The American historian Christopher Lasch argues in his book The Revolt of the Elites that social stability is now endangered not by the masses but by the élites. They took to the global market for employment, entertainment, consumption, even for marriage and friendship. They have no ties to a nation, let alone to a neighbourhood. They are opting out of many public services. The masses were once considered unfit to vote because, lacking property or money, they had no 'stake' in the country; now it is the élites, the aristocrats of the market, whose fortunes are now so detached from locality and nation that their only interest is in minimising government. They have become the supreme individualists. Thus, argues Lasch, democracy is in danger.
For more than 15 years, governments of both left and right have regarded it as axiomatic that they must organise their economies and societies to make them competitive in the global market, to create lands fit for heroic entrepreneurs. In the next 15 years, they might think it wiser to consider how they can control the global market, to find ways of minimising the social wreckage it inflicts.
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