Daniel Burnstein: Katrina Blues Compounded by Continuing Incompetence
As a native New Orleanian, I have been appalled at the Bush administration’s treatment of that city since Hurricane Katrina struck last year. Its low-priority approach to the human suffering there was demonstrated in a recent article in the New York Times (“Slow Home Grants Stall Progress in New Orleans,” November 11, 2006) that detailed the literally impossible paperwork maze that many residents face in applying for aid.
While the administration justifies this in the name of preventing waste and fraud, its approach in actuality demonstrates its instinct to make policy decisions that are at the expense of those in need. The administration is infamous for hypocritically overlooking the dangers of waste and fraud when its friends benefit, but it takes a righteous tone about these dangers when it comes to aiding the dispossessed and vulnerable. More fundamentally, the administration’s approach is undergirded by the general worldview of right-wing conservatism, which sees evil tendencies as predominant in human nature and admonishes us to combat these tendencies at all turns. Thus, officials are so concerned to preclude fraud (particularly, it seems, when the disadvantaged are the aid recipients) that this abstract concern trumps any compassion they may have for the well-being of actual disaster victims. Relatedly, the right-wing conservative worldview provides a rationale for many citizens who do not care enough about the disadvantaged in the first place to use reason to understand social problems, who instead content themselves with simplistic notions about the evils of government “handouts.” Likewise, this rigid concept of human nature reinforces the cynical notion that we, as a people, are incapable of fashioning government programs that are effective in alleviating social problems—a view that allowed Bush officials, with a clear conscience, to appoint administrators seeking to curtail the mission of government agencies such as FEMA that had previously done good work for human welfare.
Conservatives in the moderate Burkean tradition such as Theodore Roosevelt would have found this view of human nature to be extremist. Indeed, I think TR would have identified such a viewpoint as, at least in part, a convenient rationale or cover for those with wealth whose greed more essentially underlies their resentment about paying taxes to help the needy.
Moderate conservatives and liberals generally agree that human nature has both negative and positive tendencies, and that reasonable checks should be built into government programs to prevent abuse. But current Republican leaders take this notion to the extreme in cases involving the well-being of the dispossessed and disadvantaged. Myself, I prefer the outlook expressed by Franklin Roosevelt who asserted that “Governments can err. . . .but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”