The affirmation of national and cultural identity as the core of the new nationalist ethic acquires special importance at a time when massive immigration, a totalitarian and antiwhite multiculturalist fanaticism, concerted economic warfare by foreign competitors, and the forces of antinational political globalism combine to jeopardize the cultural

As a replacement for liberalism and its infinitely expanding universe of spoiled consumers and bureaucrats, he sought inspiration in the lower-middle-class ethos of the American populist tradition, with its emphasis on the community-centered, “heroic” morality of small-scale producers—artisans, shopkeepers, and farmers. Lasch called for a renewal

That attitude involved a sharp feeling of being exploited by and condescended to by the rich and having to foot the bill for minorities: “a sense of resentment and exploitation, mainly economic but also broader, that is directed upwards as well as downwards,…

The problem has not gone away, it’s gotten worse. We still are working to answer why the loss of faith in the old order has registered as intensified anti-egalitarianism rather than a renewed egalitarianism, why perceptions of public corruption and criminality have led to the open embrace of corruption and criminality rather than its rejection, and

When democratic demand did express itself from below, it came in the form of a personalistic, charismatic, and vindictive regime: a champion of the people who could punish and humble the arrogant old ruling classes.

This was the age of what the economist Hyman Minsky called “managerial-welfare capitalism” or “paternalistic capitalism”: the corporate behemoth and state leviathan moved harmoniously together; the average man sheltered under them. IBM culture was “cradle to the grave”: it offered lifelong employment and such benefits as free membership in the

As always, symbols—actors, rappers, songs, movies, culture—were needed to stand in for complex issues.

the MARs, who believed in “the duty of work rather than the right of welfare; the value of loyalty to concrete persons, symbols and institutions rather than cosmopolitan dispersion of loyalties,”

They feared social collapse, a Great Tribulation, but in a sense they were both its products and its agents. Mainstream American society had stopped providing them with a plausible story: army service was demoralizing, the churches had nothing to say to them, materialism could not fill the gap, and all around them were signs of decay. The oldest