About Christopher Lasch: Christopher (Kit) Lasch was a well-known American historian, moralist, and social critic.
Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, confer...
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.
The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.
