... Reclaiming Public Responsibility

In After Katrina ..., I suggested that in the wake of that recent hurricane, American politics may have started to tip in a different direction. What direction might this be?

An answer to the question can be extracted from an op-ed piece in today's Baltimore Sun. "A steady withdrawal from responsibility", by Goucher College assistant professor of anthropology George Baca, indicts a "make-the-federal-government-weaker philosophy" for the longstanding abdication of public social responsibility which Katrina has now exposed.

Katrina, says Baca, "washed away the gloss that decades of civil rights reforms have put over the American public's contempt for poor African-Americans, leaving their isolation and poverty for the world to see."

Weakening the government in Washington, D.C., by reducing spending on programs — "except, of course," Baca points out, those expenditures focused "on law enforcement and jails" — has been called by conservatives "starving the beast." What Baca shows is that so doing, even when it zeroes out supposedly race-neutral initiatives like government spending on infrastructure — levees are infrastructure — has hurt poor and working-class blacks disproportionately.

Those below the middle class rely on the fruits of public spending more than, say, the newly successful black middle class does. Katrina has made that clear. When the levees crumbled in New Orleans, post-hurricane, middle-class folks were long gone. It was the impecunious who could not find transportation, most of whom were black, that suffered.

So the conservative ploy of adverting to how many blacks have "made it" since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s has just masked how many more blacks have not made it, in an ideological atmosphere where private markets have trumped public initiatives.

Until Katrina, that is.

Katrina is now Exhibit Number One in the case that "the privatization of public goods," as Baca summarizes the thrust of American politics since President Reagan, was what left New Orleans and the two-thirds of its population who are poor, most of whom are African American, singularly exposed to the threat of a Category 4 hurricane.

So the direction in which I hope American politics has begun tip is one in which, the next time a political candidate extols anything like "starving the beast" or "the privatization of public goods," sensible voters will say, "But ... what about Katrina?"