The premise of The True and Only Heaven, Chistopher Lasch writes, is to demonstrate that the old political ideologies of left and right “have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action.” Given the presumed defeat of laissez-faire, the left assumed that it would be the party of the future. Welfare states would continue to grow indefinitely; capitalism would evolve into socialism.

By 1991, it was clear that the left’s zealous confidence in progress was foolishly misplaced.

Who would have predicted, twenty-five years ago, that as the twentieth century approached its end, it would be the left that was everywhere in retreat?

As a one-time man of the left, Lasch always seems to reserve the most venomous barbs for his former comrades. But he also takes the new right to task. Despite hollow promises to resurrect family values—a project dear to Lasch’s heart—the right had failed to arrest the disintegration of American culture. The right’s slavish commitment to free-market capitalism, in fact, was responsible for the ever-deteriorating conditions of American family life.

Whereas conservatives had once fought against the ideology of progress, the so-called Reagan revolutionaries, bearing the conservative mantle, had come to embrace it. Indeed, supply-side economics—the great economic “innovation” of the Reagan years—was little more than a bastardization of the progressive Keynesian economics that led to the 1964 Kennedy-Johnson tax cut.

Ritual deference to ‘traditional values’ cannot hide the right’s commitment to progress, unlimited growth, and acquisitive individualism. According to Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, “skepticism about progress,” once the hallmark of “intellectuals identified as conservative,” has all but disappeared. “Political differences between right and left have by now been largely reduced to disagreements over policies designed to achieve comparable moral goals.” The ideological distinctions between liberalism and conservatism no longer stand for anything or define the lines of political debate.

The left and right both believe in progress, in “the desirability and inevitability of technical and economic development.” Neither has much to say about environmental limits. Both sides vehemently “repudiate the charge of ‘pessimism.’”

Neither side addresses the overriding issue of limits, so threatening to those who wish to appear optimistic at all times. The fact remains: the earth’s finite resources will not support an indefinite expansion of industrial civilization. The right proposes, in effect, to maintain our riotous standard of living, as it has been maintained in the past, at the expense of the rest of the world (increasingly, at the expense of our own minorities as well). This program is self-defeating, not only because it will produce environmental effects from which even the rich cannot escape but because it will widen the gap between rich and poor nations, generate more and more violent movements of insurrection and terrorism against the West, and bring about a deterioration of the world’s political climate as threatening as the deterioration of its physical climate.

Yikes! Lasch fashioned himself a modern-day Calvinist prophet, and I’ve got to say, that’s some prophetic doom-saying right there. How much of this has come to pass? Environmental effects from which even the rich cannot escape? Hurricane Sandy, check. Depletion of non-renewable resources? Look no further than unsustainably high commodity prices as well as the crude oil production plateau. Widening of the gap between rich and poor nations? Check. Ever more violent movements of terrorism against the West? Check. A deterioration of international politics mirroring the ever-growing climate chaos? We’ll have to wait and see on that one.

The left’s program is “equally self-defeating,” writes Lasch. Extending Western standards of living to the rest of the world will lead “even more quickly to the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, the irreversible pollution of the earth’s atmosphere, and the destruction of the ecological system, in short, on which human life depends.” Continue reading →