Ranging broadly over Western political thought since the 17th century, Lasch looks at successive versions of a belief in progress that he finds characteristic of the liberal current.
Once again, our trusty Mondragón Bookstore has supplied an old book with current wisdom. This one is The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, by Christopher Lasch (1991). Nearly 35 years old, dating from the first decade of the right-wing counteroffensive, it sheds surprising light on our current political chamber of horrors.
Ranging broadly over Western political thought since the 17th century, Lasch looks at successive versions of a belief in progress that he finds characteristic of the liberal current. And in turn, he also focuses on critics of each of those liberal arguments.
For example, he treats the religious thinker Reinhold Niebuhr in depth, detailing his challenge to liberal optimism and his advocacy of a worldview tempered by the inevitability of sin, conflict and violence. Niebuhr, in his turn, had a profound impact on Martin Luther King Jr., who came to view the world with hope but without optimism.
The last two chapters bring us into our own times, since the 1970s, times that have witnessed the erosion of the New Deal order, the concentration of income in the hands of the wealthiest, and the erosion of the liberal hold on the American working class. Educated liberals increasingly came to see the mass of the population as incapable of understanding the values of democracy, progress and social justice. Conservatives starting with George Wallace and Richard Nixon were then able to win over more and more workers based on appeals to resist the liberals' agenda of social justice and cultural advocacy for new, more progressive values.
This was already happening in 1991, 35 years ago! Trump's base was there, waiting for him.
His final pages sum it up. The argument is about limits, as opposed to the liberal assumption of infinite progress, and about hope, as opposed to the liberals' optimism. Oddly, he thinks populism embodies the necessary counter to liberalism. Were he alive today, I wonder what he'd think about Trump.
The true clincher of his argument comes when he notes that "The belated discovery that the earth's ecology will no longer sustain an indefinite expansion of productive forces deals the final blow to the belief in progress" (529). We must accept limits to our aspirations. All this long before global warming became common knowledge.
Here is a final irony. Today's liberals accept global warming and the need for limits. It is the contemporary Right Wing, led by Trump, that insists that global warming is a hoax and that there are no limits.
I pointed out in a recent essay that Trump and his troops have a kind of Jacobin mentality: nothing is impossible, nothing is forbidden. We liberals, I said, must be today's conservatives, today's Edmund Burke.
I suspect that Lasch would be disoriented by today's politics, and surprised that it's the liberals he's rooting for now.
