The Preface to The Culture of Narcissism describes in broad strokes what Lasch calls "the current malaise" facing late-20th century America. The issue that Lasch attempts to face squarely is the intellectual and moral and social bankruptcy of liberalism, as a practice in the United States.
It is important to remember what he means by "liberalism". He is not using the word to refer to the squishy left-leaning politics of late-70's Democrats. Rather, he is referring to the liberal tradition, which exists in two related strains throughout US history. What we typically call "conservative" is actually just a variety of classical liberalism, far closer to the libertarianism of John Stuart Mill mixed with the classical economics of David Ricardo, rather than true conservative thought such as one reads in Burke or Russell Kirk. The flip side, the mild statism of "liberal Democrats" is more reminiscent of 19th century British liberalism, or perhaps if slightly more "radical" version embodied in Britain in David Lloyd George, rather than a true ideology of the left. With only one true leftist in the US Congress (Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is a Social Democrat), the left is far less represented in American mainstream politics than the right, which has most of the Republican Party.
These two sides of liberalism, void of any meaningful content to move the American public, or even to hold it together, waged a fierce struggle throughout the decade of the 1970's. The reaction against the radicalism of the late-1960's - itself very much an admixture of strains of traditional liberalism, rather than a substantive truly radical social critique based in Marxist, or neo-Marxist thought - resulted not in a higher synthesis, but rather a resurgence of reactionary corporatism, an unveiled attempt to reverse multiple social gains of the working class. That one of the central critiques of the radical movement of the 1960's - the state is corrupt and evil; do not trust it - was echoed by Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address ("government is the problem") - should have clued people in to the reality that the distance between "liberal" and "conservative" thought in the United States was quite short indeed. It should also have made people aware that each was equally vapid, and quite wrong.
Lasch also points out in the preface that what many observers saw as a retreat from politics might have been a good thing. Low voter turnout and a persistent drop in party identification may have been indications not that the American people are dumb or don't care; rather, he argues, this political distancing may have been a sign of incipient revolt, a refusal to accept the terms of our common life as presented to us by a system far too vested in modes of thought and discourse that they correctly perceive as morally bankrupt.
It should also be noted that the corruption at the heart of American culture, a corruption to which Lasch assigns the term "narcissism" to describe the depth of the psychic emptiness once filled by social, cultural, and civic institutions whose very hearts have been eviscerated by the self-immolation of liberalism, is a corruption first and foremost among elites; then, of course, there is bourgeois culture and its American inheritors, those heady pursuers of personal fulfillment, excessive personal decadence at the expense of delayed gratification.
It is interesting to consider how, at this point, the American right - the rump of all that is left of that decade of fire - has nothing to offer the American people but fear, paranoia, and glittering distractions as a way of staving off the possibility of its own demise. That it might bring down the whole system, and us with it, matters little. Void of any sense of self, these last stragglers from the age of narcissism fear only the annihilation of their own, empty selves. We stand on the brink, and there is no way to be sure who will win the struggle between the nihilist inheritors of the legacy of Reagan and the coming age of possibility and hope, tempered by an understanding of limit and the acceptance of failure on a social and political as well as personal level.
One thing for sure. Lasch's thirty year old book is a great program to the match.
