Daily Inspiration Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch is needling liberals with a diagnosis that doubles as an accusation: they didn’t merely misunderstand “family values” as a political force, they treated it as an opponent’s brand to be reverse-engineered once it started winning. The verb choice matters. “Finally grasped” casts them as slow to recognize what was obvious to everyone else; “cried” suggests panic, not conviction. Even “appropriate” is a loaded term in a line about symbolism: it implies taking without earning, borrowing moral authority without sharing the underlying commitments that generated it.

The subtext is a critique of managerial politics. Liberals, in Lasch’s telling, are at their most fluent when translating lived attachments into messaging - turning the family, not into a set of obligations or a social institution under strain, but into a rhetorical asset. “For their own purposes” is the sting: family becomes instrumental, a tool to advance agendas rather than a reality demanding limits, sacrifice, and a thick sense of duty. He’s not praising conservatives so much as accusing liberals of conceding the moral terrain and then trying to rent it back.

Contextually, this sits in the late 1970s through early 1990s, when the “family values” frame became a primary weapon of the New Right amid anxieties about divorce, women’s labor, youth culture, and economic insecurity. Lasch, a heterodox critic of consumer capitalism and elite liberalism, saw in the scramble to claim the family a deeper panic: a culture losing the institutions that once made solidarity feel non-negotiable, trying to patch that loss with better copy.