September 02, 2005

Lake George
by Jeff Langstraat

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The news media seem to have changed this week. Anderson Cooper's takedown of Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) last night, Soledad O'Bryan taking on FEMA director Michael Brown this morning and Ted Koppel doing the same last night, Jack Cafferty's justifiable attack on the government's response, and other things might indicate that the press corps might finally be shedding its sycophantic posture. We can hope so. What I doubt we'll see, though, is the placement of this incident in the broader context of modern Conservatism. That would be "playing politics." What cannot be avoided, though, is that the destruction of New Orleans is a political disaster.

What we are seeing along the Gulf Coast is the results of putting people who don't believe in governance in charge. This is what happens when people who want to starve the government are put in control of it.

We knew this was possible. The New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series about exactly this kind of scenario three years ago. FEMA itself listed this type of disaster as among the greatest threats facing the United States, and ran a drill for it last year. That New Orleans was vulnerable and that a national disaster could result from an event like this were both well known. Yet, when it came to to prevent this sort of thing from happening, the administration pushed it aside:

After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain."

In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending.

As Miles O'Brien just said on CNN, this was "the most highly anticipated disaster" we've probably ever faced...and the government was not prepared. That, too, was predicatable.

It's possible to argue that modern conservatism (of the Goldwater/Reagan type) was born in the 1960s. Along the way, it brought on board racist Dixiecrats and socially regressive theocrats. Nixon's Southern Strategy, Reagan's Welfare Queens and Bush I's Willie Horton conflated blackness with criminality, pathology, and willfull poverty in the American imagination. Crackers from Birmingham to Boston resisted efforts to provide opportunities for the poor and people of color (two overlapping categories that are often conflated) and fled the cities where "those people" live. Our government left those communities most in need to rot. There were eruptions from time to time, but those were successfully attributed to the pathological poor. Jonah Goldberg's noxious emanations are a low-rent expression of this attitude.

That attitude has been realized in policy. Conservatives have been resisting any form of welfare state since FDR implemented the New Deal. (Remember, Shrub's been trying to privatize Social Security since his 1978 Congressional campaign.) The "Law and Order" Republican campaigns combined with their attacks on welfare utilized a sophisticated coding--welfare is wasted on the undeserving poor who are better dealt with via criminalization. Somehow I doubt that's what David Brooks had in mind when he wrote: "take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come."

As central as the politics of race and class are to this drama, there are other parts of modern Conservatism that we must consider. Another is their hostility to any form of redistributive governance...hell, to any kind of responsible governance. Infrastructure is only necessary so far as it fosters capital accumulation. Anything else is superfluous. Government itself is a problem.

This is one reason for the constant push for tax cuts, the government needs to shrink, services need to be cut. The state must be starved to the point where Grover Norquist can "drown it in a bathtub." These dystopic fantasies are being realized in New Orleans.

Beyond exposing the catostrophic potential of conservative policy, this event demonstrates the lack of seriousness in the Right's approach to actual governance. As if the inept planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq weren't a serious enough example, we also have the administration's opposition to Gulf Coast protection funding and the diversion of funding from FEMA. Of course, increasing funding to make sure FEMA was properly staffed and ready to respond was out of the question--there are still taxes to cut and government programs to be "reformed".

Protecting the people of the United States is expensive. It cannot be done on the cheap, and it must involve spending on vital infrastructure. Continuing to cut taxes and programs is a recipe for disaster. Such a approach makes us less safe. Such an approach places more people at unnecessary risk. Such an approach is idiocy. But, it's what the Conservative movement is selling.

The other day, Atrios had this to say:

Damn I wish we had any competent people in power. Seriously, is there a single member of the Bush cabinet who is even marginally competent? I don't mean that as code for agree with me ideologically. I really mean, are they competent? Are any of these people capable of running a lemonade stand?

We've received our answer this week. It was an entirely predictable one. There are things this administration is amazingly competent at, the creation of a public image being one of them. However, holes start to appear in that public image whenever the administration is put to an actual test. When there is no spectacle to be planned, when there are no loyalty tests to be administered, when it comes to the actual art of governance, modern Conservatives are incompetent. But, that incompetence is part of their ideology. Government is the problem, so why bother understanding how it works.

Conservatives love to toss out the phrase "social engineering" to criticise liberal attempts to alter social conditions. It's a meaningless phrase. When people take action to improve science education to make Americans "more competative in the twenty-first century," they're engaging in social engineering. Pretty much any state policy is social engineering. Lake George is the result of Conservative social engineering.

[Update: Michael Berube has some similar thoughts.]

Images from the New Orleans Times-Picayune

Posted by in Catastrophes, Class, Conservatism, George W. Bush, Hurricane Katrina, Politics, Poverty, Race, Republicans
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