Christopher Lasch

When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.

The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.

The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left.

The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.

The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.

The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.

Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.

It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.

Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.