Kash of Angry Bear has an excellent post in which he characterizes the differences between liberals and conservatives and, actually, most of it I agree with. Here are the basics of his case:
- Some things (actually quite a few things) are just the results of bad luck.
- A decent nation aids people who’ve had bad luck.
- Taking care of society’s hard luck cases is a public good.
I don’t consider myself either a liberal or a conservative. I’m pretty clearly not a conservative (at least not as they seem to be now) because I definitely believe that government has a role in just such activities as Kash is talking about. Where I think I differ from Kash is that when I say “government” I think I mean something different than he does:
Liberals believe in a strong and well-run national government that has the resources and organization to provide effective help to the victims of disasters such as Katrina. Conservatives have planned and executed the down-sizing of such federal government responsibilities.
I’m not convinced that the federal government is the best choice for the first line of defense in helping victims of disasters such as Katrina. And that pretty clearly means I’m not a liberal, either (at least as they seem to be now).
You see I believe in the principle of subsidiarity, the idea that government should operate as closely to the people as can reasonably be achieved. There’s a role for local governments, state governments, and the federal government.
Kash pretty clearly blames conservatives for the Katrina disaster:
I could go on with this list, but I’m sure that you can fill in additional items yourself. My point is that nearly all policy divides between liberals and conservatives contain a strong element of the philosophical divide that I described above: that liberals tend to believe that people often suffer due to forces outside of their control, and that when that happens the government should help out; while conservatives think that the government should play a minimal role in helping those who have fallen on hard times.
Katrina provides a horrible but effective illustration of this difference in action.
I think that’s being overwrought. The disaster in New Orleans had many causes. The most important were:
- The hurricane
- The river
- The geography and geology of New Orleans
- The failure of the levee
Neither liberals nor conservatives are in any way responsible for any of the first three. Hurricanes, rivers, and geography have no politics, political parties, or political philosophies. I lived for many years on the banks of the Mississippi. It just keeps rolling along.
The failure of the levee is an interesting case, however, but I think it proves the opposite of what Kash believes. The Army Corps of Engineers has had primary reponsibility by statute for flood control on the Mississippi since the 1930’s IIRC. Congress funds the Corps, directs its operations, and provides oversight. The Chief Executive and the military administers the Corps and provides day-to-day direction. Neither the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the Reagan administration, nor the Carter administration (and so on) nor any of the Congresses—some dominated by Democrats some by Republicans—saw fit to correct the problems with the defense of New Orleans against the water.
Delegating power and responsibilities to the federal government impedes, emasculates, and infantilizes local governments and individuals. I think that if the federal government had gotten the hell out of the way there’s a pretty good chance that New Orleans would have solved its own problems long ago. They had a stake in the outcome that can’t be matched by any federal bureaucrat or any federal agency.
That’s just human nature which is another force of nature as powerful and ineluctable as hurricanes and geography and which, like rivers, just keeps rolling along.
Dave, I agree in principle with your point about federal government. Yet if we want the feds to stay out of the way, this means strong civil defense, which puts great responsibility on individuals and individual communities. Given our highly mobile work force and two wage-earner households, I am not sure modern America is capable of a strong civil defense effort.
Ye pays yer money and ye takes yer choice. If we want a federal government that’s strong enough to handle crises without a by-your-leave, there will be no local government.
This is a federal system. The meaning of that is often lost on people such as Kash, but it means a lot to people who wanted to be free from oppressive central government, and live closer to their representatives in local government. Dumbkopfs often look for enemies to blame in difficult situations, when they should be doing something to help. Typical.
Dave nailed it, I think.
And just making the Federal Government bigger doesn’t make it better. Too many people think that “Because it’s Federal, it’s somehow bigger/better/faster/wiser.”
Which ain’t true. It generally just means it has more money.
But Dave, you *can* be a conservative and think the Federal gov’t has a role in those roles you speak of. You just can’t be a right-wing wacko…
Oh, yes, John. Indeed I used to consider myself a conservative until the inmates took charge of the asylum.
Or, more accurately, I’ve always considered myself a Whig: a liberal conservative.
Whatever political stances I have are inevitably informed by thirty-odd years of working for a living and the perfectly-obvious observation that the best decisions are made as low on the org chart as is possible: the farther away you are from the action, the less validity your suggestions are likely to have. This translates easily into a preference for city or county action over state, and state over federal.
Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, was on “Meet the Press” this morning. Listen to this, from the transcript:
MR. BROUSSARD: I want to thank Governor Blanco for all she’s done and all her leadership. She sent in the National Guard. I just repaired a breach on my side of the 17th Street canal that the secretary didn’t foresee, a 300-foot breach. I just completed it yesterday with convoys of National Guard and local parish workers and levee board people. It took us two and a half days working 24/7. I just closed it.
MR. RUSSERT: All right.
MR. BROUSSARD: I’m telling you most importantly I want to thank my public employees…
MR. RUSSERT: All right.
MR. BROUSSARD: …that have worked 24/7. They’re burned out.
You hear that? They closed a breach in the levee, right there. That seems to me to prove your point about government working better the smaller and closer it is to home.
Thanks, amba. Yes, that’s a great illustration. IMO this is just commonsensical and human nature. I’m more interested in patching the hole in the street that runs in front of my house than City Hall is.
Repairing a levee, and spending millions to upgrade it, are different matters entirely. In a post-industrial-revolution society, central governments have important advantages in terms of their ability to collectively mobilize manpower, resources, and wealth.
“In a post-industrial-revolution society, central governments have important advantages in terms of their ability to collectively mobilize manpower, resources, and wealth.”
Like the late, great Soviet Union? You miss them don’t you?
It’s simply a false dichotomy to say this is about more vs. less governmenet, when the real argument is where the center of power lies. Obviously almost everyone (with the exception of a few fringe cases) recognizes that disaster prevention and recovery are a prime government function. Thus the question is whether we think disaster prevention and coordination is primarily a local, state, or federal responsibility.
The people we call “liberals” generally show that they have huge faith in centralized power and centralized authority. They appear to feel that local and state governments are just sort of little provincial administrators who don’t do much that’s very important. For anything really significant, it’s the central state planners who are and should be in charge.
We could argue from the example of New Orleans that maybe they have a point on this one: if the Feds had ignored posse comitatus and simply trampled the local governments, pulling in and taking immediate charge of everything, perhaps the disaster would have been less than it was. The property damage would have been the same, but perhaps there would have been less suffering and death.
Perhaps. Then again, would they have made a bunch of dumb decisions themselves? We can’t know, can we?
“Like the late, great Soviet Union? You miss them [sic] don’t you?”
Good one!
Actually, I’m still pining for Jacobian France. Murder, political terror, executions, propaganda… and all without the benefit of modern conveniences such as radio, well-developed bureaucracies, and vast armies. Now that was a system of government.
But I suppose you’ve devastated my point. I’m sure that if Louisiana and the Soviet Union had gone to war with one another, Moscow would be governed by the Napoleonic Code, Bourbon – instead of Vodak – would run in the streets of Leningrad, and the Khabarovsk Saints would be four-time NFL champions. If only the US hadn’t had a strong Federal Government to merely deter and contain the Soviet Union for fifty years.
“The people we call “liberals†generally show that they have huge faith in centralized power and centralized authority. They appear to feel that local and state governments are just sort of little provincial administrators who don’t do much that’s very important. For anything really significant, it’s the central state planners who are and should be in charge.”
That’s an interesting claim, but I don’t think it is entirely correct. Contemporary liberals don’t have “huge faith” in centralized power and centralized authority. Rather, they recognize the economy of scale advantages enjoyed by the Federal Government when it comes to resource extraction and collective mobilization. At the same time, liberals are very much in favor of forms of local autonomy that make sense given contemporary economic and strategic realities. Generally speaking, a lot of liberals came out of the Civil Rights experience extremely concerned about local tyranny; this isn’t a matter of local governments don’t do anything that is important, but a matter of buying into the argument of the Federalist Papers about the advantages of size for the maintenance of republican liberty. In some respects, liberals are too caught in the prism of the Civil Rights era, since a lot of states these days have constitutions and policies that are more expansive in terms of rights and liberties than the Federal corollaries.
We could, of course, turn this all around and point out that conservatives have shown almost no interest in local control since they’ve taken over all of the Federal Government: from education policy, to drug policy, to the Schiavo case, to gay marriage, to trying to overrule state environmental regulations, conservatives have been perfectly pleased to centralize power when they disapprove of state and local policies. Suddenly, liberals have found themselves championing local autonomy on a whole host of issues.
The Civil War historian James McPherson wrote an article in the New York Review of Books on the “myth of the Lost Cause” some time ago. In it, he made a very convincing case that advocates of “states rights” have almost always been instrumentalists, and have been perfectly willing to change their tune when confronted with state and local policies they don’t like and Federal policies they do.
Dan, I think that there’s some truth in what you say and there are certainly progressives who believe in a stronger central government for reasons of economy of scale. But I honestly don’t believe that’s true of all progressives. Some, I believe, really distrust local governments. Some, unfortunately, long for the raw power of a stronger central government. I note that Kash, an economist, in the post that was the springboard for my post, did not mention economy of scale at all and, as an economist, if that were his main motivation for a strong central government I would have thought he’d at least have mentioned it.
Dave, fair enough… but Kash does make this argument in a later post, and I’m not sure it doesn’t undergird his other statements.
“Think about it for a moment. The rescue effort now involves tens of thousands of military personnel, and even with that massive influx of manpower the process is still taking days. How many police officers did New Orleans have? A total of just 1500. Similarly, moving the estimated 100,000 people in New Orleans who did not have a car would have required at least 2,000 buses. Yet the city of New Orleans possessed just a few hundred. Obviously there were more buses in outlying communities, but of course those communities also had their own people to move, so that doesn’t help much.
My point is simple: even if all local resources had miraculously survived the hurricane intact, and were used to maximum effectiveness (I don’t know if they were or weren’t, but it’s irrelevant) there’s no way that those resources would have been able to deal with Katrina by themselves, either before or after the storm. Attributing the disastrous response to Katrina to inadequate efforts by local authorities seems fairly ridiculous to me.
There’s a good reason that the federal government has a long history of being the primary responder to major disasters even when they only have a local impact – local governments simply do not have the resources.”
Maybe it is getting to be time again for more rounds of more thoughtful variants of the “what’s liberalism, what’s conservativism” exchanges. You’re certainly off to a good start with the post we’re commenting on.
Dan — I don’t think that is technically an economies of scale argument; it’s just a raw size argument.
Regardless, I post because I was struck by this comment: “There’s a good reason that the federal government has a long history of being the primary responder to major disasters even when they only have a local impact – local governments simply do not have the resources.â€
Is that actually true? 9/11 was primarily a local response, no? All disasters up until the 1930s would surely have been local responses. What disasters is he referring to?
There is also a difference between not having enough resources and not bothering to use them: http://www.local6.com/news/4929516/detail.html.
I fail to see exactly what is going on here, other than some a priori political agenda. Sometimes the locals have superior organization or leadership (see 9/11). Other times they don’t (see 8/29). If the locals don’t have the ability, then you’d better keep your ready.gov emergency kit handy. Either way, you’re dependent upon the locals. Maybe he has an idea for how we could change to make the feds responsible for everything.
I suspect, however, that if the feds did take over, there would be even more instances of http://junkyardblog.net/archives/week_2005_08_28.html#004752.
I hate to double-post, but one more important point should be made.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that federalizing a traffic accident would be a good idea. Kash and others are suggesting that the response to Katrina should have been federalized.
Well, how do you draw the line? As it stands today, the governor and local officials are responsible for declaring a state of emergency. That seems like a pretty good way to distinguish between those cases where the individual state has sufficient resources and where the state doesn’t. Sometimes, of course, you’ll get some really stubborn state officials who draw their jurisdiction rather broadly. People like Kash will get upset at the insufficiency of the federal response.
But what is the alternative? For the FEDS to decide what is or is not their jurisdiction? Yipes.
Victor, thanks for both of your comments—your comments about scale, economies of scale, the federal government as primary responder, and drawing the line on jurisdiction. I’d been drafting a comment of my own making just those points and you’ve made them nicely, thank you.
The economy of scale argument (which I believe is made by Kash as an afterthought) is particularly interesting. Are there actually economies of scale involved? Separate from just scale, that is? I’d be very interested in seeing evidence.
Another thing that bugs me is the twinning that so many who are critical of the response to the relief effort after the catastrophe are doing of what would appear to be conflicting points of view. They want to federalize the response and they don’t like the federal government’s response. It’s generally phrased as wanting “strong, competent central government”. Is there an example of such a thing? France, where 10,000 old people whose deaths were abetted by individual and government indifference? Germany? Russia? China? How is such a strong, competent government to be achieved?
I think the federal government can certainly be better and Michael Brown is a wonderful example of a bad example. Can we do better? Sure. And we must. Many have suggested eliminating political cronyism (without explaining how this might be done). Well, James Lee Witt, whom many are fast to praise, was Clinton’s political crony. He had been the director of the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services (an office to which then-governor Clinton had appointed him without experience or expertise) for four years. That’s not expertise—that’s an apprenticeship.
Dave — well, I appreciate the chance to discuss this is a non-partisan atmosphere. I should caveat my comments about the economies of scale … I, too, was speaking somewhat off the cuff and I may have oversimplified Kash’s intent. This is important.
I should clarify … the Feds bring economies of scale with respect to post-disaster recovery financing: disasters are unlikely to strike everyone at once, and one could argue that the feds represent an implicit form of “insurance”. Secondly, the feds can establish standards for local conduct and efficiently provide education. The Feds already do both of these things. I am not arguing for complete absence of economies or in favor of complete libertarianism.
Where I suspect I would part from Kash is with the first-responders; those responsible for the first 48-72 hours of disaster relief (or even beyond in many cases). Placing first-responders around the country will cost the same whether done by the feds or by the states. Barring exceptional warning (and here Katherine was exceptionally generous to us), first responders simply must be local. You must have expertise on the local topography, politics, and economy.
Furthermore, the citizenry of each state has separate preferences and beliefs about the risks they face. The job of convincing Washington to share those beliefs in order to gain the desired protection strikes me as particularly unwise. Just look at Louisiana and the Coast 2050 project. As a result of Katherine, I’m sure we’ll spend billions on upgrading levies in New Orleans, squeezing out at least in part hurricane relief elsewhere in the country, earthquake, wildfire and volcano concerns in the West, etc.
Ultimately, all politics is local. The same goes for emergency response, a point which reinforces your salient observation on base closures.
They want to federalize the response and they don’t like the federal government’s response.
Exactly my sentiments. FEMA was started in 1979, and had to be overhauled in 1993 because of failures. It did well in the OKC bombing, but again the federal response to 9/11 was found wanting. We have been building for decades if not centuries toward federalization, and yet still find our government wanting. There simply is no way to guarantee that a federal bureaucracy will operate more efficiently than a state one (or vice versa).
In times of crisis, our pain and innate optimism leads us to reject the status quo in favor of anything else.
Data is meaningless without theory. I see local, state, and federal officials operating ineptly, and I conclude that the best thing to do would be to improve the linkage between local politicians and their accountability. The inept federal response is simply to be expected. Liberals see the same failures and their natural distrust of local autonomy leads them to conclude that the best thing to do would be to improve the linkage between federal politicians and their accountability. We reach different conclusions from the same data, a point you articulated very well.
Of course, I’m right and they aren’t. I just hope that in our desperation, the frying pan we leap into will be no worse than the frying pan we are leaping from. 😉
PLEASE understand that ALL American politics are merely strands of LIBERALISM. ‘Liberal’ (Demorcrat) or ‘Conservative’ (Repuplican) schools of thought are BOTH based on LIBERALISM. NOT Conservatism and definitely NOT, Social Reformism, Marxism or Communism. Unfortunately, since Mrs Thatcher began her unholy alliance with Mr Reagan the UK has now been almost entirely marinated for 30 years in the so-called ‘Neo-con’ / ‘Democrat’ philosophies. In the UK Obenfhurer Blair called Democrat-ism ‘New Labour’ and sold it on the back of a what was once a great political party (LABOUR). He described his Clintonesque policies as the ‘Third Way’. Some call it; Americanism. Until, Americans are able to understand the simple fact that their entire political system is based on very slightly different versions of EXACTLY the same thing we are all doomed to put up with a crass, second rate and frankly pathetic way of conducting ourselves. Democrats and Republicans can be compared to the Small and Big enders in gullivers travels. ‘America’ / Liberalism is only globally right because it has more guns and more ‘steaks’ than anyone else. God help us.
We could argue from the example of New Orleans that maybe they have a point on this one: if the Feds had ignored posse comitatus and simply trampled the local governments, pulling in and taking immediate charge of everything, perhaps the disaster would have been less than it was. The property damage would have been the same, but perhaps there would have been less suffering and death.