Christopher Lasch predicted the future.

More than 40 years ago, Lasch, one of America’s most brilliant thinkers, noted that America had become fractured and that our elites had lost touch with the people. Christopher Lasch died in 1994, yet he anticipated the rise of President Donald Trump and the new populism. He also diagnosed the spiritual and psychological problems that continue to plague the public.

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In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, his 1992 book, Lasch got the general mood. “Americans are much less sanguine about the future than they used to be, and with good reason,” he wrote. “The decline of manufacturing and the consequent loss of jobs; the shrinkage of the middle class; the growing number of the poor; the rising crime rate; the flourishing traffic in drugs; the decay of the cities—the bad news goes on and on.” 

Lasch concluded, “No one has a plausible solution to these intractable problems, and most of what passes for political discussion doesn’t even address them. Fierce ideological battles are fought over peripheral issues. Elites, who define the issues, have lost touch with the people. The unreal, artificial character of our politics reflects their insulation from the common life, together with a secret conviction that the real problems are insoluble.”

Lasch, born in 1932, started his political journey on the Left and then moved right. However, his wasn’t just a simple transformation from liberal to conservative. Lasch read Marx, but was more impressed with Marxism’s theories about culture than with any “mechanistic” view of history. Lasch was interested in what communist Antonio Gramsci called the “devastated realm of the spirit.” (Gramsci has recently come back into vogue as “the communist conservatives love.”) Lasch appreciated thinkers who “showed how Marxism could absorb the insights of cultural conservatives and provide a sympathetic account, not just of the economic hardships imposed by capitalism, but of the way in which capitalism thwarted the need for joy in work, stable connections, family life, a sense of place, and a sense of historical continuity.” 

Decades before President Trump, Lasch was exploring how economic devastation and the free trade-induced loss of good jobs in the manufacturing industry would affect families.

What made Lasch begin to move right was the far-Left radicalism of the 1960s and his studies into the nature of family. Decades before the unhinged Democratic Party of 2025, Lasch saw liberalism becoming so radical that it lost sight of its foundations: “My growing dissatisfaction with the new left did not imply any break with the historic traditions of the left, which I held in higher regard the more I came to understand them. The trouble with the new left, it seemed to me, lay precisely in its ignorance of the earlier history of the left, as a result of which it proceeded to recapitulate the most unattractive features of that history: rampant sectarianism, an obsession with ideological purity, sentimentalization of outcast groups.”

The old Left was against war and a bureaucratic culture that separated itself from the concerns of regular people. It stood for workers first and defended the complementary differences between men and women. It was often religious and understood the two things that Lasch said summed up his philosophy: Limits and hope. It criticized the warmongering and bureaucratic coldness of mainstream liberalism. It was a precursor to today’s populism.

Lasch also saw how politics was becoming more about lifestyles and psychology than foreign policy, common culture, and economics. In his seminal 1979 work The Culture of Narcissism, the book that made him famous, Lasch argued that the human personality itself had changed over the course of the 20th century. People had transformed from strong and well-adjusted to personalities that are weak and dependent on government, corporations, radical politics, sex, and bureaucracies for a sense of meaning. “The personal crisis … now represents a political issue in its own right,” Lasch wrote, “and a thoroughgoing analysis of modern society and politics has to explain among other things why personal growth and development have become so hard to accomplish; why the fear of growing up and aging haunts our society; why personal relations have become so brittle and precarious; and why the ‘inner life’ no longer offers any refuge from the danger around us.” Been on a college campus lately? It’s a mental house.

Finally, Lasch saw the failure of globalism. In his study of the family, he observed that “the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race. It needs to attach itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general.”