“Ideology And Real Life”
The
aftermath of Katrina continues, as it should with all of the images
we've been exposed to over the past week. Kevin Drum wrote an excellent post about the rather fundamental disconnect we suffer when looking at situations like this.
IDEOLOGY AND REAL LIFE….One
of the things that Hurricane Katrina has done is shine a very bright
light on the different worldviews of liberals and conservatives.
Conservatives
fundamentally believe in a limited role for the federal government.
They believe in downsizing, privatizing, and placing greater reliance
on state and local government to provide essential services. It's easy
— too easy — to blame George Bush in hindsight for specific things like
cutting the Corps of Engineers budget for the New Orleans district, but
the reason this criticism is legitimate is because this wasn't merely a
specific incident. As even some conservatives tacitly admit, it was a
direct result of George Bush's governing ideology.
FEMA
was downsized and partially privatized because modern Republican
leaders think that's the right thing to do with federal agencies.
Budgets were limited for levee construction and first responder
training because Republicans have other priorities. The federal
government was slow to respond to Katrina because conservatives believe
states should take the lead in looking out for their own needs. George
Bush talks endlessly to the cameras about the private sector helping to
rebuild the Gulf Coast because that's the kind thing conservatives
believe in.
Liberals,
by contrast, believe in a robust role for the federal government. We
believe in sharing risk nationwide for local disasters. We believe that
only the federal government is big enough to coordinate relief on the
scale needed by an event like Katrina, and that strong, well managed
agencies like FEMA should take the lead role in making this happen.
Both
of these governing philosophies are defensible, but too often they seem
like nothing more than opposing sides in an intellectual game. Katrina
demonstrates otherwise. It's what happens when a drowning city runs
smack into a conservative movement that believes in drowning the
federal government in a bathtub.
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