Galbraith: Conventional Wisdom for Liberals

In his Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith, who died Saturday aged 97, coined the phrase conventional wisdom. He meant by it the general widespread public assumptions, the unchallenged faith in things as they are. He meant the ideas that intelligent people like himself scorned as shallow and self-serving.

Naturally, he became the No. 1 purveyor of liberal conventional wisdom in the last half of the twentieth century.

Liberals have needed to feel themselves separate from the general run of Americans. They think of themselves as evolved, superior by virtue of education and by virtue of their values and their compassion. They are dissenters; they challenge conventional assumptions about life and mores. This special difference is what gives them the right to judge and the right to rule.

But of course liberals hold their own rigid views about the way things are, and they way things ought to be. It was the genius of Galbraith to understand that and to churn out, in book after book, the latest version of liberal conventional wisdom, the way that liberals looked at the world and interpreted it.

He also gave liberals a special place in that world.

In American Capitalism he presented the US economy as big corporations against big labor. And of course liberals were needed to balance the countervailing interests of powerful business and powerful labor.

In The Affluent Society he presented the liberals with a vision of private wealth and public squalor, licensing them to expand government in the 1960s to erase the moral stain of public squalor.

In The New Industrial State according to the New York Times obituary “he tried to trace the shift of power from the landed aristocracy through the great industrialists to the technical and managerial experts of modern corporations. He called for a new class of intellectuals and professionals to determine policy.” Oh good! More jobs for liberals—as if there weren’t already a huge new class of intellectuals and liberals busily doing just that!

It is likely that the comfortable liberal conventional wisdom that he publicised in his many books helped liberals to ignore the economic challenges of the 1970s and turn their eyes away from the success of Reaganomics in the 1980s. It didn’t square with what they had read in Galbraith, so it couldn’t be true.

But that is all over and now it is time for liberals to wake up and confront the new economy of the twenty-first century. How does an educated elite deal with “today's harsh, interconnected world where corporations devour one another for breakfast,” a world which has little time for American liberals and their conventional wisdom?