Charles Champetier’s article, published in the journal Éléments in 1996, is a palpation of the work of the American intellectual Christopher Lasch, “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy”, through the lens of the Nouvelle Droite (European New Right).
The central narrative of the work and the article is that Ortega y Gasset’s analyses of the “revolt of the masses” must now be overturned as ungrounded: in the 20th century, the masses were uprooted and carried away by totalitarian movements, but today, the “New Order” of managers, technocrats and professionals of information and culture are the elites who have separated themselves from common life and abandoned its values.
Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) was a controversial and unclassifiable figure in American intellectualism. Heir to the Critical Theory of the infamous Frankfurt School, indifferent to the revolutionary dimension of Marxism, deeply attached to the past and future of the United States, a claimant to the populist tradition while at the same time borrowing arguments from conservative thought, Lasch is an interesting as well as provocative figure. His last work, completed shortly before his death, constitutes an intellectual testament that shakes up many certainties and dogmas of liberal democracy.
The X-ray of the New Order
The “New Order” is defined as those who control international flows of money and information, preside over charitable foundations and higher education institutions, manage the means of cultural production, and set the terms of public debate. This is the managerial class and the intellectual professions, that is, the liberals of the upper middle class.
In contrast to the old bourgeoisie, whose power was based on property income, the New Order bases its dominance on three elements:
- the dominance of information,
- the exploitation of “managerial capacity”
- and investment in private and specialized education.
Its main concern is not the organization of the state or the defense of the common good, but the “harmonious functioning of the system as a whole” that is, globalization and the promotion of a new “sense of history” against which any rebellion is declared futile.
Lasch points out a disturbing trend: industrialized societies are returning to a state of the Old Regime, with a sharp social division between a self-satisfied elite and a suffering “third class.” The rift is not only economic but also moral: above, power, technocratic language, moralistic chatter and the comfort of high incomes; below, the confrontation with reality, uncertainty about the future, the question of meaning, disgust for small talk and a hunger for great values.
The Ridicule of Democracy
One of Lasch’s central arguments is that the established meritocracy is only a mockery of democracy. The New Order, made up of “men and women in transit,” draws its legitimizing value from the feeling that it has made itself and therefore owes nothing to anyone. Unlike the old aristocracy, which was bound by the ethic of noblesse oblige, meritocracy tends to depersonalize and absolve itself of responsibility for guiding society. When faced with criticism, the elite no longer defends its commitments, but invokes the authority of the “complex” mechanisms of politics and economics, beyond the reach of the common man.
This attitude manifests itself in everyday life: members of the New Order abandon city centers for residential suburbs, send their children to private schools, never use public transportation. Such a spontaneous indifference to the “public good” makes the elites’ claim to embody it illusory.
According to Lasch, this meritocracy allows the rise of a few while at the same time justifying indifference to the general level of education of the people. It sanctifies the victory of the intellectual model, reflecting the evolution of capitalism towards an increasing abstraction of values. The end result is profoundly undemocratic: class separation, contempt for manual labor, the decline of public schools, the disappearance of a common culture.
The Fairy Tale of Social Progress
The text analyzes in detail the history of the myth of social mobility in the United States. The USA is the ideal “experiment” and the ideal platform for study, since it is promoted and presented as the matrix of the future society. A society of flattened thinking, dependent on material goods, both necessary and unnecessary, interracial, sexually immoderate, dependent on substances and atheist. Even in the 1990s, the utopia of such a society is obvious and that is why Lasch studies it.
Lasch therefore argues that the long-term trend of improving living conditions has been reversed: the middle class today fears falling into poverty more than it hopes to rise towards comfort. The vision of indefinite development is dissolving.
The myth of opportunity developed after the crash of 1929 and took off in the 1950s and 1960s, in response to a loss of confidence in class struggle and a fear of stagnation. However, Lasch traces the roots of the ideal of opportunity to the late 19th century, when the end of the Western Conquest and industrialization replaced the promise of independence with the hope of elevation through wage labor.
Throughout the 19th century, the most widespread ideal in the United States was not the ascent of the social ladder, but the possession of property and the free fulfillment of labor—a desire for self-determination, combined with a working-class mentality hostile to “slacker” capitalists. Wage labor itself, compared to “white slavery,” contradicts the principle of autonomy. The only acceptable desire for elevation was of an intellectual nature: curiosity for discovery, education, a taste for written culture. The ideal was a classless society, where knowledge would not be separated from work.
American populism is inscribed in the nostalgia of this “golden age”, but an era of fragile equilibrium where public life referred to a democracy of small owners, to the union of intellectual and manual labor, to the educational value of practical experience in the management of property and the exercise of citizenship.
Reference to the Populist Party
The article includes an extensive parenthesis on American populism, distinguishing it from the pejorative use of the term in France. While in France populism is used as a pejorative term for demagogic positions or far-right movements, in the United States politicians — both Democrats and Republicans — readily claim a populist tradition.
American populism in the narrow sense refers to the Populist Party, founded in 1891 and developed in the inland states. Its emergence was associated with the fear of the degradation of small independent landowners in the face of the Industrial Revolution and the development of a strong federal state. The party opposed the imperatives of “progress” and desired the preservation of the “original model” of American democracy: extensive local autonomy, proximity of elites and people, good work ethic, non-competitive economy.
Interestingly, the People’s Party was more hostile to the market than to the State, unlike many contemporary neo-populists. Its program included nationalizations of railroads, telegraphs, and telephones, as well as a proportional income tax. Sociologically, American populism is rooted in the middle class, in that “Middle America”: halfway between the bureaucratic-intellectual heaviness of the East Coast and the technological-commercial frenzy of the West Coast.
The Priesthood of Experts and the Paleontology of Democracy
Lasch argues that there is no democracy without virtue, and no virtue without education. While most democrats believe that “liberal institutions, not the character of citizens, make democracy work,” Lasch first demands the education of the people, independent of property and social status. He denounces the “clericalization” of intellectual life, a real seizure of knowledge by an “enlightened” elite who know how to entertain the masses in order to keep them illiterate and ignorant.
The reign of “specialized know-how” in all fields extinguishes common sense and destroys the citizens’ capacity for judgment. Lasch joins a tradition of criticism of liberal democracy that, from Emerson and Whitman to Dewey, claims an alternative and active conception of freedom, the fulfillment of duties rather than the enjoyment of rights. He approaches the Aristotelian conception of freedom with admiration.
Lasch has no sympathy for the apostles of “tolerance,” for whom denouncing bigotry or racism is enough to obtain a certificate of democratic good conduct. Formal observance of the principle of toleration amounts to “suspension of moral judgment”: if everything is of equal value, the discussion of values ends before it begins. Democracy degenerates into a juxtaposition of special privileges protected by law, leading to the “legalization” of American democracy.
On the contrary, the principle of excellence, equally valid for all, presupposes a common education for the acquisition of “self-respect” which he considers the “sine qua non” of participation in public life. Lasch is strongly critical of “affirmative action” and “political correctness”: by adapting education to the taste and level of each, democracy abandons the purpose of forming equal citizens in order to please various individuals, thus cutting off the branch on which it sits.
Convergences and divergences of the two “allies”
The text examines the relations between populists and communitarians, two currents that challenge liberal individualism. Lasch separates himself from the communitarians on two points: he accuses them of attacking the market more than the State, thus confusing communitarianism with social democracy, and he rejects their concessions to the recognition of multiculturalism and the “ideology of compassion”.
However, the author of the article -rightly- disagrees with Lasch on this point. He argues that the withdrawal of the State will not produce spontaneous solidarity, such a view is naive or cynical. The State remains the only public institution capable of opposing the effects of the market.
Lasch’s strongest criticism of the communitarians concerns the issue of “compassion” towards the alleged victims of discrimination. Lasch’s position, which contrasts respect and dignity with compassion and pity, is reinforced by the excesses of affirmative action and academic radicalism. However, the author doubts whether invoking “individual responsibility” or “impersonal common rules” is enough.
Despite the disagreements, the text suggests that the contradictions are not as stark as Lasch’s proposed “common program” suggests: a 21st-century public philosophy should give greater weight to community, emphasize responsibilities over rights, find a more capable expression of community than state welfare, and limit the market and large corporations without replacing them with centralized bureaucracy.
The Decline of Public Life
One of the most insightful sections of the text concerns the disappearance of spaces for public meeting and discussion. Lasch observes that political life requires contexts where people meet as equals, regardless of racial, social, or national origins. However, these same conditions fail in the contemporary way of life of American society.
The decline of civility begins with the disappearance of human-scale cities, small towns, and neighborhoods in favor of huge office cities and residential suburbs. This is followed by the dismantling of the urban fabric according to needs, and finally the disappearance of informal meeting places (bars, cafes, squares, parks) or their privatization.
Everywhere, the meeting places of citizens are replaced by virtual places of transit for users. The security of rational choice of individuals results in the formation of “networks” — inherently divisive (individuals associate with their own kind), elitist (the ability to form networks is proportional to income), and introverted (the same individuals exchange the same observations). It is the death of the original spirit of democracy, which the Greeks conceived as the permanent confrontation of different but equal citizens.
The Information Fraud and the Death of Communication
Defenders of liberal democracy promote the “information and communication revolution” as a counterbalance to the collapse of public life. However, Lasch argues that the information explosion goes hand in hand with the end of public debate.
First, the failure of the press to “objective” journalism banishes any commitment to it as “distortion.” Information of a political, economic or social nature is worth nothing without interpretation and assessment of the context, causes and effects. This interpretation is controlled by elites, and the selection of certain information from millions refers to subjective assessment. The different treatment of elections in India and Israel, for example, obeys a bias of the political-media class.
Second, television played a decisive role. Before its generalization, there was a proliferation of publications, speeches, public debates, glorification of the differences between candidates, constant discussion of program details, lively language — and high participation. After: obsessive attention to appearance, strengthening the prestige of the “neutral” journalist, standardization of speech, concentration of discussions in a single confrontation, elimination of unwanted third parties — and high abstention.
Lasch emphasizes that “what democracy requires is intense public debate, not information.” Information, usually perceived as a prerequisite for debate, is in fact its byproduct. We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can ask them only by subjecting our ideas to the test of public debate.
Political labyrinth
The decline of public debate is also a consequence of the profound homogeneity of the New Order. Despite superficial differences, Western elites agree on the essential: the persistence of the State and the market as insurmountable forms of organization. Hence the constant unpopularity of politics: since the truly essential are not discussed, the discussions always concern the secondary. “Changing society” is reduced to “adjusting constraints,” and “grand plans” are dissolved into “small reforms.”
Populists denounce both the State and the market as destructive forms of social bonding. The market uproots individuals by encouraging them to make the calculation of self-interest prevail over solidarity. The State tries to artificially reconstruct socialities, but maintains a welfare regime in the antithesis of direct solidarity. Replacing flexible forms of interaction with systems of formal control weakens trust, undermines accountability, and leads to a counter-ideal outcome.
The growing appeal of populist or communitarian ideas is that they escape the right-left classification. The denial of the market tilts them to the left, while the critique of the welfare state anchors them to the right. However, the values of equality and freedom are no longer the only ones that guide public debate.
The West of Beliefs
The text concludes with a broader philosophical and political analysis of the contemporary situation. Classical political philosophy was constructed in an era when identity and brotherhood were not problematic either because societies were bound by communal ties, or because state-national identities were on the rise. Freedom and equality were then features of a personal will that found no other interlocutor except the State.
This is no longer the case. The equality and freedom of individuals are now closely linked to a prior recognition of the equality and freedom of the communities to which they belong, which are the only ones that can give meaning to particular existential needs,
Globalization in the furnace of leveling has created a paradoxical “feudalization”. The collapse of state sovereignty and national borders has not led to the advent of a “citizen of the world,” as progressives believed and hoped. On the contrary, there is a revival of “forgotten” identities and the flowering of multiple communities that aspire to acquire institutional substance.
The “old orthodoxies” and the “party fanatics” — all those who still dream of a renewal of liberalism according to the model of John Rawls — are surprised by this development. And the New Order, with this blindness, deepens the gap that separates it from peoples and communities. Its power is unquestionable, but its moral legitimacy is zero. It can reassure itself with justificatory arguments that no one believes anymore, but indifference is slowly giving way to rebellion. It may try to accelerate “progress” and “development,” but everyone now experiences its impotence or its insensitivity. It may flood public debates with the incoherence of reality shows or the repetition of politically correct slogans, but new horizons of meaning emerge outside of it.
The End of the New Order
The article concludes with a prophetic discourse: the New Order is about to die, but it does not know it yet. Lasch’s analysis, as presented by Champetier, constitutes a radical critique of modern liberal democracy, its elites, its meritocratic mechanisms, its media, and its technocratic conception of life and politics.
The text highlights the rupture between the people and the elite as the central political problem of our time. The New Order, with its dominance of information, economy, and culture, has become detached from common life and has abandoned any sense of responsibility for the common good. At the same time, the decline of the public sphere, the replacement of political discourse by technical management, and the collapse of traditional forms of community create a vacuum that fuels the backlash.
However, the text is not a simple defense of positive populism. Instead, it offers a dialectical analysis of the tensions of modern democracy: between meritocracy and equality, between individual rights and communal obligations, between the market and the state, between globalization and the revival of local identities. The critique of the New Order is combined with a critique of both liberal individualism and state interventionism, paving the way for a search for new forms of political community.
The author’s position is that the way out of the impasse lies in overcoming old ideological divisions and recognizing the importance of identity and brotherhood, values that liberal democracy has neglected or even demonized. Lasch’s work, as Champetier interprets it, constitutes an invitation to reconstruct democracy on a basis that respects the dignity of the people, community life, and real political participation, beyond technocratic management and the abstract proclamations of elites.
All of the above, at their core, is confirmed by the current failure of American society. The same failure is also present in every poorly printed copy of this society in the so-called West. But Europe, compared to the US, has strong cultural roots and an identity that decades of drug binge drinking have failed to erase. The backlash in Europe against this perverted liberal New Order has never stopped and the future looks interesting, difficult and explosive.
