Politics & Power Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

The line lands like a dare to every careerist instinct in public life: sometimes the only honest win is a loss. Galbraith, an economist who spent his life watching the machinery of power rationalize itself, isn’t offering stoic consolation. He’s indicting a political culture that treats victory as its own moral argument, as if a majority vote could launder a bad idea into virtue.

“On the right side” does two jobs at once. It gestures toward ethics - civil rights, war, labor, poverty - but it also implies historical literacy: the “right side” is often only obvious in retrospect, after the polling, the speeches, the incentives. Galbraith’s subtext is that politics routinely rewards the wrong behaviors in the short term. If you insist on being correct when correctness is inconvenient to donors, party leadership, or public mood, you should expect to be punished. The punishment isn’t incidental; it’s the system functioning as designed.

The second half, “and lose,” is the masterstroke. It rejects the comforting myth that moral clarity naturally produces electoral success. Instead, it reframes losing as a form of testimony: a way of keeping an idea alive long enough for conditions to change. In Galbraith’s era - the Cold War consensus, Vietnam, the tug-of-war over the welfare state - “responsible” opinion often meant accommodation. His sentence makes room for principled dissent that isn’t performative, the kind that accepts temporary defeat because it’s building the ledger that history will later audit.