I admire Lasch for being the ultimate mugwump in a profession dominated by boringly straightforward left-liberals, but I'm not sure his politics were ultimately coherent.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter now that he’s a populist right shibboleth more than a resource. (Call him “Kit” like his friends for hipster cred.)

Hate to sound like Kevin Williamson, but it’s tough to champion the rubes and the lower-middle class against the elites while crusading against progress and consumer capitalism...

because these people are pro-progress, pro-consumption, pro-innovation-for-innovation's-sake—they oppose these things only spasmodically, if we’re being honest.

I have similar rugged German ancestors, farmers and tradesmen, the ones whose traditionalism Lasch cherished, but...did he not notice their American Dream was the exurban dream, and they seized it at the first available opportunity?

(Even those old socialist mayors of Milwaukee with names like Seidel and Zeidler would have been old-fashioned quasi-Marxians (I assume), the sort of socialists who wanted to marry the enormous productive capacity of industrial capitalism with broader consumption.)

In a sense Lasch was not a populist but an exotic breed of Marxist vanguard intellectual, but unlike a Marxist couldn’t admit to himself that he understood the people's interests better than the people themselves.

Tbf perhaps _True and Only Heaven_ gets into all this more than I recall. It’s been a while... Here’s a wincingly acute contemporary review of Culture of Narcissism by Bernard Williams https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n14/bernard-williams/modern-discontent