quote
Lasch’s jab lands because it weaponizes nostalgia without sounding sentimental. By invoking Tom Paine, he’s not praising “the left” so much as staging a custody battle over American radicalism: who gets to claim the mantle of plainspoken, democratic revolt. Paine is shorthand for an insurgent politics that talked like a pamphlet and thought like a moral emergency. Lasch contrasts that with a modern left he believes has traded persuasion for posture, and everyday realities for a rarified language that reads as managerial or therapeutic.
The phrase “common sense” is doing double duty. It nods to Paine’s actual pamphlet, but it also signals a broader populist grammar: arguments that start from felt experience, not from credentials. Lasch’s intent is corrective and strategic: he’s urging the left to rebuild legitimacy by re-attaching itself to ordinary competence, limits, and the practical ethics of community life. The subtext is sharper: if the left can’t speak in a register that people recognize as sane and usable, it will be outflanked by the right, which has long been better at performing “plain truth” even when selling elite-friendly economics.
Context matters. Writing in the late Cold War era, Lasch watched liberalism drift into technocracy and cultural professionalization, while “populism” became a contested, often reactionary label. His critique isn’t a plea for moderation; it’s a warning that a politics allergic to the common sense of the common people will end up governing by expertise and moral signaling, not consent.
The phrase “common sense” is doing double duty. It nods to Paine’s actual pamphlet, but it also signals a broader populist grammar: arguments that start from felt experience, not from credentials. Lasch’s intent is corrective and strategic: he’s urging the left to rebuild legitimacy by re-attaching itself to ordinary competence, limits, and the practical ethics of community life. The subtext is sharper: if the left can’t speak in a register that people recognize as sane and usable, it will be outflanked by the right, which has long been better at performing “plain truth” even when selling elite-friendly economics.
Context matters. Writing in the late Cold War era, Lasch watched liberalism drift into technocracy and cultural professionalization, while “populism” became a contested, often reactionary label. His critique isn’t a plea for moderation; it’s a warning that a politics allergic to the common sense of the common people will end up governing by expertise and moral signaling, not consent.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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