The Culture of Contentment.

John Kenneth Galbraith Houghton Mifflin, $22.95, 183 pp.

To call America a "culture of contentment," in the nerve-wracked nineties, seems uncommonly perverse. By all accounts, Americans have never felt less confident about the future. Their uneasiness goes well beyond the faltering economy. 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. How can Galbraith expect anyone to take his diagnosis seriously?

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. 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. It afflicts a majority, at least a majority of those who vote. Even the poor suffer, it seems, from "relative tranquility." They compare themselves "not with those who are more fortunate but with their own past position." The recognition that they are better off than they were in the deep South or the third world has a "tranquilizing effect." From top to bottom, then, American society is riddled with contentment.

Needless to say, this analysis does not rest on observation, even on a casual survey of public opinion polls. It is a deduction from the failure of liberal economic policy to command widespread support. For Galbraith, the value of that policy is self-evident. 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. government] action--by better schools with better-paid teachers, by strong, well-financed welfare services, by counseling on drug addiction, by employment training, by public investment in ... housing" etc., etc. 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 "contentmen" becomes the only explanation of inaction.

Is it necessary to point out a more obvious explanation--that Galbraith's remedies have already been tried and found wanting? Teachers' pay has risen steadily without any improvement in teaching. Public housing has been notoriously a disaster. The welfare system is another; and we have long since passed the point where criticism of welfare can be dismissed as a way of "blaming the victim." Such pieties belong to a vanished age of political simplicity. If people reject them, it is not because they are "contented" but because they are wiser than they used to be.

There is a kernel of truth in Galbraith's description of American society. To an alarming extent, the privileged few--by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent--have made themselves independent of public services. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence around them. In effect, these people have seceded from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America's destiny for better or worse. 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.

These would-be cosmopolites are not exactly contented--they might better be described as sophisticated, self-absorbed, self-satisfied, and self-righteous. Nor are they resistant to change, strictly speaking. They are themselves riding a tremendous wave of change, revolutionary in its implications. But they have little interest in improving the quality of our public life; to that extent, Galbraith is right about the source of our political stagnation.

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. Most Americans still depend on public services and still care, if for no other reason, about the future of their country. Their hunger for change, moreover, is the one fact that clearly emerges from a presidential campaign that is otherwise confusing and unpredictable. 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.

Not only in the United States but in Western Europe the limits of the welfare state have become painfully evident. It is increasingly clear that we need to reinvigorate forms of public life that are independent of the market and the state alike. The public realm can no longer serve as a synonym for the state. 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.

"The prospect is not bright," he says in his concluding chapter, titled "Requiem." I would be the last to argue that the prospect is rosy. But the death of the welfare state, the death of social democracy, is not the death of democracy itself Who knows? It may turn out to be the beginning of a democratic revival.