Christopher Lasch

“Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.”

“Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.”

“The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.”

“It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.”

“Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.”

“It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.”

“The left has lost the common touch.”

“The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.”

“Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.”

“The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.”

“Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.”

“The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.”

“We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.”

“The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.”

“Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.”

“The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.”

“The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.”

“The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left.”

“Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.”

“The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.”