CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Economic Basis of American Politics

I

Why is there not one single American among the “great economists”? From its earliest days this country has had more economists than any other country. It has led in the development of the tools of economic analysis. Economists are everywhere—in government, in business, in the universities, in the labor unions. In no other country, indeed, is a knowledge of economics considered part of ordinary education; in the United States, however, we have for many years been trying to combat “economic illiteracy” in the secondary schools. And certainly there is no country in which popular interest in economics is greater and in which economic issues are more prominent.

Yet we conspicuously lack the Great Economist, the economist who changes our ideas about economics and gives us new approaches to the interpretation and direction of economic events.

Or, rather: the great economists America has produced are not known as such, are not recognized as such. Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay certainly deserve being considered very great economists: Hamilton, at the very dawn of systematic economics, created a basic theory of economic development which has not been much improved since; Henry Clay’s “American System” is the font and origin of all welfare economics. Yet their very names are rarely mentioned in histories of economic thought, whereas the German Friedrich List, who repeated what Clay had taught him, usually occupies a prominent place in these books.

Of course, neither Hamilton nor Clay really wanted to be known as an economist. Their own ambitions were elsewhere: Hamilton on becoming the Commanding General of a victorious United States Army, Clay on being elected President. To both men, their economics were totally incidental to their politics and a tool thereof. For both Hamilton and Clay, economic policy was clearly a means to a political end. And when their economic views are discussed, they are correctly treated as part of their political theories and political strategies.

The explanation for this state of affairs would seem to be this: Economics is too important to American politics to be left to the American economist. Economics has a political role to fulfill that transcends its own subject matter. For well over two hundred years it has been the unifying impulse in this country’s political process. Since colonial days, “economic interests” have been used systematically to create political forces and political alignments and, above all, to unite regional and sectional groups behind one leader and one program. The names of these economic interests have changed; but whether we speak of the “manufacturing interest,” the “farming interest,” or the “silver bloc,” the idea itself has not changed. Similarly, for well over two centuries, economic issues—such as the tariff, the currency, or free soil—have been used to overcome and neutralize ideological cleavages and conflicts that otherwise might have torn apart the nation. During all of our history, fundamental rifts in the country have been bridged by polarizing politics on economic issues; these are issues on which a compromise, distributing dollars and cents, is always possible. The classical example is, of course, the compromise over the “Tariff of Abomination” between the South and Andrew Jackson that postponed the conflict over slavery for thirty years. All along it has been good American political manners to talk dollars and cents when we really mean political decisions. The way in which Robert McNamara, as Secretary of Defense in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, used budgetary control radically to alter strategic concepts and military organization is another good example.

Perhaps most revealing is the way in which we have used the economic sphere to think through and work out basic issues of the relation of government to society. Big business is far more powerful in France or Germany, for instance, than it is in the United States. But only in the United States has the relationship between “government and business” come to be considered the key issue for a fundamental discussion of the role and power of government in society. Indeed, our public discussions for a century now have led many a naïve foreign observer to conclude that in the United States there are no noteworthy social institutions other than business institutions.

The Great Themes of American History

The result of this peculiar role of economic issues and economic controversy in the American political process is most paradoxical. On the one hand, economics in this country appears to be far more prominent and far more important in the political life than in any other country. American history seems to be dominated, at first sight, by economic conflict. Indeed, it is possible to overlook the fact that the great themes of American history have all along been moral and constitutional: slavery, the industrial versus the agrarian society, and federalism in the nineteenth century; racial equality, the role and function of the central government, and America’s place in an international society in this century. In sharp contrast to countries whose politics have an ideological organization and pattern, such as all European countries, these great themes are barely mentioned in day-to-day, year-to-year American politics, where the slogans are primarily economic. It is, therefore, only too easy to mistake the appearance for reality. It is thus possible to argue, as a whole school of historians did, that the Civil War was an “unnecessary conflict” and could have been avoided by paying a few hundred million dollars to the slaveowners. It is possible, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., did in his brilliant Age of Jackson, to overlook completely that the central theme and the crowning achievement of the Jackson administration was to establish the sovereignty of the national government over all regional or sectional interests; instead, Mr. Schlesinger made economic and class interests paramount. It is even possible, as Charles Beard did in a long life as a historian, to see the whole of our history as determined by, and subordinated to, economic interest. But Beard lived long enough to find out that any attempt to predict the course of American history and American political behavior from economics is bound to misfire.

Every American politician must, indeed, know how to use economic measures for political ends. If he aspires to a national role, he must be a master of finding and creating economic alignments that unify diverse groups across the nation. Even John C. Calhoun, the most nearly “metaphysical” of our political thinkers, spent the last two decades of his life in an abortive attempt to bridge the moral gulf of slavery between South and West by means of their common economic interest as farmers.

So it is that, despite its appearance of centrality, economics in the American experience is actually a subordinate means to predominantly noneconomic ends. Our values are not economic values, nor is our economics autonomous. Politics even decides what economic issues are allowed to appear on the stage of American history. For, to be “available” as a political vehicle an economic issue must fit into our political logic. It must mobilize national energies and must unify large masses across regions for joint political action and for the conquest of the central political power that is the Presidency.

This explains the absence of the Great Economist. Such a man must assume the autonomy of the economic sphere in human life. He must assume the reality of economic values. If he is interested at all in politics (as few of them were), he must treat politics as a handmaiden of economics and as a tool for achieving economic purposes. These assumptions make no sense to the American experience. What flourishes in this country, therefore, is economic technicians of skill and renown, economic analysts, and expert fashioners of economic tools. We have political economists and economic politicians galore. But the climate is most uncongenial to the Great Economist. Such a man must assume an autonomous economic reality, of which the political issues are merely a reflection. In our American experience, however, economics is the conventional shorthand and the lingua franca for issues and decisions which are not economic, but political and moral. One might, indeed, formulate a basic rule of American politics to read: If at all possible, express a political issue and design a political alignment as an economic issue and an economic alignment.

II

The insight that economic interests can be used as the hinge of politics is commonly traced to the famous No. 10 of the Federalist Papers in which James Madison (following Harrington’s Oceana and John Locke) concluded that power follows property. But, when Madison wrote, American political life had already, for a century, been habitually organized around economic issues and in economic alignments. Madison only codified what had been fairly general American experience during the colonial period.

Colonial legislatures had, indeed, no alternative if they wanted to be effective at all. The matters that now occupy a legislature—public order and law, the administration of justice or education—may have been of very great interest to them, but were normally not within their reach. They had, perforce, to be left to the individual local communities, the towns and counties. In colonial America, distances were too great, population too sparsely settled, for any central authority to be effective. If the local community would not look after its own internal affairs, nobody else could. The major burning issue for the colonial legislature was relations with the mother country. And those turned on economic problems and economic questions: taxes and tariffs, coinage and credit, and so on. It was in these matters, above all, that the colony’s Royal Governor was interested; for in eighteenth-century theory and practice, an overseas colony was an economic asset. Of course, such recurrent disturbances as Indian risings or the endemic war with the French occupied a good deal of the time and attention of the colonial politician. But his main job was to represent the colonist before and against the economic power represented and exerted by the Governor. His very raison d’être was economic. And only by identifying and organizing economic interests could the eighteenth-century colonial politician create unity in the electorate he represented—an electorate which, as the century wore on, became increasingly diversified in its other characteristics (religious beliefs, ethnic origins, and so on). There never was much need to do for the eighteenth-century politician, in the state houses of Boston, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg, what Sir Lewis Namier had to do in our century for his English counterpart: to seek out and identify his economic affiliations and interests. That was the one fact about the politician in colonial America that was always clear, evident, and known to everybody.

But to Madison—and to all the brilliant politicians who, in the first quarter-century of United States history, established the political conventions and the political processes for the infant country—should be given credit for one fundamental insight: Economic interests could be used to unify. They could be used to overcome the pernicious “factions,” the cleavage of society into ideological camps divided by their basic beliefs, which the founding fathers rightly feared as incompatible with nationhood and political stability.

The Uses of Economic Conflict

This is a political view of economics—a view which explains economic events in terms of human behavior. This, more than anything else, distinguishes the traditional American approach to economics from the approach of the economist. The economist understands the behavior of commodities. And if he is naïve (as our present-day neo-Keynesians tend to be), he believes that human beings behave as commodities do. But even at his most profound and skeptical, he is likely to consider ordinary human behavior as economically nonrational behavior. In fact, the economist has, all along, been either suspicious or at the least contemptuous of the politician who, so it seems to him, subordinates the clear logic of economic rationality to the murky unreason of human emotions and vanities. From this starting point, the classical economists essentially arrived at a denial of politics. To them there was a pre-established harmony in the economic system, with economic self-regulation automatically producing the optimum for all groups and classes in society. Marx himself was no less contemptuous of the politician: no longer accepting the classical doctrine of harmony, but instead accepting the reality of economic conflict, he deduced therefrom the inevitability, beyond any politician’s contriving, of class war and revolution.

The political economists of the American tradition never for one moment believed in pre-established economic harmony. Economic conflict was much too obvious for that. It had, after all, characterized relations between the infant colonies and the mother country, culminating finally in a violent upheaval of the political order in the Revolution. But at the same time, they saw in economic conflict their means to prevent the more dangerous ideological conflict. And they saw in economic conflict the means to establish order—not harmony, which they did not expect on this earth. Above all, they saw that economic conflict was the one clash within the body politic that could be managed. It could be managed because economic interests are divisible, whereas political or religious beliefs are not. One can always split an economic difference in two—and while half a loaf is better than no bread, half a child, as King Solomon long ago perceived, is no good at all. The same goes for half a religion, half a philosophy, or half a political principle.

Above all, their experience, unique at that time and quite at variance with what “common sense” would have taught elsewhere, had convinced the founding fathers that, unlike all other cleavages, economic conflicts tend to become less acute with time. They may not be self-healing, but they are capable of amelioration. If the fight is over “who gets how much,” then one can satisfy both sides if the amount available for distribution increases. And their experience as colonists on the virgin continent had taught them that the economic pie is, indeed, capable of being increased by human action, rather than being fixed forever.

They may not have consciously thought this through. But Alexander Hamilton started out from the assumption that it is possible to increase the economic resources available. This assumption explains in large part why his countrymen, no matter how much they distrusted his politics, took to his economics at once, but also why he never attained full respectability as an economist. For the economist traditionally—until well past World War II—took it for granted that economic resources are given and limited, so that the problem is their most effective distribution in a system of equilibrium. In this respect Keynes, however much he otherwise might have differed from his predecessors, was as traditional as anyone. It was not until the most recent decades, until the advent of “economic development” as a goal of economic policy—with President Truman’s “Point Four” declaration of the early 1950’s being the crucial date—that proper economists accepted the purposeful creation of dynamic disequilibrium as possible and meaningful.

To the American—no matter how faithfully he repeated the teachings of the economist, no matter how faithfully he himself taught them in the classrooms of his colleges—it was obvious that in his country the economic resources had been proven to be capable of almost infinite expansion through human and, in large measure, political action. He may have agreed with the economist that this was purely the result of the rarest of accidents: the existence on this continent of vast areas of empty soil, ready for the plow, ready to be appropriated and to be converted into an economic resource. But very early we find in the actual political behavior of the American strong evidence that, deep down, he knew differently. He knew what Hamilton had known in the last decade of the eighteenth century: that there is an economic dynamic and that economic resources are the creation of man rather than of Providence. This underlies quite clearly such bold measures as the Morrill Act of 1865 which, in creating the land-grant colleges, clearly assumed that the application of knowledge creates economic value and productive capacity well beyond that given in the existing resources. It underlay, from the beginning, all American trade-union movements. American “business unionism” assumes not only that the economic pie can be made greater but, above all, that the fight over the division of the pie is by itself likely to produce a larger pie—that, in other words, economic conflict by itself leads to economic growth and therefore, at the same time, to political and social unity.

III

There can be little doubt that the American concept of “economic interest” as an effective and unifying political force has served this country exceedingly well.

In fact, it is questionable whether there could have been an American nation without it. With the wisdom of hindsight, we have come to see in the frontier a source of strength. But, in reality, the experience of the frontier must have been an almost unbearable strain, as witness all other countries that have undergone a similar experience. It was not only the kind of strain on the physical resources and on the political energies which rapid, turbulent expansion produces. Above all, it was a strain on the unity of a country in which the new tidal wave of immigrants of different social background, national origin, and religious allegiance always arrived long before the preceding wave of immigrants had been absorbed. In such a country, growing at a frenetic speed, ideological, philosophical, or religious cleavages might have been fatal.

One should not forget that the immigrants, by and large, had themselves no tradition of self-government or even of political activity; it was not, after all, the respectable or well to do who arrived in the holds of the immigrant ships. And yet these vast heterogeneous masses had to become a nation under one government and with one set of basic values practically overnight, or else the American experiment would have floundered. If economic interests had not been available as the political organizer, it would either have been necessary to impose the most rigid authority on the population or else pluralism would have organized itself against the nation and its unity—with every imported tradition of religion and culture, every imported political value and belief, the focus of an ideology alien, if not hostile, to American nationhood (as is so clearly the case in Latin America).

The great phenomenon of the nineteenth century is not, after all, the rise of the American economy. It is the creation of the American nation. For a nation, as we are now finding out the world over, is not something one can easily create. It is, on the contrary, usually the fruit of long experience and of historical forces operating over many centuries. Neither the nations of Europe nor Japan were created overnight. That nationhood is difficult and takes a very long time to create is proven by the fact that, outside of these old nations—and of the United States—very few, if any, nations have yet come into being. In all of Latin America, for instance, despite centuries of political identity, only Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Brazil, can be said to be “nations”—and, in both, nationhood has come only in this century. But the United States achieved nationhood in a few short decades, or, at the most, within a century. This it owes to a very large extent to the tradition which used economic interests and their clashes and conflicts as the foundation for political issues, political alignments, and political conflicts. This has enabled the United States to tolerate, if not to encourage, pluralism in all other spheres, to survive the fiercest of civil wars, and to attain a unity of allegiance and of basic commitments which represent as strong a common bond and communion as centuries of common history, common language, and common experiences have given to any of the older nations.

The Bias Toward “Bipartisanship”

But the convention of economic interests has not only tended to prevent ideological issues from arising. It has forced the American political system into a nonpartisan approach to noneconomic problems.

A noneconomic issue threatens the existing political alignments. It is not easily encompassed within the American political system. The American politician shuns ideological stands, for the simple reason that they are certain to alienate a large proportion of a constituency brought together and held together by economic interests. Any noneconomic ideological stand would have at once, for instance, exploded the alliance between the lily-white, fundamentalist Protestant, and proudly Anglo-Saxon South and the cosmopolitan, largely Catholic or Jewish working class in the big cities on which the Democratic party was based for so long. The only thing that could hold them together—and could thereby get a Democratic politician into federal office—was their economic opposition to the manufacturing interest.

This built into the American political process a powerful incentive to handle noneconomic issues on a “bipartisan” basis, that is, to remove them essentially from party politics. Indeed, the greatest praise in our political system is reserved for the “patriot” who turns a potentially disruptive noneconomic issue into bipartisan consensus. It is for this act of patriotism at the expense, legend has it, of his Presidential chances that American history primarily remembers Henry Clay. And a century later, Arthur Vandenberg earned himself a permanent place in the American political pantheon by similarly making American foreign policy after World War II “bipartisan,” thereby again sacrificing whatever chance for the Presidential nomination of his party he might ever have had. A great many voters repudiated Barry Goldwater in 1964, not because they disagreed with his views, but because his decision to take a partisan stand on noneconomic issues seemed to them a greater threat to the Republic than a wrong, but bipartisan, consensus on the issues. And, in the context of the American political process, they were right.

Foreign affairs, religion, education, civil rights, and a host of other areas which, in any other country, are the bread and meat of party politics and political organization are, therefore, as much as possible, treated as “bipartisan” in the American political system. This does not mean that they are not controversial. It means that the system, as long as it works, uses them to bring together otherwise warring factions rather than to create new factions on each side of the controversy. In fact, we much prefer not even to tackle such issues unless there is available for them a broad coalition cutting across our conventional political alignments. Again and again, initiative in such an issue is left, as if by passive agreement, to the one body in the American political system that is outside the established party alignment, the Supreme Court. That in both the great constitutional issues of the recent years, civil rights and reapportionment of voting districts, a Supreme Court decision took the place of political action in these politically crucial areas was in full accord with the tradition that goes back to John Marshall’s Court. For a Supreme Court decision is the “law of the land” and thus establishes its own consensus.

The Limitations of “Consensus”

There are obvious and real limitations to the effectiveness of the convention of economic issues in American politics. Not every noneconomic—that is, ideological, political, or moral—issue can be either made to appear as economic or organized as “bipartisan.” Indeed, the most important issues and decisions in the life of a nation cannot be handled in this fashion. The great example is slavery, of course, for in this country slavery did not primarily serve an economic function (as it did, for instance, in the plantation economy of Brazil). At least by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the main function of slavery was to endow the “poor white” in the South with a feeling of human superiority, no matter how wretched his physical or moral condition. Even if slavery in its origin and spread was an economic institution, by the time it became an issue, that is, after 1820 or so, the main beneficiary was no longer the slave owner, but rather the non-owner who derived the psychic benefits of a slave society without having to carry the increasing economic burden of maintaining the slaves. In other words, the Abolitionists, as we now know, were right: slavery in this country was a sin rather than a crime. And for this reason the abolition of slavery by itself, without true civil rights for the blacks, settled so very little.

And for this reason, too, slavery could not be camouflaged as an economic issue, no matter how hard the politicians of the early nineteenth century tried. Moreover, as a truly “irreconcilable” issue, that is, as a spiritual and moral one, there could be no “consensus” on it, even though the Supreme Court of the time tried to establish it in the Dred Scott decision. Nor could the existing political organization handle such a noneconomic issue—and probably the political system of no country, no matter how organized, could have handled it. On the issue of slavery, then, the American political system floundered and sank into Civil War, almost destroying the country with it.

But even in less crucial and less sensitive areas, the American political system is not geared to handling the noneconomic issue. This is particularly true whenever foreign policy cannot be organized on the basis of “consensus” and “bipartisanship.” Any such failure leaves deep and long-lasting scars. For any such failure endangers national cohesion. This was true of the War of 1812. It was true of the bitter foreign-policy conflict that preceded our entry into World War I. But for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the rift over foreign policy in the years before World War II might similarly have proven incapable of being organized within the American political system and might have torn apart American national unity. Today, Vietnam poses a similar threat.

But then there is also always a danger that our politicians may forget that the economic issue is a convention and fall into the error of believing that economics really controls politics. In domestic affairs, the danger is not very great. It is a very stupid politician who will not intuitively realize the limitations, as well as the uses, of the convention. Certainly no strong President—Jackson, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, or Truman, for example—ever believed that economic interests and economic policy were by themselves sufficient, or that they necessarily prevailed. But in foreign affairs we have made this mistake again and again—and have paid dearly in every case. Again and again we have fallen for the illusion of “economic sanctions” as an effective tool in foreign affairs. And again and again we have found that they are ineffective. This holds true for the belief of the South that “King Cotton” would force the North to its knees and constrain Europe to ally itself with the Confederacy, but also for the balancing belief of the North that the Confederacy could be defeated by economic blockade. And we now also know, from the diaries of Pro-Western Japanese leaders, that the economic sanctions which the United States and Great Britain imposed on Japan in 1940 and 1941 only strengthened the war party and deprived the moderates of all influence, just as the blockade of Germany in World War I emasculated the moderates in the German government and made the military extremists all-powerful. Ironically, we now also know that economic sanctions did not even work in the one case in which they seemed to have been successful—the case which probably explains the blind American belief in this policy: the “economic sanctions” of the American colonists against the first British attempt to tax them, a decade before the American Revolution. Recent historical research has made it reasonably certain that the British Cabinet used the American boycott as an excuse for a retreat from a policy which had proven exceedingly unpopular among powerful backers at home, and not primarily for economic reasons.

The convention of economics as the ground of political action and organization is, in other words, just a tool. Like every tool, it has to be used with judgment. And like every tool, it has limitations. Whoever mistakes the convention for reality pays the heavy penalty one always has to pay for deceiving oneself.

But while not perfect, not infallible, and not a panacea by any means, the convention has served the American people remarkably well.

IV

The question, however, is not really how well the convention has served in the past. It is: is it still useful, still serviceable? Can the common, ordinary, political business of the American people still be ordered by the traditional rule to formulate issues, as far as possible, as economic issues and to define alignments, to the greatest extent possible, as economic alignments?

It is just barely possible that this traditional convention of domestic American politics has a major future role to play in foreign and international affairs. But at the same time, it may be at the end of its usefulness at home.

Every one of the many new countries that have come into existence in the last two decades has yet to become a nation. Every one is less well equipped for this task, by history and tradition, than was the infant American Republic two hundred years ago. In every one, the cleavages between tribes, between religions, between races, run deep—and will have to be bridged fast if the country is to survive. No one of them could survive a conflict of ideologies. In this situation, a good many of them, if not all, will predictably take recourse in the elimination of politics—the vain promise of every dictatorship. Equally predictably, this will only worsen the conflicts and make them even less tractable. Predictably also, some of them at least will seek escape in braggart nationalism, if not in conquest abroad. This, too, history amply teaches, will not succeed. Only an approach to politics which allows conflicts to be productive and to create unity across the dividing line of tribe, religion, tradition, or race would seem to fit the needs of the new countries. In the traditional American approach, which makes politics turn on economic interests and economic issues, the new countries might well find what they need, ready-made and well tested.

Indeed, this approach might become increasingly more important for the international community altogether. The world today is threatened by a danger even greater than that of class war in the nineteenth century. It is threatened by the danger of a worldwide race war of the poor and largely colored majority against the largely white minority of the rich. At the same time, this is an infinitely smaller world than was that of the eighteenth century—a world in which everybody is everybody else’s neighbor and in which, therefore, there is no alternative to living together. In such a world, a political concept which allows for productive conflict, but which also organizes unity beyond the ideologies and traditions that divide, might be of the greatest importance.

We are obviously very far from any such accomplishment; the “Alliance for Progress” in President Kennedy’s original version was probably the closest to it. But, in retrospect, the development efforts of the 1950’s and 1960’s may well one day appear as the first uncertain and faltering steps toward a new, nonideological, and yet unifying concept of international order, different alike in its flexibility and effectiveness from the world anarchy of sovereign states which has become a hopeless anachronism, and a world government which, if at all feasible, could today be only a world-wide tyranny.

The Need for Innovation

But at the same time, it seems likely that in domestic politics the traditional economic convention has come to the end of its usefulness. It is not that we are dissatisfied with it or that we hanker after ideological politics. It’s just that the problems and challenges of American life no longer can be cast easily, if at all, into an economic mold. The civil-rights issue, in all likelihood, is typical of the issues that will be central to American politics from now on: the problems of the metropolis; the structure, values, and relationships of a society increasingly organized in large and powerful institutions; or the role, function, and limitations of science and technology. These questions cannot be converted into economic issues. Nor, despite President Johnson’s attempts at “consensus,” are they likely to admit of “bipartisanship.” Bipartisanship is effective when the answers are known, at least in broad outline. But great political innovations, such as we need, are rarely the children of compromise.

And yet these are also issues which the traditional ideological alignments, the alignments of European politics, cannot tackle. To do as so many foreign and domestic critics of the American political system have urged us to do for well over a century—to organize our political life on the basis of “liberal” and “conservative,” or “right” and “left”—would only add to the confusion. What is “liberal” in respect to the government of the metropolis? Or in respect to the relationship between the individual and the large organizations on which he depends for effectiveness, but on which he must not depend if he wants to be free? And what does it mean to be a “conservative” on these issues? There is obviously going to be violent disagreement in respect to these issues; in fact, there is need for such disagreement and for a diversity of approaches to their solution. But ideological alignments are bound to be as irrelevant to these issues as the traditional alignment by economic interests. The “New Left” is thus bound to be sterile and to be condemned to total frustration.

If, indeed, the world will permit us the luxury of domestic affairs in the next half-century or so, we will not only have to face up to new issues. We shall have to devise a new approach to domestic politics altogether. This signifies a greater upheaval in our political life, a greater strain on political sanity and stability, than the new issues themselves could possibly mean and a greater opportunity for creative political thought and effective political leadership than this country has known since the days of the founding fathers.

In seizing this opportunity, we may well have to abandon the traditional reliance on economic interests and economic issues as symbols of political intercourse and as means of political organization. I hope that we will not give up with them the principle underlying them: the mobilization of conflict to create unity, and the appeal to interest against the fanaticism of ideological faction. It is not only a civilized concept; it is a principle that makes politics productive for the common good. It has served the American people well—so well that doing without the Great Economist seems a very small price, indeed.

First published in The Public Interest, Winter, 1968.