Justice & Law Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch is picking a fight with his own side, and he does it by accusing the left of a particular kind of blindness: the habit of treating mass sentiment as pathology. The sentence is built to sound like a diagnosis, but the real target is not “the popular defense of the family” or “attitudes” on abortion and crime. It’s the elite reflex to read disagreement as moral failure rather than as a signal of lived anxieties, competing goods, or legitimate pluralism.

The phrasing “sees nothing but” is the tell. Lasch isn’t claiming the right’s rhetoric is pure; he’s arguing that the left’s interpretive framework is too thin, too smug, too quick to reach for the easy labels - “bigotry” and “superstition” - that flatter the accuser while ending conversation. Those two words matter: bigotry pathologizes the heart (you’re hateful), superstition pathologizes the mind (you’re irrational). Together they let educated liberals dismiss opponents as both morally and intellectually defective.

Context does a lot of work here. Writing amid late-20th-century culture-war flashpoints - busing, crime politics, battles over sex education and curricula, Roe-era abortion polarization - Lasch is warning that technocratic liberalism and university-inflected progressivism were losing the ability to speak to ordinary voters without contempt. His deeper intent is strategic and moral: if the left can’t interpret popular attachments (to family stability, neighborhood safety, communal norms) as something other than backwardness, it cedes those attachments to the right and turns politics into a permanent seminar in scolding.