What Keynes understood is that governments bear primary responsibility for recessions. In really severe downturns, such as we suffered in the 1930s and are suffering today, government action is essential to turn the economy around; the private sector simply can't do it on its own. He also understood that democratic societies cannot long tolerate high levels of unemployment. At some point, people will jettison capitalism for some sort of socialism, which would threaten democracy as well.
Keynes' efforts were motivated by a strong desire to maintain the liberal capitalist order. Honest conservatives have always understood this. In 1945, economist David McCord Wright noted that a conservative political candidate could easily run a campaign "largely on quotations from The General Theory." The following year, economist Gottfried Haberler, of the conservative Austrian school, conceded that the specific policy recommendations of Keynesian economics were not at all revolutionary. "They are in fact very conservative," he admitted.
Peter Drucker, a conservative admirer of Keynes, viewed him as not merely conservative, but ultraconservative. "He had two basic motivations," Drucker explained in a 1991 interview with Forbes. "One was to destroy the labor unions and the other was to maintain the free market. Keynes despised the American Keynesians. His whole idea was to have an impotent government that would do nothing but, through tax and spending policies, maintain the equilibrium of the free market. Keynes was the real father of neoconservatism, far more than [economist F.A.] Hayek!"
John Kenneth Galbraith, whose politics were well to the left of Keynes, not to mention Drucker, agreed with this assessment. "The broad thrust of his efforts, like that of Roosevelt, was conservative; it was to endure that the system would survive," he wrote. But, Galbraith added, "Such conservatism in the English-speaking countries does not appeal to the truly committed conservative."
Bruce Bartlett argues that the conservative position that governments "do nothing in the face of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression" would endanger the very thing free market ideologues are trying to preserve, the capitalist system itself. This was something that Keynes understood very well.
Though this argues that Keynes was a conservative, I don't think it much matters what label we attach to Keynes, it is the idea that government intervention preserves rather than destroys the capitalist system that is important. If we had no government intervention at all, no automatic stabilizers such as unemployment compensation and food stamps, no Social Security for the elderly to fall back upon when equity and stock values plummet, no stimulus package, and no financial bailout package, conditions would be much, much worse and the calls to overthrow the basic capitalist system would be amplified far beyond what we hear even with these programs in place.
Keynes is right that these programs help to make the cyclical swings in capitalist systems less devastating and hence help to preserve the system that we have. But that's not the only reason to provide social insurance. The capitalist system is unmatched in its ability to provide goods and services, and to respond to changing demand, but it is also highly cyclic and the swings in the economy can cause great misery for people who have done nothing to deserve the misfortune the system has bestowed upon them. The people who have lost their jobs and their ability to provide for their families deserve our collective help not just because that's the only way to preserve the capitalist system, but also because it's the right and moral thing to do
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