Katrina: it's not about "failures," it's about policy

The one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is fast approaching. Through our Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch project, the Institute has been talking with people across the country about the need to use this window opportunity to talk about the people whose lives are still in limbo, and the larger issues that Katrina raised.

George Lakoff of the Rockridge Institute has an interesting piece shooting around the blogosphere, called "Bush is Not Incompetent." While some may find that header hard to believe, his point is a good one: the problems our country has faced in recent years isn't because of the supposed "failures" of our president, but rather "are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy."

The Bush White House isn't failing -- it's succeeding all too well in its goal of putting corporate interests in charge, increasing the imbalance between the haves and have nots, and so on. Progressives shouldn't be calling these mistakes, but the systemic problems of right-wing politics, as practicted on both sides of the political aisle.

This has been the missing element of the Katrina debate over the last 10 months. By shouting and cajoling, we've managed to keep Katrina on the national radar, however faint the signal. Anderson Cooper, Kyra Phillips and other TV figures make their regular trips to the Gulf to chronicle the damage and slowness of recovery.

But what we haven't managed to inject into the debate -- despite all the hopes of a "national discussion about race and poverty" -- is the underlying political and moral values that led to Katrina and its aftermath. Lakoff gives some example of how the devastation can be linked to not to just a few bungling individuals, but an entire philosophy that puts a "me first" ethos above the common good:

Given this philosophy, then, is it any wonder that the government wasn't there for the residents of Louisiana and Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Conservative philosophy places emphasis on the individual acting alone, independent of anything the government could provide. Some conservative Sunday morning talk show guests suggested that those who chose to live in New Orleans accepted the risk of a devastating hurricane, the implication being that they thus forfeited any entitlement to government assistance. If the people of New Orleans suffered, it was because of their own actions, their own choices and their own lack of preparedness. Bush couldn't have failed if he bore no responsibility.

The response to Hurricane Katrina -- rather, the lack of response -- was what one should expect from a philosophy that espouses that the government can have no positive role in its citizen's lives. This response was not about Bush's incompetence, it was a conservative, shrink-government response to a natural disaster.

Another failure of this administration during the Katrina fiasco was its wholesale disregard of the numerous and serious hurricane warnings. But this failure was a natural outgrowth of the conservative insistence on denying the validity of global warming, not ineptitude. Conservatives continue to deny the validity of global warming, because it runs contrary to their moral system. Recognizing global warming would call for environmental regulation and governmental efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Regulation is a perceived interference with the free-market, Conservatives' golden calf. So, the predictions of imminent hurricanes -- based on recognizing global warming -- were not heeded. Conservative free market convictions trumped the hurricane warnings.

And there are many more examples where this came from.

How do we inject these issues into the Katrina debate? Progressives need to think about this, because the one-year anniversary may be our last opportunity to put these issues on the national agenda.