“The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy”

In 1932, Jose Ortega y Gasset warned of the “revolt of the masses.” Today, writes the late cultural critic Christopher Lasch, it’s the elites we have to worry about. Completed a week before his death from cancer in February 1994, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (W.W. Norton & Company; 276 pages; $22) is a full-spirited attack on the threats to American democratic culture that Mr. Lasch sees. He argues that a new class of professional and managerial elites are isolating themselves from the rest of society, pursuing a rootless existence and lacking any commitment to the wider community.

He argues that success has never before been so associated with social mobility, and that this mobility has replaced earlier democratic ideas of raising the general level of competence, energy, and devotion in society.

Mr. Lasch, who taught history at the University of Rochester, spares neither right nor left in his critique. He does, however, take on many liberal buzzwords, such as diversity, self-esteem, and multiculturalism. On diversity, for example, he argues that the concept seems an attractive slogan on its face. But, “in practice, diversity turns out to legitimize a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion.”