The Culture of Contentment

...to that extent, Galbraith is right about the source of our political stagnation...

...Christopher Lasch To call America a "culture of contentment," in the nervewracked nineties, seems uncommonly perverse...

...To an alarming extent, the privileged few--by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent-have made themselves independent of public services...

...Needless to say, this analysis does not rest on observation, even on a casual survey of public opinion polls...

...Even the poor suffer, it seems, from "relative tranquility...

...How can Galbraith expect anyone to take his diagnosis seriously...

...Teachers' pay has risen steadily without any improvement in teaching...

...They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in companysupported plans, and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence around them...

...and we have long since passed the point where criticism of welfare can be dismissed as a way of "blaming the victim...

...By all accounts, Americans have never felt less confident about the future...

...Their hunger for change, moreover, is the one fact that clearly emerges from a presidential campaign that is otherwise confusing and unpredictable...

...It afflicts a majority, at least a majority of those who vote...

...He does not allow himself to entertain the slightest doubt that "life in the great cities...could be improved, and only will be improved, by public [i.e...

...But the death of the welfare state, the death of social democracy, is not the death of democracy itself...

...They are themselves riding a tremendous wave of change, revolutionary in its implications...

...From top to bottom, then, American society is riddled with contentment...

...The prospect is not bright," he says in his concluding chapter, titled "Requiem...

...But"contentment"--which in Galbraith's vocabulary boils down to a reluctance to support social democratic reforms--is not confined, as he sees it, to the 20 percent of Americans who take in more than half of all income...

...The public realm can no longer serve as a synonym for the state...

...Nor are they resistant to change, strictly speaking...

...The welfare system is another...

...For Galbraith, the value of that policy is selfevident...

...If people reject them, it is not because they are "contented" but because they are wiser than they used to be...

...Is it necessary to point out a more obvious explanation--that Galbraith's remedies have already been tried and found wanting...

...There is a kernel of truth in Galbraith's description of American society...

...He is quite wrong, however, in broadening the category of the "contented" to the "majority of those who vote" or to the majority of the population or to everyone except the "socially concerned," or whatever he means to argue--his characterization of the contented class varies from page to page...

...Public housing has been notoriously a disaster...

...But they have little interest in improving the quality of our public life...

...In effect, these people have seceded from the common life...

...It may turn out to be the beginning of a democratic revival...

...Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure---of business, entertainment, information, and "information retrieval"--make them deeply indifferent even to the prospect of American national decline...

...The vacuum of public leadership, the trivialization of public discourse, the commercialization of the press, the cynicism and nihilism of popular entertainment, the collapse of public education, the weakening of family ties, the loss of national unity and purpose--all this hardly adds up to a recipe for contentment...

...If he intended to argue merely that people who run things seldom have a strong incentive to change them, we could accept this platitude as a plausible though partial and inadequate explanation of our political stalemate...

...Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America's destiny for better or worse...

...The recognition that they are better off than they were in the deep South or the third world has a "tranquilizing effect...

...Criticism of the welfare state, far from a sign of contentment, has become a necessary condition of change--though not the kind of change Galbraith has in mind...

...Their uneasiness goes well beyond the faltering economy...

...Most Americans still depend on public services and still care, if for no other reason, about the future of their country...

...It is a deduction from the failure of liberal economic policy to command widespread support...

...Such pieties belong to a vanished age of political simplicity...

...I would be the last to argue that the prospect is rosy...

...When the "willingness to appropriate and spend public funds" is so obviously the solution (the only solution, Galbraith insists) not just to poverty--the "most serious social problem of the time"--but to every other social problem, then "contentment" becomes the only explanation of inaction...

...Who knows...

...government] action--by better schools with betterpaid teachers, by strong, well-financed welfare services, by counseling on drug addiction, by employment training, by public investment in...housing" etc., etc...

...They compare themselves "not with those who are more fortunate but with their own past position...

...It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services...

...It is increasingly clear that we need to reinvigorate forms of public life that are independent of the market and the state alike...

...Not only in the United States but in Western Europe the limits of the welfare state have become painfully evident...

...When they speak of change, of course--and this is what Galbraith finds hard to forgive-they do not mean a return to the New Deal...

...These would-be cosmopolites are not exactly contented--they might better be described as sophisticated, self-absorbed, self-satisfied, and self-righteous...