The Role Call

This morning, the first thing I saw on the train into D.C. was a headline I read over a fellow commuter’s shoulder. It read “Katrina Ushers in Return of Big Government,” apparently a response to Bush’s speech and the amount of money now being allocated to relief and reconstruction efforts.

The era of big government is back. President Bush is presiding over what is sure to be the most expensive government relief and reconstruction operation in U.S. history.

With estimates of the federal tab ranging up to $200 billion for rebuilding New Orleans and other storm-ravaged Gulf Coast cities, Bush and his Republican allies in Congress are casting aside budget discipline.

They’re also deferring _ for now _ vows to finish the Reagan revolution against big government and turning to some of the same kinds of public health, housing and job assistance programs they once criticized as legacies of the Democrats’ New Deal and Great Society.

I think this may be the wrong take, though some have paraphrased Bush’s speech as “From now on, I’m a Democrat.” In the Bush era, at least, the argument between liberals and conservatives hasn’t been about the size of the government so much as the role of the government. If it’s in cause of preventing or defending against terrorism or giving federal dollars to churches (and whever possible into the hands of conservatives), for example, the government may grow as large as it likes. What we saw in the response failure after hurricane Katrina was simply the logical extreme of the conservative idea that the government ought to not only interfere as little as possible in the citizen’s lives, but that it also ought to do at little as possible to help citizens in trouble.

It’s the basic principle of everyone for himself or herself, or every family for itself. If the poor people and families abandoned to the storm’s ravages in New Orleans were indeed told “you’re on your own,” it was merely a verbalization of what Bush conservatives (and Reagan conservatives before them) have been saying all along. It is not the proper role of government to help anyone, and at best it should help as few people as it can get away with.

I don’t mean to keep going back to Lakoff here, but it’s unavoidable that the “wealth-is-well-being-is-virtue” principle comes into play here. The “good” people can provide for themselves. Those who can’t are obviously not “good” people, and it’s not the proper role of the government to alleviate the consequences of their bad moral choices. (Because poverty can only be the result of bad moral choices or poor values. (Get it? Poor people have poor values.)

Unfortunately for conservatives, at the moment, Katrina has turned that view on its head, because the sight of bodies floating face down in floodwaters and people stranded on roofs waving signs that read “help us,” and the stories of people drowning in their homes or having to live in the squalor of the Superdome, rubbed too many Americans the wrong way.

On another blog I posted about the death of the president’s Social Security “reform” (read privatization) idea. It looks right now that leaders in the GOP are abandoning the idea, because they couldn’t get critical mass in terms of public support, and because the couldn’t afford to be seen as even remotely threatening a program that so many poor, elderly and disabled Americans depend upon.

The downside for conservatives in this is that “privatizing” Social Security plays right along with their “wealth-is-well-being-is-virtue” script, and the couldn’t get Americans to buy it. From the conservative viewpoint, Social Security is a very bad thing because it puts the government in the place of taking care of people whose values were apparently such that they didn’t make sure they could provide for themselves in their old age or in the event of their incapacitation, etc. Again, it reinforces the wrong values, because the better thing to do would be to leave them. And if they don’t have families who can take care of them, then they’ll have to take charity…if there’s any available. If not, it’s their own problem.

Thus far, it hasn’t flown. Not enough Americans are comfortable with or inured to the kinds of images we saw in New Orleans, and those are exactly the images that result when the social net that keeps some people from hitting absolute bottom is cut away. Cutting that net away is exactly what the conservative program does. And if you’ve let them convince you that private charity will fill the void to the same depth and degree as the government, you’re kidding yourself. Name one private charity that has the same degree of resources (that is, if it doesn’t also get government funds).

What we saw in New Orleans was a glimpse into the world conservatives envision and want; one in which the role of the government is to secure the safety of property and person (or, perhaps, persons with property), and not much else. Bad storm coming? The most the government will do is tell you it’s coming and advise you to get out. Can’t get out? Tough nookie.

Conservatives will tell you that’s not what they want. They’ll tell you that they want private industry and private charity to step in and do the job that government didn’t in the case of New Orleans. It’s worth noting that some folks wonder if the Gulf coast recovery is going to turn out to be a test run of the conservative ideas mentioned above. However, the thrust of Bush’s speech emphasizes the amount of federal dollars that will go into rebuilding and recovery, which only underscores that private entities don’t necessarily have the resources to even begin an effort of this magnitude, let alone sustain it.

I said all that to say this. It’s a role call. It’s not about the size of the government as it is the role and function of the government. It’s a question of whether part of the role of government is to protect the weak or those who cannot protect themselves, or whether it exists simply to protect the property and persons of the — in this case, economically — strong. It’s a question that we’re all going to have to answer at the ballot box. Do we want a country in which scenes like those we saw in New Orleans become more common? Do we want to become used to them and maybe even indifferent to them too?

It’s going to be up to us.