The Right’s favorite Left radical

In the spring of 1979, Jimmy Carter set a place at his table for a radical historian: Christopher Lasch. The author’s book The Culture of Narcissism, published a few months earlier, had become that rarest of objects, a best-selling work of social criticism, with a National Book Award soon to follow. And it had reached a president facing gas lines and a country he no longer felt he understood. Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell had been pressing the book on the White House for months. So its author came to dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, seated beside First Lady Rosalynn Carter, in company that included the sociologist Daniel Bell, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the broadcaster Bill Moyers, and other diagnosticians of the American soul. Caddell briefed the room on the nation’s darkening mood. By Ju