(Cross-posted from mediagirl.org)
Some 25 years ago, the Democratic Party did something precipitous: they abandoned progressive values in a political gambit to ride the coattails of the conservatism that was sweeping the country. Like Judas, they cried, “I’m not liberal. I don’t even know any liberals!” The gambit paid off in the form of two terms for Clinton, and massive losses in Congress.
Yet they’ve stuck to their guns, under the guidance of the DLC. They generally backed many of the conservative attacks on our government infrastructure. They are culpable.
And now, in the disastrous man-made disaster following Katrina, We The People are paying the price.
The loudest howls have been in the indifferent, contemptuous, ineffective and arrogant responses from President Bush and his minions. It’s bloody obvious that FEMA, now a part of the Department of Homeland Security, has been rendered all but totally ineffective — and even obstructionist.
Imagine if this had been a terror attack. Clearly there is no preparation to protect the people. Clearly the federal government has squandered the past four years since 9/11.
But let’s face it: There’s plenty of blame to go around. We have local officials to slacked or fell down on the job. We have state officials who seemed to think protecting property from looters was more important than getting drinking water to desperate survivors. We have police doing their best to impersonate blackshirts.
What went wrong? One can point to a number of things, from beaurocratic incompetence to, as conservative Robert Tracinski claims, welfare shirkers and criminals who chose to die rather than do anything that doesn’t involve government handouts.
But what caused this obscenity that is still unfolding is a political culture built upon this pernicious notion that the government can’t do anything, that the government is the enemy, that government should be gutted, disabled and dismantled.
Obviously, some strong and effective government could have come in pretty handy this past week. In fact, a strong and effective government could have prevented this horror from ever happening.
We’re paying the price. Our leaders failed us. And we failed ourselves by not demanding better of them. Not only is New Orleans under 25 feet of water. Conservative ideology is all wet as well. Protecting the people isn’t up to the private sector. And it involves a lot more than sending in boys with machine guns.
This is OUR country, and it’s suffering. And this is OUR government, and it’s broken.
So what are we going to do about it?
