Lasch understood that democracy is a fiction when people spend their lives working in conditions over which they exert little or no control, compensated by shoddy consumer goods that bring faint comfort when the things that really matter\u201d\u201dsuch as adequate schooling and homeownership, the last vestige of proprietorship for most people today\u201d\u201dare out of reach. These social facts don\u2019t produce citizens capable of self-governance but a people who are ruled over by a remote technocratic elite, as Murray has correctly observed, who make decisions for the masses they know little and care even less about.<\/p>\n
Even with President Obama\u2019s recent championing of \u201cmiddle-class economics\u201d\u009d and the Republican Party\u2019s occasional concessions to belief in the social destructiveness of economic inequality, both parties cling to different branches of what Lasch called the ideology of progress, redistribution on the left and \u201ca rising tide lifts all boats\u201d\u009d on the right. By contrast, Lasch\u2019s vision of the good life is truly radical yet profoundly conservative; it harkens back to traditions now largely dormant in American life where those who worked for a living wanted to build local communities, in the words of 19th-century labor leader Robert MacFarlane, based upon the now forgotten American ideal of \u201csmall but universal ownership\u201d\u009d of property, which was the \u201ctrue foundation of a stable and firm republic.\u201d\u009d In other words, independence rooted in both liberty and equality.<\/p>\n
This producerist ideology, according to Lasch, \u201cdeserves a more attentive hearing, on its own terms, than it has usually received.\u201d\u009d It holds the answer to the questions critics like Charles Murray raise\u201d\u201dand reveals that too many libertarians and conventional conservatives are confused apologists for a system that produces everything they despise: authoritarianism, centralization, and widespread dependence.<\/p>\n