I had written an entirely different wormseye, about choosing Muslim leaders. this this bubbled up, and I’m not sure whether to use it instead. Do any of you have opinions?
(serendipitously, I find on Brad deLong an illustration of my point about citizenship more shocking than anything I’d dare make up.)
more below the fold.
There’s no question but that Katrina has exposed monumental incompetence in the America government at all levels. The backlash against George W Bush seems to be spreading right across America, even among the people who normally believe all his nonsense. The mask has slipped a little. While there are still corpses floating through the streets of New Orleans he make jokes about how one of his buddies’ houses will be rebuilt, better than ever. He deserves a shameful end.
There are particular, identifiable decisions that he made which made the catastrophe worse. He appointed incompetent cronies to important jobs. He starved the agencies that might have maintained the dams of money. He did nothing to prepare for the disaster, which was long-foreseen as a possibility, and clearly likely in the four or five days before the hurricane actually landed.
But we need to be balanced here, and to apply to Bush the same standards as we apply to the looters in the ruins of New Orleans. Like them, he has a personal responsibility for his actions; but we must also suppose that, like them, he might have been a harmless, even a useful member of society if it were better organised.
Obviously he is not responsible for the hurricane. Maybe even the catastrophe wasn’t his fault. The really frightening possibility is that Bush isn’t responsible for the failure of the relief efforts, and that no modern president could have done much better.
In this context, it’s useful to think about moral hazard. This is usually applied to reasoning about the poor: for example, if generous social security means no penalty for idleness, and no reward for hard work, then we can expect more idleness and unemployment than otherwise. But there is moral hazard to riches too. George Bush has never in his entire life been punished for failure, and neither has anyone he has appointed. Disloyalty or insubordination are the only crimes he recognises. Should we blame him or the system?
Quite probably, the federal emergency management agency would have done a better job had Gore, or Kerry been president. It’s hard to see that it could have done worse. But the point about such speculation is that it’s irrelevant. Given the choice of better men, the system threw up Bush, twice. The second time he even won the election.
It will seem to historians quite absurd that such an untried child of privilege should have even run for president, let alone succeeded. Say what you like about British democracy, but we would not even elect Mark Thatcher to a seat in parliament, and his business career is at least as distinguished as Bush’s.
But democracies can survive bad leaders. That is their best justification: they don’t guarantee immediate success, but they do provide a more efficient, and less bloody means of punishing failure than any alternative. The test will be to see whether America will realise that the aftermath of the hurricane was a failure that mattered, and that demands democratic action. My guess is that it will fail.
When seven — not seven thousand — black illegal immigrants were killed in a house fire in Paris last month, the notoriously right-wing Minister of the Interior was down at the scene the next morning, taking his chances with an angry crowd, promising that measures would be taken. Why did Sarkozy do this? Because he wants to be President, and he knows that he will be helped to this, in France, by showing that the state cares when catastrophe strikes even the poorest and meanest citizen. That’s just not true in the USA, which is why we must blame the system for Bush, as well as indulging our natural disgust at his character flaws.
Everything I have read suggests that his core vote won’t be affected at all by the scenes in New Orleans. On the contrary, this frightful failure of government will be taken by the Right to prove that government can’t do anything except wage war.
A fearful hatred of the black poor is far too deeply embedded in American politics for anything to change. A country that really believed the poor had human rights, or even the rights of ordinary citizens, would not have allowed its president to react to Katrina as Bush did. But neither would it tolerate the American prison system, or the American health insurance system. All these things are not merely tolerated, but made worse. Time after time, it has been proved that the way to win elections in America is to promise to grind the faces of the poor still harder. No politician can fight this fact. Look at the things that Clinton did to be elected, the retarded black man he had executed to show that he was tough. Here, too, the phrase we need is moral hazard.
Yet the trouble with believing that your government is a worthless excrescence is that sooner or later, you will find that it is true and then it won’t be sooner or later but too late.
Well said, and it needs to be said, and I think it is fair. Would you like my nihil obstat and imprimi potest?
My cynical side agrees with you, but I’m not so sure over all. My father is a pretty die hard Republican, and on Thursday night he wasn’t upset with the government. (Maybe because he had been working at a shelter all day and didn’t get a chance to see the news.) By Friday evening, he was incensed. There’s a huge disconnect in this country between what regular people are doing to relieve the suffering and what the government has done. I hope some of that disconnect turns into changed votes as regular people realize that the leaders they elect don’t even recognize their values, much less share them.
Aren’t you in effect saying we have the leader we deserve? But America is too big and strange a nation to say that. Gerrymandered to hell, our legislature is just a corruption rather than a reflection of what the people have voted on themselves. Now our last branch will be hopelessly corrupt as well, perhaps for longer than any other.
These are people that have worked out how to game the system. And yes, they’ll go unpunished, largely because they gamed it using national mythos. But I think what they may prove more than anything is that democracy doesn’t scale over a huge and culturally diverse population.
Rafe: I know — I read the long post from your mother, and was really impressed. But whether the disgust of decent people will translate into the sort of coherent political programme that would be needed to reverse the whole trend of politics since about Reagan is another question.
Quinn: I don’t think you deserve the leaders you’ve got. I think the system is rigged to produce them. You live in California. Who is your governor, again? No. I don’t htink you deserve him. But he certainly go himself elected.
The spin is already on: the administration is blaming the (democratic) governor of Lousiana for the debacle. And once the rescue efforts get underway the media will run non-stop feel-good stories about remarkable rescues and heartwarming reunions and most Americans–at least most white Americans–will forget all about the botched planning, the unnecessary deaths, the pictures of fellow Americans slogging through sewage.
We just love disaster and misery because it gives us the chance to give charity, do volunteer work and enjoy the uplift.
Bush will more or less get away with it–it will be a little hit rather than a big hit. But a little hit is pretty bad for him at this point. One thing I’m sure of though is that Bush’s attempts to win over more blacks are done for.
The “most powerful propaganda”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006710.html#006710 I have seen came through the Nielsen Hayden empire. But I can’t see that resonating with Bush voters.
I think it is a very interesting article and I found the comments and links also left here useful. You’ve got a “this this” in the first para, but I’m sure that wouldn’t make it to the final version.
This is an horrendous event, and Bush and his government should be disgraced. If the linked article containing comments that Halliburton has already been given the contract for the cleanup operation is true, then that is really grossly insulting to those who have been affected, and a further stain on a way of government that the rest of the world should shun rather than look up to.
Much as I don’t like to disagree with Harriet, I wonder if Bush really will get away with this.
Talking to my mate dave from that famous Democratic stronghold Southern Illinois (!) today,he offered the following reasons why Bush should sink:
1. He was near the end of a five-week vacation when disaster struck and hung around home for an extra day or two before checking out the scene or
making a statement about the tragedy.
2. He flew to Colorado for a fund-raiser rather than to New Orleans to show any form of leadership or solidarity with the folks there.
3. In fact, the storm was neither unprecedented nor unexpected. In the past year or two, the Corps of Civil Engineers and the city requested major funding (10 million dollars) to upgrade the levee system in fear of just such a storm. The money was taken out of the federal budget because funds were needed in the bottomless money pit called Iraq.
4. On top of that the storm was obviously seen
coming as there was time for 800,000 people to be evacuated. So why wasn’t their time to prepare a few planes or buses to provide what was already
expected would be needed?
5. Louisiana was unable to summon its usual reserve of National Guardsmen to help with the disaster because a rather large number of them had already been called up to serve in the costly and
more than questionable war in Iraq.
6. Upon first visiting New Orleans,Bush made light of the city, referencing his young party boy frat boy days there. He also commented on how tough Trent Lott had it. The Mississippi Senator lost a house in the storm but you can bet he’ll build a great new house. In other words, an inherently unserious person was being unserious at the most serious possible time.
7. FEMA, the federal organization whose primary existence is specifically to respond to such disasters didn’t respond very well and since the Buck is supposed to stop at the Oval Office, the man in charge gets the blame.
8. Among the various roles of the President, and often the most important role for Republican presidents, who are generally less policy-wonky and often of the symbolic Leader variety, is that of a kind of national figurehead, the granddad who
feels your pain and speaks to the heart. Bush didn’t. He didn’t seem to show any genuine remorse or care for the people of New Orleans and the situation on the ground simply because he didn’t feel any and it was obvious that he didn’t.
9. It’s simply time that this detached, isolated
platitude-spouting pseudo-cowboy, fake-warrior patrician shit got a little flak for any of the 200 crappy things he’s done in the past five years.
He’s been given a free ride on everything from his personal past to his present war and maybe some media folks, perhaps feeling guilty for offering the said free ride, have finally decided it’s payback time.