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?

Orientalist Bernard Lewis at 90

It was Bernard Lewis, a scholar of the Middle East, who wrote the seminal article in 1990 that warned of the gathering storm in the Middle East. “The Roots of Muslim Rage” warned “that our luck had run out, that an old struggle between "Christendom" and Islam was gathering force.”

His life is celebrated by Fouad Ajami today in OpinionJournal.com.

It was Lewis that noticed in the London paper
“Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in February of 1998... a declaration of war on the United States by a self-designated holy warrior he had "never heard of," Osama bin Laden.” Three years later the rules changed on 9/11.

For centuries,

Islam and Christendom had feuded and fought across a bloody and shifting frontier, their enmity a "series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests." For nearly a millennium, Islam had the upper hand.

But then the tide turned, and Islam found that it started losing every war. It was humiliating.

And the special humiliation of Islam issues from its early success. Moses and the people of Israel wandered for years in the wilderness. Christ was crucified. But Mohammed the prophet was an immediate success in hearts, minds, and on the battlefield. Islam showed how politics and religion could be unified into a single successful empire of faith and of worldly success. Now all that was over. And it was intolerable.

Bernard Lewis worries about the West.

It may be that Western culture will indeed go: The lack of conviction of many of those who should be its defenders and the passionate intensity of its accusers may well join to complete its destruction. But if it does go, the men and women of all the continents will thereby be impoverished and endangered.

The question is whether the rage of Islam is just another rebellion against the power and authority of the global middle class and its paradigm of enterprise, law, tolerance, markets, and prosperity, or whether the angry Islamists will sweep over the world like the recurring eruptions of nomads out of the Asian steppe.

The answer is up to us. The West certainly has the power to stop the rage from the Middle East. The question is: Does it have the will?

Liberal Lion J.K. Galbraith Dead at 97

He was a government price controller, a Harvard professor, a public intellectual, a writer of best-sellers, and the face of liberal economics. He was John Kenneth Galbraith and we shall not see his like again.

In the 1950s he taught liberals how to sneer at the American middle class with his best-seller The Affluent Society. In The New Industrial State he taught how General Motors and corporations like it ran the world. In American Capitalism he advanced his ideas of the corporative state as the balance between “contervailing powers” of business, labor, and government.

If you read the appreciative obituary in the London Times you will learn that he was a genius who offered insights into the economy. If you read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Daily Telegraph you will learn that

"He is one of those unfortunate people who lived long enough to see his ideas discredited," said Doug McWilliams of the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

In his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s he was the voice of enlightened liberalism. He was always ready with an acerbic sound bite to put down the conservative line, and liberals basked in his talent and his brilliance. His best-sellers flowed out, one after the other, confirming for liberals everything they knew, or would have known if they had thought about it.

On occasion Galbraith would debate with William F. Buckley, Jr. as Mr. Liberal against Mr. Conservative. They were well matched, each with an arrogant presence that satisfied their supporters and enraged the opposition.

Democrats sorely miss his presence on the team, as an all-rounder who could think, write, and perform on TV, and pitch their ideas like a pro.

It was doubtless his authority that encouraged Democrats to believe that Reaganomics would never work. But as the old corporative world of big business vs. big labor gave way to the global economy where rent-seeking corporations and labor unions had no place to hide, his ideas began to lose their lustre.

Despite the power of Galbraith’s prose the economy is not a simple narrative of business vs. labor with noble government in between. It is far bigger than that, and far more fascinating.

But it is a world in which liberals are much less important than they would like to be.

Solzhenitzyn Can't Take US Hegemony

Although Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner of the Soviet Union and lived from many years in exile in the United States he has never been a fan of the West. Adrian Blomfield in the Washington Times reports that Solzhenitzyn feels that the US is encircling Russia. WRiting to Moscow News, he wrote

Though it is clear that present-day Russia poses no threat to it whatsoever, NATO is methodically and persistently expanding its military apparatus in the east of Europe and is implementing an encirclement of Russia from the south

The support for revolutions in the Balkans and the Ukraine make it perfectly clear to him.

All this leaves no doubt that they are preparing a complete encirclement of Russia, which will be followed by the deprivation of her sovereignty.

He’s right, of course, but not in the way he thinks. The US is not out to demolish Russia, at least not directly. We just have a civic faith in democratic capitalism. Perfectly harmless, really. We just instinctively work to support democratic capitalism, and try to plant it wherever we find a seedbed that might support it.

But if I were you, Alex old chum, I’d be more concerned about the Chinese. Those chaps are not going to stay south of the border forever, you know.

Music is For Neanderthals

Music has always had a good press. “As Plato said: “Music uses sound to educate the soul in virtue” and most educated persons have since concurred,” according to Terence Kealey.

But scientist beg to differ. Music is the language of pre-speech. It connects with the emotions, not with reason. People who are deficient in reason, like babies, stroke victims, and autistic children are the experts in music.

Leon Miller, of the University of Illinois, described 13 people who were indeed mentally retarded. Typically, their IQs and social skills were so rudimentary that they could not speak or dress themselves. But musically they were gifted, not only playing well but also composing creatively. And, typically, they had perfect pitch.

We use music, or musicality in our voices, to communicate with babies. And they understand us. “'What a good girl!', delivered in French, provokes a happy smile in an English nursery.”

Studies show that 100 percent of mothers sing to their babies.

But here’s the nub. An archeologist, Stephen Mithen, has studied the Neanderthals and decided that they could not speak, but could sing. His book is called The Singing Neanderthals. I know, it sounds like the Trapp Family Singers.

Along came walkin’ talkin’ Homo Sapiens and it was curtains for the Singing Neanderthals.

So when Daniel Barenboim says that “making music and playing it in an orchestra is the best way to understand democracy,” he is probably wrong. Unless democracy is considered a primitive, pre-articulate activity.

Saudi Jihadists Take Down Conservative Blogs

This morning at about 10:00am EDT conservaive blogs across the nation suffered a Denial of Service attack originating out of Saudi Arabia.

You can see reports from Michelle Malkin, Instapundit, and Hugh Hewitt. On Hugh Hewitt they are starting out their return to service with a piece on the silliness of Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell. Here at the Road to the Middle Class we have already dealt with her insult to Washington State. Of course. Maybe she’s right, and just reflecting the stump-toothed conspiracy theorists of North Seattle.

Maybe these eager cyber-jihadis haven’t yet read Jonah Goldberg’s piece on “Globalization for Losers.” He suggests that Radical Islam is Globalization for Losers. And of course, running a close second is the Naomi Klein lefty globalization of losers, a globalization run by the UN and progressive activists.

It’s been one rebellion after another over the last 150 years against the glorious rise of the middle class and its commonwealth of law and prosperity.

What is wrong with these people?

Economy: Roaring or Limping? You Make the Call

With the Department of Commerce expected to announce a 5.0 percent annual growth rate for the first quarter the New York Times was worried this morning. Wrote David Leonardt and Vikas Bajaj

Gas prices are rising, as are mortgage rates. House prices in many once-hot markets have started slipping. The American automobile industry shows no sign of recovery. And the paychecks of most workers have not even kept up with inflation over the last four years.

Yet the national economy continues to speed ahead.

What on earth is going on? Well, it turned out that the Commerce Department reported a mere 4.8 percent annual growth in the first quarter of 2006, 0.2 percent less than the forecast. No doubt the shortfall was President Bush’s fault. You can understand the New York Times’ disappointment. Anyway, the rich are doing well.

Spending by upper-income families appears to be driving much of the economy's growth. The average hourly wage for rank-and-file workers — who make up roughly 80 percent of the work force — has fallen by 5 cents in the last four years, to $16.49, after inflation is taken into account. Yet most well-paid workers have continued to receive raises.

You’d expect Larry Kudlow to look on the bright side, and he does.

Today’s economy may be the greatest story never told. It’s an American boom, spurred by lower tax rates, huge profits, big productivity, plentiful jobs, and an ongoing free-market capitalist resiliency. It’s also a global boom, marked by a spread of free-market capitalism like we’ve never seen before.

So let’s pull out all the stops.

Recent data on production, retail sales, and employment are stronger than expected. The latest durable-goods report shows huge gains in orders for big-ticket items like airplanes, transportation, metals, machinery, and computers — even cars and parts. These orders suggest that the economic boom will continue as far as the eye can see... Just what the doctor ordered.

Will angst about gas prices cost Republicans in the Fall? Who knows? But at least the mess over ethanol shortages should force the government to make some sensible decisions about energy. And maybe we could even dip a drilling bit into the sacred groves of ANWR.

“Let free markets work. This is the new worldwide message of freedom, prosperity, and optimism.” That is also the message from Larry Kudlow. New York Times please copy.