Voices Against Progress

By Paul Gottfried

I met Christopher Lasch for the first time at a lecture that he gave at Case Western Reserve in 1969. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and I was an assistant professor in the history department. His remarks were centered on the U.S.’s responsibility for our bad relations with the Soviets. He made repeated references to a book he had written on the American intervention against the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1919, which Lasch considered the origin of our clashes with the Soviet Union. Lasch’s remarks fitted in with the dominant anti-Americanism of the historical profession, and I associated his presence with certain setbacks that would soon befall me. In the following year my contract at Case Western Reserve was not renewed, and although a financial shortfall was cited as the official reason, I suspected that my older colleagues did nothing to save my skin because I was known on campus as a “Nixon Republican.”

Lasch was teaching at a hotbed of the New Left, the University of Rochester history department, which was chaired by a self-described Stalinist, Gene Genovese. I immediately regarded him as persona non grata. My chairman, Jack J. Roth, who had hired me, was a friend of Lasch’s, whom he had met while both were at Roosevelt University. I thought that Jack, whom I always suspected of being a closet, nonvoting Republican, was parading his friendship with a lunatic in order to ingratiate himself with our leftist colleagues. My diatribes against Lasch in conversations with Jack were an excessive reaction I now regret.

But my dislike for his friend only increased when I went to Rochester the following year as a candidate for an associate professorship. I came as Genovese’s favored candidate; unfortunately, by then he and Lasch had fallen out over questions of departmental governance. Lasch never came to any of my scheduled interviews or to my very long, awkwardly delivered presentation on historiography, but he lurked behind the scenes as a vaporous, malign presence. He lined up votes against me that were then directed toward my rival candidate, who won in a squeaker. The setback that I suffered was so devastating that my career never really recovered. Not even the scheming that caused me to lose a graduate professorship at Catholic University of America seventeen years later did as much harm to me as Lasch caused in a single afternoon of conversations. The post at Rochester was in the scholarly field in which I was then publishing; it was in a prestigious department, membership in which would have opened other professional doors; and at twenty-nine I would have been young enough to take full advantage of my appointment. Within a year, moreover, the job market would collapse, and I was forced to work for several years as an educational administrator in New Jersey before landing an academic position at Rockford College. Although I was grateful for that berth, it did not compare to what I had lost because of Lasch’s politicking.

Nonetheless, twenty years later Lasch — whom like most everyone I came to call “Kit” — and I became friends, to the point that he would openly discuss what had happened at the time of my interview. He had been genuinely concerned about what he saw as the highhanded way in which Gene was dealing with his duties as chairman, and he feared that Gene was trying to fill the junior professorships in the department with handpicked vassals. This possibility had dawned on me during my interview, and I told Kit that he might have been justified in his anxieties. It was entirely possible that out of gratitude and youthful enthusiasm I would have been what my Stalinist chairman Gene was looking for: an indisputable academic conservative who could be counted on to rally to his benefactor. In any case, I was willing to consider Kit’s position because he admitted to what he had done — and he did so with regret in light of our later friendship. His behavior compares favorably to that of other, more powerful political enemies who have accused me of madness when I found their fingerprints on guns that had been fired at me. Kit never lied to me about his previous unfriendliness, which in his case was morally motivated.

The first time we met again face-to-face was at a conference held in 1990 at Elizabethtown College. By then I greatly admired his work on the therapeutic state (his magnum opus dealing with this vast subject, The True and Only Heaven, was about to be published by Norton), and a thematically related project that I would eventually pursue was taking shape in my head. The conference, on the future of community, had been arranged by the board of Telos magazine. When Kit got around to speaking about “scientific” administration as a threat to cultural identities, I found myself strongly seconding his remarks. But he also had a tendency to appeal to the consciousness of “real people,” whom managerial government had supposedly marginalized. Claes Ryn, who was also present, criticized Kit for his “romantic populism,” whereupon a firestorm erupted. Kit taunted Claes as an “elitist,” a description that fitted and still fits this soft-spoken Nordic gentleman who appears everywhere in elegant attire. Claes retorted that you can’t escape from elites; you get them no matter what, because the “people” have no sense of self-government. Indeed they want others to look after their needs.

I was caught in the middle in more than one way. The two disputants were both friends; and although I agreed with Claes that we ought to resist the impulse to romanticize the “people,” Lasch had a certain populace in mind to which his designation undoubtedly applied. His rugged German ancestors who had settled in Nebraska as farmers, and the working-class families whom he contrasted to the sybaritic cosmopolites in his last book, Revolt of the Elites (1995), instantiate the “real people” — that is, those whom Lasch wished to re-empower. The question might be raised whether “the real people” form anything approaching a significant demographic part of today’s America — or whether they exist for the most part as an idealized memory. But such a picture of the “people” informed Kit’s populist conceptions. The good types who redeemed his dualistic universe were often the progenitors of the Catholic blue-collar working families that I can still vaguely recall from the 1950s. These families were marked by multiple offspring and by wives who prepared their husbands’ lunch pails. Lasch’s evocation of the females in his ideal but perhaps archaic nuclear family caused the feminist Susan Faludi to designate him as the “leading American sexist of the ’90s.”