We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.
Christopher LaschWhen 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.
Christopher LaschNeoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
Christopher LaschA society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.
Christopher LaschOnce women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the clich? that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.
Christopher Lasch