Zitat des Tages von Christopher Lasch:
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech.
Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.
The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.
A 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.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.
Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
The left has lost the common touch.
The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.
When 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.
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.