By NORMAN BIRNBAUM [The Nation] – In the late 1960s and early ’70s [Christopher] Lasch sought to shape the New Left into the redemptive movement he and many of the rest of us were seeking. Decentralization, local autonomy, a distrust of doctrines of efficiency and technocratic calculation were crucial issues on the New Left. Lasch thought of a reinvigorated citizenship, and sought contact with revisionist historians and activists like Gar Alperovitz, Michael Harrington, Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd. He joined the socialist historian James Weinstein in a group intended to develop a large project for democratic renewal. As the New Left succumbed to sectarianism and self-immolation and Lasch’s disappointment with it grew, I decided to explore profane American politics by working with the United Auto Workers and the New Deal’s heirs in the Democratic Party. I was impelled to do so by the lessons being offered by Europe. Enrico Berlinguer in Italy, Willy Brandt in Germany and François Mitterrand in France were persuading the makers of a culture of protest to accept the burdens of a long march through the institutions of society. Lasch took a different approach, sensing—correctly—that the analogy to Europe was shallow. By the time I moved to Washington in 1979, we had taken very different paths. Miller’s biography confirms my regrets. I missed a very great deal in not confronting Lasch’s thought after our common immersion in the New Left.
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After the publication of The New Radicalism in America, Lasch’s influence was considerable. He spoke across the nation, wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books and had access to a large public. He thought of himself as a socialist and remained in touch with a wide spectrum of American social criticism. The experience, along with his doubts, took literary form in The Agony of the American Left, published in 1969. He returned to the theme evoked in his acerbic remarks on Mailer: the student movement had to replace acting out with serious social action. To endure, a popular movement would have to draw upon cultural sources deeper than a political agenda (as the African-American protest had done in the South). Above all, new forms for the practice of democracy in everyday life would have to be created by reviving legacies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, erased by the homogenization of mass culture and the corporate colonization of daily life. Lasch thought of these new forms as modern versions of local self-government and the self-education of an independent citizenry. Much of his later work sought to answer the question of why these radical early American practices had dissolved.
The Agony of the American Left described a failed revolution that was ideologically and intellectually contradictory. Lasch’s readers thought of him as one the left’s most effective protagonists, yet he was already struggling to make sense of the ideas that would set him apart from the left. At the high point of secular America’s struggle to dominate the culture, Lasch raised the possibility that secular progressivism was not sufficient for inspiring the constancy and dedication required by an enduring movement for institutional change. He was trying to explain the defeat inflicted upon the Democratic Party in 1968 by the group it had tried so much to integrate into American society: the white working class. No doubt, many in that class disliked racial equality and feminism. Lasch returned to the criticism he had put forward in The New Radicalism: the educated elites were too dismissive of the legacy of populism, and of its democratic potential.
Continued in The Nation | More Chronicle & Notices.
