Lasch called for a renewal of populism’s “appreciation of the moral value of honest work, its respect for competence, its egalitarian opposition to entrenched privilege, its refusal to be impressed by the jargon of experts, its insistence on plain speech and on holding people accountable for their actions.” He would say that populism “was not a panacea for all the ills that afflict the modern world,” and he admitted that “it would be foolish to deny the characteristic features of populist movements at their worst—racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, and anti-intellectualism, all the other evils so
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