I was reading this George Will opinion piece and he made some good points re the liberal and conservative reactions to Katrina.
For many the notion of societal security is likely to trump social justice concerns re the poor and dispossessed .
For some, yes. For others, and I think most of us, the attitude is “There but for the grace of God go I”, tempered by the ol’ Golden Rule. The dispossessed from NO are our people, us, and but for quirks of fate any of us could similarly need help. Such help, on the large scale that is sometimes needed, can be provided only by government, which of course is nothing more than the people acting collectively. The disaster shows that we need it and we need it to be well run. Have you noticed the near-universal condemnation of the administration’s performance here? How does that compare to the fuck’emall from your cite?
Will’s concept that the thinness of our protection from chaos can only be protected by force is no better than an apologia for fascism. He needs to stick to baseball.
A compassionate, human view that I’m sure many more of us agree with from James Carroll:
Since the topic is a comparison to Iraq:
“Four dollar gasoline”
“Four dollar gasoline”
For some odd reason that little word cluster has a powerful memeic resonance.
I don’t know much about conservatives, but the last few words were a WTF moment for me.
Let me see if I understand this facet of conservative thought: Governments screw things up. Private sectors often don’t. Thus, we need to have people pay private companies to provide firemen, police, rescue services.
Ha! Like that would matter one lick to the people affected by this storm, since they would not be able to afford such services, if it was left to the private sector.
Are we reading the same quote? I don’t think he’s saying that at all.
No, I am not claiming that he said it, but am instead quoting a few sentences in which he shares a germ of an idea “Private sector good, government bad!” and then I expressed my limited view of the conservative philosophy as a whole, not necessarily what he expressed in the article. Perhaps I am misunderstanding how the conservatives see thing, but looking over past posts , that is what it sounds like.
I have just read over some past threads. I see now that while phrases like “This is a liberal hour in that it illustrates the indispensability, and dignity, of the public sector.” Pops up in conservative thought, it pops up* more* in libertarian thought. Thus, while I think such an attitude is wrong headed, I am aiming at what is for the most part the wrong people. Not that conservatives don’t believe this too, just not enough for me to claim “Conservatives believe such and such”
Since when was Hobbes a conservative? Hobbes’ pessimism led him to advocate an all powerful state which could not be checked by constitutional limits or popular dissent. I doubt that many of the SDMB conservatives would sign up for that. (Brutus maybe, at least according to his political compass score, but he’s no longer posting.) I certainly doubt Ronald Reagan–whatever one thinks of him–would agree.
Hobbes and Locke often get lumped together because they both used a mythical “social contract” as a jumping off point for their reasoning. But their conclusions are poles apart.
Will is an eloquent writer, and he sure knows how to name drop, but his intelligence is vastly over-rated IMO. To paraphrase Vizzini, I do not think the books he references say what he thinks they say.
The best conservatives and liberals are admirable in their optimism about people, though that optimism leads to different conclusions. This doesn’t mean they are pollyanna’s. We didn’t need Katrina to remind us of the fragility of social order. There are countless examples of chaos the world over. But we also know that totalitarianism is not the alternative to chaos, but is another evil to be fought. Katrina left appalling damage, and the response has been a massive clusterf–k, with much blame to be assessed on all levels of government. But, without minimizing the human agony this storm and our ill-preparedness have caused, it will not cause the collapse of U.S. civilization.
To be fair to Hobbes, there is a lot of wisdom in Leviathan. And Hobbes lived through a time of chaos far worse than Katrina is causing, which may make totalitarianism seem like a good thing at the time, in a like way to the way a freezing winter may make a boiling hot summer seem like a good thing at the time. But I don’t think many of us on either side of the political spectrum would really endorse the more extreme conclusions of Hobbes.
I very much doubt this will be remembered as conservatism’s great moment. The poll numbers will be very interesting, I’m predicting a five point drop in Bush’s ratings.
Now for the libertarians: How would these disasters be handled in Libertaria? This is my opinion a perfect example of the moral bankruptcy of libertarianism. We are indeed our brothers’ keepers. There is indeed a role for government assistance.
Not one of Will’s better articles. It meanders all over the place, his points are vague, and his conclusion isn’t really supported by his own statements.
If anything, I think Katrina is simply going to widen the divides that are already in the country. Racists are going to blame blacks. Liberals will blame the Republican government. Republicans will blame the Democratic state and local governments. Liberals will use this as an excuse to demand giving more power to the federal government. Conservatives will use it to argue that the government can’t do everything and we should rely more on individuals. Conspiracy theories will fly on both sides.
As far as I can tell, the main political effect of Katrina is that politics are about to get a lot uglier.
Hobbes’ Leviathan supports belief, not in conservatism, but in authoritarianism – in the need for an all-powerful state to keep order and for the people to just accept it and obey. That is essential to only some variants of conservatism, and not the kinds with which I had assumed Will to be associated.
Well, yes and no. Leviathan supports the idea of an all-powerful sovereign to settle the disputes of men and maintain civil society, but the reasoning for doing so is very conservative - Hobbes believed that it was in each individual’s self-interest to support a sovereign because only in a civil society could he lead a better life.
So the conservative or even libertarian view of Hobbes could be that the legitimate role of the state is to protect individuals from the natural state of conflict between men, so as to maximize each individual’s personal freedom. There’s nothing in Hobbes that would support, say, redistribution of wealth or other social outcomes. Hobbes is more about, “I’ll agree not to punch you in the nose if you agree not to punch me, so that neither of us will have to worry about broken noses. And to keep you honest, let’s have this sovereign with the guns enforce our social contract.”
That’s a pretty limited view of government, in and of itself.
As a Canadian, you might not fully understand that ugliness in American politics has long since passed the point of diminishing returns. If I come across a dog carcass crawling with maggots, technically I can make it uglier by taking a shit on it, but who’s really going to appreciate the difference?
I don’t see how this could possibly be a boon for conservatives.
Most of those left behind were poor and/or non-white. Conservatives aren’t known as the party favoring the poor & non-white, fair or not.
Also, global warming may have made Katrina worse and there are some conservaties who do not take GW seriously.
Also (not to Bush bash) but funding for levees in Louisiana by 80% before the flood by this administration.
So I can’t see it happening, conservatives are portrayed as being indifferent to the poor, indifferent to minorities (true or not), indifferent to global warming and the conservative president and conservative government drastically cut funding for flood levees (to be fair to Bush he didn’t know this was going to happen) so the idea that people will flock to conservatism as a result of Katrina is highly unlikely. Hopefully this will build up a nation that is more conscious of our treatment for the poor and that does more to rectify that ugly facet of american life.
Very much so. It would be much much worse if we lived in a libertarian nation.
I believe that these events will give strength to the most pessimistic elements of both liberal and conservative thought.
The liberal is optimistic about how naturally peaceful individual people are. He believes that a relatively small amount of government force is required to keep us from trying to hurt each other. However, he is pessimistic about our inclination to share and our ability to organize large projects successfully. He believes that the government must force us to share by taxing us, and that the government is best suited to maintaining the infrastructure on which our society depends, such as, in this case, levees. Thus, the liberal will support a weak state in matters of personal action, but a strong state in matters of distribution of resources.
The conservative, on the other hand, takes the reversed position. She has confidence that individuals will be generous without government coercion, and that private charities will largely suffice to protect victims of bad luck from utter ruin. Moreover, she believes that things like levees are best kept in the hands of private entities or, perhaps, small local governments. However, she is pessimistic about how naturally peaceful people are. She is inclined to agree with George Will about how “thin and perishable is the crust of civilization, and hence how always near society’s surface are the molten passions that must be checked by force when they cannot be tamed by socialization.” Hence, she will support a weak state when it comes to distribution of resources, but a strong state in matters of personal action.
Both of these positions contain an internal tension. If you believe that individuals are naturally peaceful, why do you believe that they must be forced to share (by taxation)? Or, conversely, if you believe that individuals are naturally violent, why need they not be forced to share? I am not saying that either of these positions are logically inconsistent, but followers of either philosophy should feel some obligation to address these apparent contradictions.
At any rate, I’d say that Katrina confirms both the liberal’s and the conservative’s pessimistic views, while presenting a problem for both of their optimistic views. But, naturally, each side focuses on the confirmation for his or her own view and the threat to the other’s.
The libertarians may be roughly described as taking the optimistic positions of both the liberals and the conservatives and repudiating both of their pessimistic positions. In the end, they are the losers here. Which is a shame, because that is the view I consider closest to my own.
Really? Since this is all hypothetical, I can make the following counter-claims:
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In a libertarian nation, fewer people would have waited around trusting authorities to ‘do something’. More people might have prepared for their own survival and evacuation.
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In a libertarian nation, the federal government would still be responsible for disaster management (most libertarians agree, anyway). But it would have been able to focus much more on that, since it wouldn’t be encumbered by the eight zillion other things it’s trying to do at the same time.
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As a corollary to #2, a federal government in a libertarian society would be much leaner and focused on its ‘core’ responsibilities - military, police, emergencies. Less red tape, fewer bureaucrats in the chain of command, etc.
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In a libertarian country, without federal flood bailouts and rebuilding assistance, fewer people would live in disaster-prone areas in the first place. Federal flood insurance is actually a pretty big welfare scheme for rich people, who build big coastal mansions and summer homes in dangerous areas that would normally be uninsurable, relying on federal flood insurance to bail out them out from the results of their poor housing locations.
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In a libertarian country, the levees might have been maintained by private companies instead of a patchwork quilt of political districts fighting turf wars among each other. And given the potential liability cost of a levee break, they probably would have had liability insurance. And the company underwriting the liability insurance would have had a hell of a lot more incentive to make sure the levees were engineered correctly than some political stooge.
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In a libertarian country, other mechanisms for aiding disaster relief might have arisen. Perhaps we’d have a huge private company that specializes in disaster rescue and relief that would contract to cities for their protection. It’s hard to say what mechanism we might have, because the presence of the federal government has prevented alternatives from being contemplated.
And I could go on. This is a complex subject, and to just hand-wave away alternatives to the current situation as being ‘obviously worse’ is not warranted.
I don’t know what this is based on, many people are still refusing to leave LA even when offered. I also don’t think its realistic to assume that just because you cut gov. aid that people become self reliant. Some crumble and that is just the reality of the situation.
I’m not sure how that would change anything. Nobody from gov. organizations like the highway project are working on LA doing life/death rescue. So it wouldn’t matter. Life & death rescue missions and major medical interventions, which are what are truly important, probably wouldn’t be affected by projects to build highways in Boston or NASA space programs.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
- As a corollary to #2, a federal government in a libertarian society would be much leaner and focused on its ‘core’ responsibilities - military, police, emergencies. Less red tape, fewer bureaucrats in the chain of command, etc.
This is conjecture. They may also privatize all of these functions to the point where there is gross inequality between rich & poor, or so there is only superficial coverage or inefficiencies. I have read reports that for profit hospitals cost more than non profits.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2004/june/forprofit_hospitals_.php
There is no guarantee that libertarianism/privitization would lead to better situations.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
- In a libertarian country, without federal flood bailouts and rebuilding assistance, fewer people would live in disaster-prone areas in the first place. Federal flood insurance is actually a pretty big welfare scheme for rich people, who build big coastal mansions and summer homes in dangerous areas that would normally be uninsurable, relying on federal flood insurance to bail out them out from the results of their poor housing locations.
Conjecture. The federal government has a project in California where they offer flood insurance cheaply to people who build houses in high flood areas. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Insurance/story?id=94181
If they didn’t have the insurance they’d have to rely on disaster management to bail them out.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
- In a libertarian country, the levees might have been maintained by private companies instead of a patchwork quilt of political districts fighting turf wars among each other. And given the potential liability cost of a levee break, they probably would have had liability insurance. And the company underwriting the liability insurance would have had a hell of a lot more incentive to make sure the levees were engineered correctly than some political stooge.
Again, some studies show private industry is better, some show public is better. There is no telling for sure. Who would fund levee building in a libertarian economy as there is no profit motive? There would be no profit motive for something like that, so it wouldn’t happen. In libertarian situations people ignore what is good in the long term in favor of what is good in the short term, it is darwinism which is unintelligent. It is cheaper to dump waste in the ocean and pollute the skies and not repair levees, but in the long run it’ll cost far more in lives and money than it would’ve cost in the short term. The only reason many industries have safety practices isn’t because of adam smith’s invisible hand it is because the gov. forced them to take up more expensive practices (cleaning their pollutants, adding safety features, etc).
Hopefully that would work better. But again, there is no telling. Besides the gov. already farms out a good deal of its industries to private contractors such as military hardware or infrastructure building. I don’t know about disaster relief, but I see no proof that it would automatically be better under libertarianism.
No, in my experience libertarians have a philosophy that gov is incompetent and private orgs are competent and they base their opinions on assumptions like ‘people are totally rational and totally in charge of their lives’. These are emotional viewpoints, and while I admit the idea that libertarianism is automatically bad is also an emotional viewpoint, so are the core principles of libertarianism. They are not factually deduced philosophies based on what is best or what works, they are philosophies which are emotionally driven by emotions like individualism and fear of authority. What is emotionally congruent and what is the best idea have nothing to do with each other. In some situations libertarianism will work better, in some it will not. But by and large I am glad we do not live in a libertarian government because I think the situation would’ve been alot worse if we did.
Another problem with libertarianism is the rich/poor dichotomy.
Pharmaceutical companies claim to spend much of their time/effort building life saving drugs, but about 3/4th of the drugs they create are nothing more than clones of pre-existing drugs (ie, a new SSRI, a new proton pump inhibitor, a new ACE inhibitor, etc. Essentially another drug in a class that already exists). Also, while we work on 3rd or 4th cures for baldness for rich nation thousands of people die from lack of medicines in the third world because they can’t afford any of the medicine. This is a side effect of uncontrolled libertarianism and privitization, the fact that minor luxuries for the rich can become more important than life or death help for the poor.
Since one of the major problems of the Katrina catastrophe is that the poor were hardest hit I think it would be even worse under libertarianism, as the poor are the least important to for profit companies.
Arguable, but irrelevant. The premise of the OP is that Hurricane Katrina “may be a boon to conservatives philosophically.” The spectacle of looters and snipers might serve to illustrate the authoritarian side of Hobbes’ philosophy, that government is necessary to keep order and defend individual life, liberty and property; but it does nothing at all to strengthen the limited-government side of that philosophy, the view that government is necessary only to keep order, etc.