1. There's a useful revisiting of John Kenneth Galbraith going on right now. He's a hard character to analyze, because he often took contradictory views. But as you might imagine, I think David gets Galbraith wrong. Galbraith is one of the creators of neoliberalism.
2. First, Galbraith was an ardent pro-corporatist. I found private letters where Galbraith gave advice to steel companies on how to defeat the DOJ merger challenges. He took speaking fees from IBM/Dupont/independent bankers and believed bigness was good.
3. This wasn't because he thought the state/unions had tamed corporate power. Galbraith was an inevitabilist, writing “it is part of the vanity of modern man that he can decide the character of his economic system.” He even mocked the idea of a earlier 'so-called money trust.'
4. Galbraith's entire career coasted among economic elites. He worked with chain store magnates in the 1930s, for Henry Luce in the 1940s, and was a fixture on the corporate speaking circuit from the 1950s to the 1970s. He mocked class conflict.
5. Galbraith presented a key concept - countervailing power - as inevitable. "As a common rule, we can rely on countervailing power to appear as a curb on economic power," instead of noting the bloody struggles of union organizers or its *political* nature.
6. Here's a 1958 letter from the Director of Research for the AFL noting a friend at the big business group Committee for Economic Development saying, "Galbraith ain't so bad. After all, he is to the right of the AFL-CIO." 
7. Galbraith's politics were 100% elitist. In the 1950s, Galbraith was a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson, who opposed public funding for housing, union power, “socialized medicine,” Federalism regarding civil rights, agricultural stabilization policies, and deficit spending.
8. Stevenson was considered very smart, an 'egghead.' He was witty. When a supporter said to him, “Governor, every thinking person would be voting for you”. He retorted, “Madam, that is not enough. I need a majority.”
But really he was a snob. And that's what Galbraith liked.
But really he was a snob. And that's what Galbraith liked.
9. Galbraith showed courage as an early elite opponent of the Vietnam war and the Cold War. He deserves immense respect for that, but his political economy framework was straight up pro-monopoly. He didn't hide this. He came out as a pro-monopoly socialist in the 1970s.
10. So why is there such a big misunderstanding of who Galbraith was and what he thought? A number of reasons. First is embarrassment. Galbraith created much of the thinking behind modern politics. Many don't want to admit we just missed corporate power as a problem. But we did.
11. Galbraith's writing sounds weird today. He used words like 'technostructure' and the 'New Class' and wrote about how Wall Street was irrelevant and how the USSR and USA were the same. So people cherrypick what still makes sense, ignoring much of what he thought.
12. But also Galbraith is confusing! @davidsess's sourcing isn't wrong, but Galbraith was inconsistent and intellectually opportunistic. When countervailing power as a basic theory was reflected as nonsense, he could argue, well, it was a political deal. But that was a change.
13. And he wasn't really an opponent of neoliberalism, which is centered in the power of financial markets to restructure the corporate state. He didn't like Reagan, and he found Wall Street icons boorish. But there's a reason Democrats had no response to the Reagan framework.
14. And that is Galbraith. Lester Thurow, very much a Galbraithian, helped create the Democratic response to Reagan. That response included fighting Reagan on tax-and-transfer policies but agreeing with Reagan on antitrust, corporate trade agreements, and a lot of deregulation.
15. In 1988, Galbraith had a high profile discussion with corporate raider T. Boone Pickens on takeovers, but, as he noted, "to the possible discontent of the audience, we came out on the same side." He disagreed, but saw power the same way as Pickens. nybooks.com/articles/1988/…
16. The funny thing is I found Galbraith upset at a merger once, when his publisher was bought by a larger publisher. But he didn't draw larger lessons about what that meant.
17. Anyway, my critique of Galbraith is a big part of why Marxists despise my book Goliath. I answered the question of why Democrats had nothing to offer during the financial crisis by pointing to the guy who taught the Democrats banks didn't matter. That is Galbraith.
18. It is deeply uncomfortable to learn about the left's own complicity in the rise of big tech and corporate power all around us. But it's time to confront the reality of what happened, even if it challenges our assumptions about how moral we really are.
19. Anyway, if you want to read more about Galbraith and the creation of the modern Democrats, it's chapter nine in my book. I think it's some of the more original research in there. simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/…
