Barzun’s house of intellect is now besieged by barbarians who make no distinction between scholars and pedants, between Poets’ Corner and Pseuds’ Corner, between Kant and cant. Once unleashed, the power of mob rule is a terrible thing. “Away with him, away with him! He speaks Latin,” yells Jack Cade, a kind of 15th-century Donald Trump, in Henry VI Part 2. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” says Dick, his henchman. In Julius Caesar, the rabble dismember an unfortunate with the same name as a conspirator: “I am Cinna the Poet,” he pleads. The plebs do not care: “Tear him for his bad verses!” Shakespeare was good at mobs. 

By the end of the 1970s, the American industrial worker was being undercut by global competition. One step up, the middle class had long since felt its status and values threatened by the counter-culture. Both anxieties are adumbrated in Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations. Admittedly, the diminishing expectations of 1979 applied only to some: the manual workers and lower middle class, many of whom lost their pride and their prosperity. For others, the dynamism of the 1980s was a blessing. What Lasch called “the dotage of bourgeois society” turned out to be the prelude to a new age of affluence for those who embraced the new technologies and financial services that began to emerge in the 1980s. Silicon Valley and Wall Street, Texas and Florida boomed, while the metropolitan north-east reverted to rust belt or even, like Detroit, ghost towns. Meanwhile, Lasch had identified a key to the newly “liberated” personality type that had emerged since the 1960s to inherit the earth: narcissism.

For Lasch, the new clinical concept of narcissism “appears realistically to represent the best way of coping with the tensions and anxieties of modern life, and the prevailing social conditions therefore tend to bring out narcissistic traits that are present, in varying degrees, in everyone.” For a generation disillusioned by Vietnam and Watergate, redemption could only be found within: “The ideology of personal growth, superficially optimistic, radiates a profound despair and resignation. It is the faith of those without faith.” One of these young men was Donald Trump.

In this society of narcissists suspended between a triumph and despair that are both equally subjective, there is a special place for the combination of superficiality, nonsense and deception that is Trumpery. Lasch lamented a “paternalism without father”, run by a managerial and professional elite that was creating new patterns of dependence, ameliorated by fantasies of total gratification. “The new paternalism preaches not self-denial but self-fulfillment,” he writes. “It sides with narcissistic impulses and discourages their modification by the pleasure of becoming self-reliant, even in a limited domain, which under favourable conditions accompanies maturity.”

In such a climate, Lasch argues, not only do narcissistic personalities rise to prominence but they also elicit narcissistic traits in others. “Thriving on the adulation of the masses, these celebrities set the tone of public life and of private life as well, since the machinery of celebrity recognises no boundaries between the public and the private realm. The beautiful people . . . live out the fantasy of narcissistic success, which consists of nothing more substantial than a wish to be vastly admired, not for one’s accomplishments but simply for oneself, uncritically and without reservation.” Such a person might very well imagine that he was qualified to run for President, even though he had achieved little or nothing of substance despite inheriting wealth and opportunity. He would be perfectly suited to the fantasy world of “reality” TV, in which the boss can solve every problem with the simple words “You’re fired!”