“Neither valor and chivalry nor the code of courtly, romantic love, with which these values are closely associated, has any place in the world view of the best and brightest. A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains. Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence is has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. The Revolt of the Elites (page 39)
Worldview 2026: Back to the Future
This post signals the official start of the 2026 Praxis Circle year. Not that we’ve been asleep!
So far in 2026, the Praxis Circle team has produced two new interviews “in the can” (Brad Wilcox and Charles Murray), as well as several posts and newsletters on Beauty, Creativity, and Imago Dei (these three topics go together). As important, we have completely redesigned our education content using our vast Praxis Circle library of interview clips. We will publish the Brad Wilcox interview this month and the Charles Murray interview early this summer.
Our educational program now centers on our Ten Worldview Pillars and their associated worldview narratives. Our revised curriculum begins with three of these pillars: the Worldview concept itself, Truth, and Reason. Each course follows the organization of our three PC eBooks on each of these subjects, including many enhanced features.
Furthermore, we’ve already developed a significant inventory of Book of the Month possibilities for the year. With great pleasure, I offer here, as our 2026 lead-off a classic from 1994, Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (246 pages).
Why would we offer a book from 1994? Because this national bestseller is no less than a prophecy of the worldview clash America faces today. It also suggests ways forward that are more relevant now than ever. We are starting to see America’s opposing worldviews embrace some of them. There is hope. Eventually, common sense and accurate data do take over. You will see some of this presented in the Wilcox and Murray interviews.
Everyone operates from one or several worldviews and spends much awakened time recruiting others to their point of view. That’s just a fact of human nature. If Aristotle were around today, he would say humans are reasonable, social, and worldview recruiting animals.
The Revolt of the Elites was published right after Lasch’s death (1932 – 1994). Mr. Lasch spent most of his distinguished career from 1970 onward at New York’s University of Rochester. He died of cancer at age 61. After finishing his book, it was easy to understand its publication urgency. One can feel the care taken by his wife, daughter, editors, and contemporary fellow historians and social critics.
Lasch was one of those unusual Leftish, atheist Marxists who moved steadily to the center during his life. He even became appreciative of Christianity by applying common sense to his personal experience. He was a Leftist “mugged by reality.” This is the Praxis Circle process you’ve heard so much about: how human minds interact together with reality over time to shape personal and mutual worldview.
Lasch lived during a time I remember well—a time to which we may never return. That was when Americans on either side of the political aisle—whether Democrat, Republican, or Independent—could sit down together and have a civil conversation and actually pass joint legislation aimed at the common good. This was before extreme postmodernism, cultural Marxism, identity politics, and feminism alienated Americans from themselves.
There was general agreement among the vast majority that America, while far from perfect, was a well-intended country where its citizens, political representatives, and military almost always tried to do the right thing and that the arc of its history was as positive as any in humankind’s history. We saw America as the indispensable country among nations. (I still do, really, now more than ever.)
We see these same themes in Christopher Lasch’s writing. He criticizes the Left and the Right with equal elegance. The Revolt of the Elites is one of the most quotable books I’ve ever read. Just a few pages in, I found myself highlighting almost every line and drawing stars and arrows in the margins. The book came to my attention in a review written by Praxis Circle Contributor Mary Eberstadt and published in the National Review on October 23, 2025. I can’t top that book review, so I’ll link it here. Book quotes highlighted here largely speak for themselves.
Elites Have Deserted the American People
“The revolt” Christopher details is the moral and civic secession of the educated, mobile, upper class from the obligations, loyalties, and common life of American society. It’s the revolt Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart (2012; again, see his interview later this summer) involving the detached and decadent who inhabit his fictional Belmont versus regular Americans in Fishtown. Lasch’s Belmont involves not just the “super rich” but much of the top 20% of our American professional class.
These American elites are generally globalists. They adhere to a secular, technology-driven, identity-less, large government, relativistic worldview. They’re indifferent at best to the monogamous nuclear family (except in their own lives—thus they are radical hypocrites). They often seem completely disconnected from reality: in other words, from what the average person experiences. They are far more tied to power than any recognizable morality or group of persons outside their power base. Truth, honesty, trust, the Constitution, law, borders, and citizenship mean little to nothing, unless adhering to a will to power and control of others. They believe America should be ashamed of its past and that we should turn management of its future over to them.
Some believe the Democratic Party is currently hostage to these elites, who today represent a virtual revolutionary party inside our national boundaries. It’s a plausible argument derived from a standard oppressor-oppressed worldview. Their “inside the Big House authority” at the top of the social pyramid comes primarily from those “outside the house” Americans at the very bottom of the pyramid who depend on the largess of the federal government to provide necessities of life or who work for Big Brother directly or indirectly. In other words, the DP buys votes.
Looking more closely, this seems undeniable: borders mean nothing, citizenship means nothing (except birthright), no ID requirements for voting, full benefits to those who aren’t citizens. Add to this the now proven grossly negligent-to-criminal monetary controls and welfare fraud, and the result becomes the destruction of American culture and eventual national bankruptcy. In other words, a revolution without firing a shot.
In The Revolt of the Elites, Mr. Lasch was talking about the red-blue flyover divide many years before the Tea Party, MAGA, or populism became important American political forces. Now, we can easily place each state into one or the other category.
Sadly, for now, Virginia has fallen to an “elitist” governor and legislature that’s almost completely a function of Northern Virginia, a huge urban suburb of Washington, D.C. They want to remake the Commonwealth in their own elitist self-image much like the Puritan North wanted to remake the South after the Civil War. It’s happening again, but with little to no justification this time. Who are these oppressors (other than the elites themselves) and the oppressed (other than the “deplorables” and the illegal immigrants who are pinching themselves because they are so fortunate to be in America)? Because the facts don’t support the narrative, elites rely almost solely on their media and university-based dominance, along with their boring language games.
As the quote below suggests, the elitist program will not go well for Virginia or America over the long-term. Again, our freedom will evaporate in bankruptcy. Even under President Trump, we’re still headed down the pathway of financial irresponsibility (as by far the wealthiest country in the world). An unconscionable national debt will be our legacy to our children and grandchildren. Many believe we’re already trapped in a runaway train without means to pump its brakes. It will be for younger generations than mine to fix. The Boomer generation is ultimately responsible for this situation.
“. . . the decline of the nation-state weakens the only authority capable of holding ethnic rivalries in check. The revival of tribalism, in turn, reinforces a reactive cosmopolitism among elites.” (page 46)
The Best Description of Populism I Have Seen
I’ve thought for years that elites don’t understand populism and that the media intentionally make a living maligning it. We can’t blame Ricky Bobby. It goes back to the ancient Roman, enlightened American Founder, Third Estate, Western frontier, pre-Civil Rights/Southern African-American fears of mob rule. To localize a bit more from the elites’ point of view, they see a rural, populist fear of metropolitan life and capitalism (the “Cross of Gold”), the literate Bible fundamentalism of certain forms of American evangelism, and the “science denying” nature of early 20th century monkey trials.
Today, however, this is totally wrong. Our rural and red state communities and suburbs are fighting the megalopolis, where loyalty extends more to power, profit, and each other than to the United States. Moreover, many of our best educated citizens live in less populated areas, and most of the American public receives base levels of education as never before and has access to any information desired at the touch of their fingertips.
It’s hard to find the good old-fashioned “Southern Bubba” of my youth. We’re all gentrified and reading the Financial Times, Economist, NY Times, and Wall Street Journal. The Tea Party knew more about our nation’s founding than many college professors and about the national budget than the president at the time.
Today, populism is rooted in the variety of “commoners” whose spirit is captured in Gordon Wood’s classic The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1993). Our Founders felt an intense mutual respect for the average person, addressed them as equals, and wanted to give all “created equal” the opportunity to be their best selves. We’ve inherited that blessing and must protect it.
Let’s just say Mr. Lasch explains today’s populism as well or better than anyone I’ve encountered. This is so refreshing and well worth the read on its own. Populism is a national force that won’t go away. The Rebel Alliance is growing against elitism that disguises itself as supporting the “underprivileged.” It’s a force President Trump uncovered as much by accident as by intent during his campaign in 2015, and he’s developed it in an unorthodox way that would make Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt more proud than jealous.
Populism is a force that terrifies American and Western elites, just as it did Roman Caesars. It’s growing in political knowledge, organization, and power in America and Europe. Most important, to quote John Paul Jones: It has not yet begun to fight.
“Populism . . . is unambiguously committed to the principle of respect. It is for this reason, among others, that populism is to be preferred to communitarianism, which is too quick to endorse its ideology of compassion. Populism has always rejected both the politics of deterrence and the politics of pity. It stands for plain manners and plain straightforward speech . . . Populism is the authentic voice of democracy . . . it is our reluctance to make demands on each other, much more than our reluctance to help those in need, that is sapping the strength of democracy today.” (pages 106 and 107)
A Former Marxist Who Understood Family
As we all know, The Communist Manifesto (1848) starkly advocated for the destruction of “capitalism” and the traditional monogamous family of Mom and Dad. In contrast, The Revolt of the Elites emphasizes the importance of organizing any strong society around family. (Our interview with Brad Wilcox will highlight this same theme.)
To Lasch, family is the essential group beyond the individual that nations should be designed to serve, sustain, and protect. The government serves parents who occupy a pre-political private space, not vice versa. While most elites actually organize their families in a traditional way with pride, they want to control yours.
Underlying this is their disconnected, valueless, public face intended to maximize personal gain. In other words, they cloak themselves in compassion for those whom they destroy. In every case, earned success provides the only type of reward honest human beings give themselves credit for.
“Parents are deeply troubled by the moral climate of permissiveness, by the sex and violence to which children are prematurely exposed, by the moral relativism they encounter in school, and by the devaluation of authority that makes children impatient with any restraints.” (page 108)
A Prophet Warning of Wokeness, Cancel Culture, and DEI
Not even Christopher Lasch could have anticipated the insanity that’s developed in America and across the West when it comes to the extremes of transhumanism, wokeness, cancel culture, and DEI. Who would have thought it would ever be ok for men to compete in women’s sports or for abortion to be legal the day before a full-term birth? Who would have thought in the 1990s after the Fall of the Berlin Wall that America could become accepted by many as the Evil Empire of the absurd 1619 Project? Who could have imagined that 2 of 5 babies in America would be born into one-parent families—indeed, over 50% in certain ethnic groups? Nonetheless, Mr. Lasch uses his crystal ball as well as anyone could have in the early 1990s.
“The ’emancipation rhetoric’ of the academic turns out to be ‘deeply exclusionary—one might even say ‘racist and sexist’ in its underlying assumptions.” (page 184)
Lasch Increased My Awareness of the Dangers of Markets
As suggested already, no one will stay in a comfort zone reading Christopher Lash. I’m a firm believer that money, property, technology, guns, and markets are not inherently evil—people are. Fundamentally, I do not fully agree with his analysis of capitalism.
Money is a necessary means of exchange and only becomes a problem when an idol. Markets are what happens when human beings serve each other’s needs. In general, the principle of subsidiarity is a good rule to follow in building businesses and markets, where key decisions are pushed downward in organizations and made by those in the best position to judge. Profit is 100% necessary for families and businesses, whether for gain now or to grow and thrive and give away. I remain a free-marketer at heart.
Having said that, Lasch moved me closer to understanding the dangers of free markets that are not anchored by Judeo-Christian morality. In hindsight, the extreme outsourcing of American business from the 1980s well into the 21st century was in large measure both strategically stupid and morally wrong. Markets are only good when the human needs served and the people engaging with them are good. Large, globalist corporations often pursue gain in ways that harm fellow citizens.
Many markets involving drugs, human beings (slavery and prostitution), organs, social media, pornography, products producing serious industrial waste, and even arguable “bads” like Name Image and Likeness (“NIL”, IMO, ruining college football and basketball) are crushing our people and environment. While free markets are perhaps on track to continue eliminating poverty worldwide, urbanization coming to dominate the globe is not sustainable without significant reform. Fixing this is another great task for future generations.
The Worldview War between the Creator-God Story and the Man-God Story
Perhaps most important in The Revolt of the Elites is Mr. Lasch’s final description of where his life’s worldview journey ended. As a young man in the 1960s, he associated himself with radical Marxism. However, during the 1970s, he began to see capitalism’s virtues. While he never endorsed capitalism in full, he did advocate for limiting global capitalism and strengthening small-scale communities, production-oriented organization, and older, populist, artisan traditions. He also opposed state-managed economics and businesses. In other words, by his death, he shunned what we call socialism today.
After the Fall of the Soviet Union in his final years, Christopher Lasch could see Marxism’s failure. He saw the value of religion, the spiritual, and Judeo-Christianity; on the other side of the same coin, he saw the nihilism of the mechanical and sometimes murderous, materialist worldviews. While remaining non-religious to the end of his life, he clearly came to advocate for what we call the Creator-God Story over the Man-God Story, still as a leftist-populist.
In future posts this year, I will go “back to the future” again with a few more prophetic authors. In the meantime, I highly recommend The Revolt of the Elites to anyone on the Right or Left or anywhere in between. And I hope Mr. Lasch will influence you as he did me, and that maybe we can meet in agreement in the middle somehow, as necessary, for the common good of all.
“Perhaps the most important of this habit of mind is a proper understanding of religion . . . ‘As soon as one begins to doubt either the validity of the laws of God considered as the fundamental principles of a science that happens to be called theology, or as soon as one begins to raise a question as to the purpose of life,’ one begins down the slippery slope to relativism, moral anarchy, and cultural despair.” (pages 242 to 243)
