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?<\/p>\n\n
(serendipitously, I find on Brad deLong an illustration<\/a> of my point about citizenship more shocking than anything I’d dare make up.)<\/p>\n\n more below the fold.<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n 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?<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n 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, <\/span>which is why we must blame the system for Bush, as well as indulging our natural disgust at his character flaws.<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading
\nThere’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.<\/p>\n\n