Nearly midway into Christopher Lasch’s classic 1995 jeremiad, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy , Lasch makes a pause in his attacks upon the liberal elite’s “arrogance”, “insularity”, “abstraction”, and the fact that “the thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life”. As if coming to a sudden realisation, he adds, “none of this means that a politics that really mattered – a politics rooted in common sense instead of the ideologies that appeal to elites – would painlessly resolve all the conflicts that threaten to tear the country apart”. A politics rooted in common sense – i.
e. what “ordinary” people are most concerned with – is now said to have swept the Democrats from the White House and out of a Senate majority. It is perhaps one of the signs of our present moment, caught, to borrow a famous formulation, between a world that is dying and one that is struggling to be born, that people fall back on familiar terminology even as they have forgotten exactly what that terminology means.
Not one American in a thousand, I will wager, can tell you what defines a “fascist”. No doubt that is part of the reason that the Democrats feverish application of the term to Trump in the last weeks of the election seems, rather, to have had the reverse of its intended effect. And now, for sheer repellent power, the liberal use of “fascist” has been replaced by the conservative use of “elite”.
As a resul.
