Christopher Lasch — 3 recordings in the archive.
I want to try briefly to understand here is not the 19th century liberalism of Adam Smith and Ronald Reagan. It's the it's the liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, the welfare liberalism, the kind of liberalism that's been associated over the years with the welfare regulatory state. with the defense of ordinary people and specifically American workers. and more generally identified with an attack on inequality, privilege, excessive wealth, corporate wealth, but which in the last two and a half decades or so has come to be identified with a very different set of political priorities. as a result of which it's lost the historic core of support that elected Roosevelt four times and kept liberals in control of the Congress and the White House more or less steadily from the 1930s down to the late60s. in the mid60s, let's say 1964, good benchmark. It would have been inconceivable to any political commentator with a with any common sense that this movement, this impulse in American politics was in its waning stages. On the contrary, in 19 remember the circumstances of 1964, the crushing defeat inflicted by Johnson on Barry Goldwater, which seemed for political commentators almost across the political spectrum at the time to signal the final defeat of the American right. It would have nobody in that year of Johnson's stupendous electoral triumph in some ways even more impressive than Roosevelt second term victory in 36. Nobody could have foreseen the fall of Lynden Johnson in 1968, let alone the rise of a new right, which would lead in the 80s to victories for Reagan and indeed for his successor on the same order of magnitude that Johnson had won in ' 64. Four. This would have been inconceivable at the time and such a dramatic historic reversal requires a lot of explanation. The usual explanation, the explanation certainly preferred by liberal historians and liberals in general. the explanation of the difficulties that liberalism seems to have got itself into to the point where in the last presidential election 88, liberalism had become so obviously a dirty word that no one wanted to be associated with it. And Bush got a lot of mileage out of pinning this label on his reluctant adversary. You couldn't ask for much more dramatic confirmation of the fact that something very bad had happened to American liberalism.…