Galbraith and the decline of American liberalism

To those of us who have grown to adulthood and now run the course of middle age, the life and times John Kenneth Galbraith remain a measure of the idealism that once came into politics, especially in America. In a sense, modern American liberalism began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and continued right up to the times of the pretty embattled Harry Truman. You could go back for a search of the names of those who dominated politics in the United States, in those days before the sinister force of McCarthyism set in, and come up with quite a few that still resonate with us, even in these days of mind-boggling neo-conservatism personified by the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

In the early 1950s, apart from Galbraith himself, there was the intellectually articulate Chester Bowles who, as ambassador to India and in his other capacities, demonstrated the inherent power of liberalism to serve as a conduit to other cultures around the world. Before him, in the late 1940s, the slow but perceptible rise of a young politician named Hubert Horatio Humphrey was a strong sign of the direction America was taking in the aftermath of a war that had opened up a whole new set of doors besides closing a number of old ones. In all this slow paced march of liberalism, it was Galbraith who more than anyone else provided the necessary intellectual background.

In his seminal work, The Affluent Society, he drew attention for the first time to the manner in which society was changing not out of a determination to change but from a sheer force of natural events. His abilities where writing was concerned were prodigious, as all the books (and they totalled more than thirty) he was eventually to write were to demonstrate so palpably. It was faith that served as the underpinning in his works. He was often ridiculed by others, particularly those with an interest in economics, for what they thought was his simplistic attitude to politics as it came defined within economics. It hardly mattered to Galbraith, who remained convinced till the end (and it was a very productive, prolific ninety seven years he lived) that economics needed to be more than theoretical if it meant to substantiate politics as a means of promoting human welfare. He was never the pedantic, did not pretend to be moralistic. In such simply stated works as The Liberal Hour, he merely noted the reasons behind the advent of political liberalism, leaving it to his readers to draw their own conclusions. Those conclusions were the same that he himself appeared to have reached.

American liberalism, having been initiated in the times of FDR, went through an obvious decline in the Eisenhower years. Even so, men like Adlai Stevenson gave to liberalism periodic shots in the arm, in 1952 and 1956, when the former governor of Illinois lost the race for the White House to Dwight Eisenhower. A measure of Stevenson's liberalism was particularly noted at the Democratic convention in 1956, when the candidate left it to the delegates to choose who between Senator Estes Kefauver and Senator John Kennedy would be his running mate against the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket. It was Kefauver who won, but it also pointed to a new dawn of liberalism that could well be inaugurated some years down the road by Kennedy.

At the election of November 1960, when Kennedy defeated Vice President Nixon by a whisker and gained the White House, the liberal hour Galbraith had long waited for seemed to have arrived. And yet the contradictions could not but be noticed. Even as Kennedy went busily about trying to create an administration in a liberal mould, few could set aside the thought that in his quest for the presidency Kennedy had left a better liberal, Senator Hubert Humphrey, far behind him. Humphrey, having lost the West Virginia primary to JFK in 1960, did not figure anywhere in the new administration. But that did not take away from the popular notion that a liberal administration, of whatever hue, was finally in office. Kennedy went looking for the best and the brightest in the land. He netted Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. There was Douglas Dillon and, of course, Adlai Stevenson, who was sent off to the United Nations much against his wishes. Stevenson had wanted the State Department, which JFK was unwilling to hand over to him.

Besides nominating the men who would be his cabinet, President Kennedy did not fail to give his administration the liberal lustre that came through peopling it with individuals of Galbraith's mould. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. served as the leading intellectual voice of a government which thought it was the generation into whose hands the torch had been passed. The band of Irishmen Kennedy brought with him (note Kenny O' Donnell) as well as people like Theodore Sorensen and Pierre Salinger were all inhabitants of Camelot, the new legend of liberalism Galbraith saw being constructed with ardour in Washington.

Galbraith himself went off to India, as a necessary linkage between the Kennedy administration and Jawaharlal Nehru. He was doing what Chester Bowles had tried doing once. It was a time that the poet Robert Frost had predicted would be ('the land was ours before we were the land's') at the Kennedy inaugural in January 1961. It was an era that had risen out of the gloom of the Lincoln assassination of April 1865, when 'lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed' for the poet Walt Whitman. But not many noticed the creeping desolation that was coming into liberalism even as Camelot played on in Washington. Kennedy courted disaster at the Bay of Pigs and came perilously close to a nuclear confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev's Soviet Union in October 1962. Among the best and the brightest, Robert McNamara was beginning to mishandle policy over Vietnam, whose corrupt president Ngo Dinh Diem, along with his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, died in an American-backed coup on the first day of November 1963. President Kennedy was to be murdered later that month. Camelot was effectively buried at Arlington, though there were many around who thought they could carry the torch onward.

The decline of liberalism has been pitiful. Eugene McCarthy caused hope to rise anew in New Hampshire in 1968, only to be undercut by Robert Kennedy, who then died in Los Angeles. Hubert Humphrey's liberalism went missing in the vice presidency he enjoyed under President Lyndon Johnson, so much so that he lost his strongest attempt to be president to Richard Nixon in 1968. In 1972, Nixon crushed the liberal George McGovern in a landslide. Among America's Republicans, the brave liberal Nelson Rockefeller, having been booed off the stage by Goldwater partisans in 1964, saw much of his ardour cool as he accepted Gerald Ford's offer to be his vice president in 1974. Ford unceremoniously dumped Rockefeller in 1976, and went on to lose to the unknown Jimmy Carter.

Perhaps the last, weak hurrah was sounded for American liberalism in 1980 when Edward Moore Kennedy made a misplaced dash for the Democratic nomination against Carter and ended up harming the Democratic cause. The election of Ronald Reagan was the point where conservatism actually ran liberalism out of town. And except for the eight Clinton years, conservatism has held centre stage in America. Liberals have stopped calling themselves liberals and have been moving steadily to the centre. A liberal politician in America today is a dead, or grievously wounded, politician.

In one of his lighter moments, John Kenneth Galbraith suggested that politics was not the art of the possible. "It consists," said he, "in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable". You have that eerie feeling he was looking far ahead into the future, into an age that would leave presidential timber like Al Gore out in the cold and thereby make improbability a political preference.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.