October 27, 2025

Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by which they have once won office.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006), Canadian-American economist, The New Industrial State (1967) in The Cynic’s Lexicon, Jonathon Green, ed. (London: 1986), p.83

If Galbraith is saying addiction is a bad thing, that may account for the disappearance of the Whigs (in both the U.K. and the U.S.), but how do you explain the long life of the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Liberals in Canada, the Conservatives in Britain? Have they survived because they ditched the ideas that once won them office? Or because they kept them?

Winning formulas win for only a time: “Government is the problem, not the solution,” for instance. That worked until an international disaster (the COVID pandemic) demanded action from the only institutions around the world that could respond with sufficient power to deal with the threat.