Christopher Lasch - the last social critic? 2

This is the second half of the interview with Christopher Lasch. You can watch part 1 on this blog.

Lasch's ideas were discussed in an essay for The Week by Damon Linker last year:

Did Lasch's merciless critique of progressives and defense of working-class mores make him a conservative, as so many leftist critics and right-wing admirers have insisted in the years since his death? 

Perhaps — but only if we radically redefine what it means to be a conservative. Lasch remained deeply suspicious of the Reaganite New Right, with its mania for tax cuts and deregulation, to the very end of his life. 

And there can be no doubt that he'd be even more outraged at the libertarian selfishness of the Tea Party, as well as the contemporary GOP's elitist idealization of entrepreneurial supermen and consequent disparagement of those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy as "moochers." 

Lasch was a man without a party. Or a political movement. He refused to tailor his convictions to the categories that set the boundaries of our culture's conversation about how we should live and govern ourselves. Instead, he used every ounce of his intellect and energy to change that conversation.