Steve Bannon reads Christopher Lasch

Where the Right and the Left Converge: This Ain't No Horseshoe

Happy 4th of July, quite possibly our last opportunity to celebrate the birth of a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal.’ I’ve been brooding about Steve Bannon’s prison-bound manifesto as presented by the befuddled David Brooks on Monday. Might as well explain why. It won’t help me sleep any better, but it does address a source of the Left’s confusion on the appeal of Trump to the American working class.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/opinion/steve-bannon-trump.html

“And then I read Christopher Lasch.”

“We have a capitalist economy that has no capitalists, right? It has hypercapitalists or state capitalism. You’ve got to not just reallocate income, you have to reallocate assets. People have to have a stake in this. That’s all they’re asking for.”

—-Steve Bannon, interview with David Brooks, New York Times, July 1, 2024

“This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within capitalist production itself, a self-destructive contradiction, which represents on its face a mere phase of transition to a new form of production. . . . It reproduces a new aristocracy of finance, a new sort of parasite in the shape of promoters, speculators, and merely nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation juggling, stock-jobbing, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.”

—Karl Marx, Capital 3: 519 (Kerr ed., 1909), on the temporal intersection of modern credit and the modern-industrial corporation

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At the top of the post is the link to David Brooks’s interview with Steve Bannon on the eve of the latter’s stint in a federal prison. It makes for remarkable reading because it’s genuinely terrifying stuff. This guy is a warrior who knows he’s right, and who knows he has the attention of millions, not to mention the ear of Donald Trump. There is no comparable figure on the Left. And yet he sounds very much like my left-wing comrades—in academia, to be sure, but in the larger society as well—and not just because he positions himself as an “organic intellectual” in the Gramscian sense, that is, a man whose background, education, and social standing (his class position according to standard-issue Marxian classification schema) run counter to his ideological affiliation with the appointed cause of the working class as this has long been articulated by Marxists.

How can that be, or, how does this work? The short answer is that Bannon has read Christopher Lasch, the left-wing history professor who wrote The Culture of Narcissism (1979) while he was a contributing editor at Marxist Perspectives, the journal founded at the University of Rochester by Eugene D. Genovese in 1977. More important, Bannon has also taken Lasch’s teaching to heart—and now, to the airwaves and the streets.

For real? Most definitely. There are two traditions in Marxism as I understand it, as simply the ongoing argument about what to make of what he wrote. On the one hand, there is the tradition that derives from a close reading of the “young Marx,” he of the 1844 Paris Manuscripts, where he (1) defines work as the “essence of Man,” as per the Hegelian calculation of The Phenomenology'; (2) denounces the “alienation” of human beings from their essence—their “species being,” so conceived—by means of generalized wage labor, the work routines specific to the factories that replaced artisanal crafts and skilled trades in the production of non-agricultural goods; (3) proposes to reintegrate that “species being” by restoring artisanal craft and the self-sufficient social standing it confers on its bearer, which would repudiate the division of labor and thus make poiesis (“composition” in the Greek) the paradigm of work as such.

This tradition reaches its apogee in the “cultural Marxism” of the Frankfurt School, the lineage of which begins with Max Weber’s student, Gyorgy Lukacs, and includes the work of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Walter Benjamin, and Jurgen Habermas. American exemplars can be found in the writings of David Riesman, Martin Jay, Richard Howard, Trent Schroyer, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Jackson Lears, Matthew Crawford, et al.—but Christopher Lasch was perhaps its most ecumenical and prolific auditor, about which more to follow.

On the other hand, there is the tradition that derives from a close reading of the “mature Marx,” the master of political economy who wrote the Grundrisse (1857), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), the four volumes of Capital (including Theories of Surplus Value, 1867ff.), and the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). In these works, he (1) retains the Hegelian definition of human nature as residing in its capacity to transform both the given world and its own consciousness through work, but assumes that “abstract social labor” as perfected in factory discipline liberates all manner of hitherto unknown forces of production, including the imaginations of scientists and artists; (2) grasps “alienation,” which under capitalism takes the form of the “fetishism of commodities,” as the latest rendition of the human condition, not a hallucination induced by, and to be abolished along with, the hieroglyph called money; and (3) proposes to reintegrate the human personality on the terms of individual freedom afforded by a passage beyond necessary labor, when work becomes a vocation, or, in Protestant dialect, a calling.

This tradition has not yet reached its logical conclusion, probably because those who study Marxist political economy are, for the most part, uninterested in the cultural, intellectual, and/or ideological apparatus of modern capitalism, and even when they profess such an interest, they are willing to treat “base” and “superstructure” as separate spheres—to the point where thinkers as sophisticated as Louis Althusser are willing to grant the “final instance” of ideological determination to economic “factors.” To my knowledge, the principal exceptions to this rule are Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955), Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (1975), and Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1988). There are other exceptions, to be sure, but for now this short list will do.

II

Christopher Lasch was a “cultural Marxist” par excellence, a direct descendant of the Frankfurt School, who repeatedly cited David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd [1950]), who repeatedly cited Erich Fromm and his comrades. That is why Lasch remains as popular, and as relevant, as he was at the height of his fame, in the 1980s, but has now crossed over to become the darling of radicals on the Right like Bannon. That is also why his affection for the program of “artisans against innovation” is still so resonant among professional historians, particularly those who specialize in American history, whether they know it or not: for them, the promise of populism as it erupted in the 1890s remains the unfulfilled promise of the American Dream itself. In this sense, they are the unconscious purveyors of precisely what they deride as the social amnesia (the “false consciousness”) that supposedly blinds the masses—the unfounded belief in “American exceptionalism.” And to that exact extent, their work is as much a monument to the lost virtues of bourgeois society as is the right-wing propaganda that peddles male supremacy in the name of“family values” (on which see my Substack posts on patriarchy).

At least that is an argument I make in my book in progress on pragmatism. In the excerpt below, I link Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Lasch by noting their self-imprisonment within the intellectual and political confines of their reflexively anti-corporate, instinctively pro-artisanal devotion to poiesis. I show that “worldness,” the key concept of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), is the regulative principle of Arendt’s masterpiece, The Human Condition (1958), and that both books treat the work of the skilled craftsman as the one true medium of authentic being-in-the-world because it summons the ability to care for the world registered and expressed in “worldness.” From there I move to a consideration of Lasch, as follows.

Meanwhile, we can take Bannon at his word. He really does mean to overthrow what he understands as the ruling class. But, like Christopher Lasch, the result he hopes for isn’t socialism—it’s a return to the social structure, the economic organization, and the cultural values of bourgeois society. Not capitalism, bourgeois society: there is a huge difference.

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Christopher Lasch would seem an unlikely affiliate of Martin Heidegger, whose notorious political propensities are as much an impediment to understanding his philosophy as the ornate, Germanic prose in which he presented it.  And yet they are united by an intellectual affinity, and perhaps a political ambidexterity, that derive, I think, from their adherence to the same model of selfhood, which is clearly the inheritance Hannah Arendt shared with them and with the western philosophical tradition.  This affinity is on proud display in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), the last book Lasch saw through publication before his untimely death in 1994.  In these pages, he’s searching for the “moral equivalent of an earlier form of proprietorship,” that is, a way of reinstating “the principle that property ownership and the independence it confers are absolutely essential preconditions of citizenship.” [pp. 16, 223]

The search closely follows the lead of Herbert Croly, founding father of The New Republic, who in his second book, Progressive Democracy (1914), dared to ask “How can the wage-earners obtain an amount of economic independence analogous to that upon which the pioneer democrat could count?”  Lasch draws on (what was then) the new labor history and a sympathetic reading of 1890s Populism to answer the question, but, unlike Croly, he’s not interested in any analogy to economic independence conferred by property ownership: he wants the real thing, and so he’s willing to turn the world into a workshop.  Accordingly, he explores the radical potential of skilled workers’ resistance to the rationalization of the labor process under Taylorized corporate auspices, and small farmers’ concurrent revolt against their dispossession by “the trusts.”  American-style radicalism, so conceived, coincides with a powerfully conservative urge to maintain, or rather return to, a simple market society in which the freeholder, the artisan, and citizen-soldier remain as both the social bulwark and the social ideal of a genuine democracy based on liberty and equality.   

The premise of the argument was, in these terms, almost self-evident: “Farmers, artisans, and craftsmen became wage slaves; more than any other development of the nineteenth century, including even the Civil War, the reconstitution of a degraded proletariat in the land of plenty—a permanent class of men and women without property—cast doubt on the agreeable assumption that limitless and irreversible innovation would annul the old [presumably Polybian] cycle of growth and decline.”  Lasch fully understood this book as a history of and for the present; that is why he kept stopping to summarize and generalize the lessons drawn from the vast record he had compiled of “artisans against innovation.” [p. 64]

For example: “The conventional identification of democracy with progress makes it hard to see that democratic movements in the nineteenth century took shape in opposition to innovation.  The new breed of [corporate] capitalists were the real progressives: working-class radicals, on the other hand, struggled to preserve a way of life that was under attack. . . . [They] were defending not just their economic interests but their crafts, families, and neighborhoods.  The recognition that economic interests are not enough to inspire radical or revolutionary agitation or to make people accept its risks suggests a more sweeping conclusion.  Resistance to innovation, it appears, is an important, perhaps indispensable ingredient in revolutionary action, along with a tendency to identify innovation with the disruption of older communities by invasive forces from outside.” [pp. 213, 215]

This paranoid style has of course been an indispensable ingredient in reactionary movements animated by rumors and theories of ruling-class conspiracies against hard-working plain folk, not least in our own time, which might account for Lasch’s increasing popularity in right-wing intellectual circles (practically speaking, that means the think tanks funded by billionaires and the podcasts frequented by well-educated trolls).  But the political ambivalence of Lasch’s findings as a professional historian, social theorist, cultural critic, and public intellectual—the source of his appeal to the Right as well as the Left—was on display long before he advertised his nostalgia for bourgeois society on the massive scale of The True and Only Heaven.  The premonition or forecast of this book, and arguably its cause, is The Culture of Narcissism, which was published in 1979, when Lasch was still among the contributing editors at Marxist Perspectives, the short-lived journal founded by his colleague at the University of Rochester, Eugene D. Genovese. 

The book on narcissism was a bestseller, and won a National Book Award, making Lasch a household name and something of a TV personality.  Its popularity, which endures a half-century later, isn’t anomalous: it’s a jeremiad that might have been delivered as a sermon by Cotton Mather himself, as a denunciation of “this Sheba, Self”—the individual unbound by any inherited tradition or current obligation to others—or by William Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s scold-in-chief, or, in our own time, by the Never-Trumpers like William Kristol who condemn the Donald for his moral failings, not his sadistic programs and policies.  The Culture of Narcissism is, in other words, an elegy for the era of the ego, the epoch dominated by the self-mastering but never self-deprecating bourgeois individual, the man of reason who knew his limits, respected authority, eschewed all excess, harbored his resources, disciplined himself as well as his children, and cared for something beyond the boundary of his own family and his own body’s ambit. 

That man was the “inner-directed individual” for whom the Frankfurt School still served as melancholic mourner-in-chief.  The narcissistic personality as described by Lasch in exhaustive social-psychological detail was, in this sense, no more than a new model of the pathetic “other-directed individual” so familiar to the social scientists of the 1950s, the man who—whether dressed up at the office as the white-collared middle manager or down on the assembly line as the dungareed working stiff—lacked an ego resilient enough to resist the pleasurable enticements of “abundance,” or what came to be called consumer culture.  Lasch says as much: “The growing prominence of ‘character disorders’ seems to signify an underlying change in the organization of personality, from what has been called inner-direction to narcissism.”  Apart, then, from the psychoanalysts who redefined their field in the same postwar decade, the theorists who preside over The Culture of Narcissism are David Riesman and Theodor Adorno. [chs. 2-4, esp. pp. 76-78, 88-89, 122-37; quote at 88]

But Lasch ends his incendiary and yet familiar, almost formulaic polemic by invoking Ludwig von Mises, the intellectual godfather of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, the conservative, or rather deeply reactionary economists who carried the day against the Keynesian consensus in the 1970s, meanwhile outlining the neoliberal agenda that has since hollowed out both capitalism and democracy.  Lasch consistently ridiculed conservatives who summoned the bourgeois virtues but couldn’t criticize free enterprise for fear of undermining capitalism.  What, then, was the point of enlisting such a figure in presenting a “radical critique”—that’s how he labeled The Culture of Narcissism—of American culture and society?

To my mind, Lasch’s citation of Mises was simply an honest way of laying claim to a conservative cultural legacy—the legacy of a past to be found in the remnant of bourgeois society and its corresponding virtues.  Arendt’s repeated citation of Aristotle was equally honest, but it was no more effective than Sheldon Wolin’s in Politics and Vision (1960), or Alasdair MacIntyre’s in After Virtue (1981), or, for that matter, Tom Hayden’s plea for participatory democracy, the modern rendition of the polis, in the Port Huron Statement (1962).  These brilliant attempts to move American political discourse beyond a complacent liberal consensus were critical successes and box-office failures, as we say about great movies that were “ahead of their time.”  They mattered more in academe than in the street. 

Lasch was different: he has had a lasting effect both in and outside the ivory tower because his nostalgia for bourgeois society contains the touchstones of cultural conservatism—scientific objectivity, individual responsibility, “family values,” the Protestant work ethic, merit-driven social mobility, and so forth.  Belief in such things is perhaps the last area of agreement between the Left and the Right, or at least the part of the Left that is still suspicious of post-structuralism, post-modernism, identity politics, and whatever else pragmatism or “French Theory” gets blamed for these days.

But the fact remains that Lasch offered no solution to the intellectual impasse and the political dead end that derives from devotion to the bourgeois virtues—and couldn’t, not any more than the contemporary defenders of manhood and masculinity can restore the paterfamilias to his proper place at the head of all households, and thereby reinstate patriarchy as the guiding principle of the larger social organism.  For this would require the overthrow of post-industrial corporate capitalism and the restoration, in good old Populist fashion, of a simple market society, that is, a bourgeois society.  The self-satisfied left-wing celebrants of middle-class radicalism, small business, local knowledge, maternal authority, the anti-monopoly tradition, and the colloquial, commercial, “carnivalesque” languages of 19th-century Americans are no more willing to accept this impossible mission than their right-wing counterparts; they are certainly no less pious in proclaiming their abstention from the moral decrepitude of late capitalism.  But if we go by the evidence of The True and Only Heaven, Lasch was willing to retrieve bourgeois society from the dustbin of history, bless his heart, and so, it seems, are the firebrands at the Federal Trade Commission who want to resurrect the Progressive Era interpretation of the anti-trust legal tradition with a Brandeisian energy not seen since the presidency of William Howard Taft.