Feds were in charge--or they were supposed to be

The absurd attempts by Bush administration officials--including Chartoff and Brown--and his supporters in the press and right wing blogosphere to pin the blame for the Katrina disaster on local officials should get messy if the mainstream press is as vigilant as the bloggers who are critical of the government on this one--and that isn't at all limited to the left wing or liberal side. In fact, as I mentioned Sunday, there have been quite a few people who are fairly well respected on the right that are calling this a government's flub. The defense of the administration is not strong. In their own documents, the plan for action by the Homeland Security says that the Federal government is supposed to take the lead on these issues.

The more ignorant tack seems to be to blame the chaos on looters, etc. and to trace this back to some sort of moral vacuity on the part of New Orleans or the "Family" or American Culture. This is a laughable tack in its surface manifestations, though I am sure many people who already talk about the problems of "the family" (what does that mean anyway?) will buy it hook, line...but it is so strange to see the way these arguments have to manuever their way around talking about social responsibility while excusing our largest social institutions of any responsibility at all. I just wonder how quickly they are able to generate this chum for their hungry minions. It seems like it would take a couple of editors to make sure they don't make any ideological gaffes.

This is piece in the Chicago Sun Times which was then picked up on Little Green Footballs because it fits with their understanding of the events. It mentions a brief quote from Robert Kaplan's collection of essays The Coming Anarchy in which he mentions the "re-primitivized man" as he's witnessed it in failed states in Africa. Of course both the author of the Sun-Times piece and the clueless dittoheads at LGF interpret this through their ideological worldview that is basically a warmed over version of late nineteenth century race science tempered with an understanding of this being not the result of social Darwinism but of liberals.

The problem with both of these is that niether of them seem to have a clue what Kaplan is actually writing about or what he is pointing to in his collection of essays or in the Atlantic Monthly piece that is often cited. For one thing, if it happens that we are seeing this in New Orleans, no one is being smart or witty by saying it is like the Third World being transplanted to the First World. That was exactly what Kaplan was predicting, hence the title "the COMING anarchy." Kaplan is really a fairly conservative writer in terms of international politics, but he is also halfway intelligent: but they aren't citing him for his intelligence. That is not a priority in these arguments.

The more important insight, which none of these folks are capable of making because they are too screwed up by their fanatic right wing ideology, is one that even Kaplan isn't all that interested in making, but which I would say the conservative "american culture's rotting from the core" family values folks are actually right about but they, again blinded by ideology, can't admit or maybe even recognize. Kaplan is discussing, in the late nineties, when it was very fashionable, the "retreat of the state" but he is doing it, on the ground, in the places where the postcolonial struggle for power, exacerbated by various forms of resource scarcity and prolonged by the desire of international aid and trade organizations to have governments so small that you could drown several of them in a single bathtub. In other words, he is discussing the retreat of the state in areas where, for the past twenty years, the objective has been to whittle the state away and hand more functions over to private industry.

Of course the basic functions of a post-war welfare state aren't for them: no civil service, no education, no health care. NGOs may pick up this slack, but the private industry is mainly concerned with resource extraction. And instead of worrying too much about spreading that national wealth around, they deal mostly with the Kakistocrats in charge, the undemocratically, unelected leaders who the champions of globalization blame for bringing misery to their "citizens." Or, sometimes more problematically, the leaders of a country with all of these characteristics but which has only recently, at the hands of those same aid organizations, been thrust into democracy from above, with no other institutions or history, throwing the legitimacy of the state into question and sparking internal struggles for the few means of making a living--mostly the control over the resources that are shipped off to western countries via western corporations. So yes, the state is weakend and the people are desparate and uncontrolled, but it isn't some natural progression: it is the result of exposing a society to the bare force of market competition with nothing to protect itself; of giving people a partial glimpse of modern industry, medicine, education and society, of telling them "modernization" is the way to go and then tearing it out from under them by changing course and forcing them into a new path. It makes the current class and racial relations permanent and even Kaplan talks about the divisions between rich and poor becoming so stark that they turn into a fortress society. I think the analogy that he uses is the bulletproof limousine: the rich and privileged will have no choice but to wall themselves into it and hope to keep their oasis of safety because there is no other option (Certainly not sharing the wealth and working for a broad, stable society.) This is the explanation the Kaplan gives for the Coming Anarchy (it was the only clip I could finf online:)

Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity. These wars will be subnational, meaning that it will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own citizens physically. This is how many states will ultimately die. As state power fades-and with it the state's ability to help weaker groups within society, not to mention other states-peoples and cultures around the world will be thrown back upon their own strengths and weaknesses, with fewer equalizing mechanisms to protect them.

A stark and scary prediction. It is too bad there are no agents in this change, that globalization is an inevitable process and the privitazation of everything existing will continue apace without any direction or intervention from anyone. Then we could discuss it as something that someone were doing and we could suggest to that someone that, perhaps, we wanted a bit more protection. Unfortunately, the state is not powerful anymore except in matters of the already powerful. This is ultimately what more academic ideologues like Hernando de Soto (so aptly named I really thought it was a joke for a while) argue: that increased property rights would help development. It seems that most countries already have a problem with property rights--that is too many of them are in the hands of the powerful. Luckily, we can rest assured that eventually everything will even out, the market and globalization will give rise to a new human being, an Ubermensch-ish fellow capable of dealing with this terror (now we're back to social darwinism--though now with Adam Smith)

Whereas the distant future will probably see the emergence of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming decades will see us more aware of our differences than of our similarities. To the average person, political values will mean less, personal security more. The belief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the overriding obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the differences between peoples?

So we land up with the "Clash of Civilizations" argument of Huntington, which is grist for a whole other post.

The point to end on here is that, the LGF folks are certainly right that we may be realizing the "third world in the first" as Ankie Hoogvelt calls it, but it isn't due to some impulse that has been taught by rap music or the end result of seeing too many strippers or gambling too much. Certainly all of the social ills of New Orleans society--including its corrupt police force--have played out over the last week. But what we have seen is the rotting of American Culture that has been perpetrated by the blind faith in the market as the most efficient and benevolent institution of society. The truth of the matter is that, in addition to this privatized, stateless vision of society being the one that has resulted in the gutting of the Army Corps of Engineers Budget and crippling FEMA, it is also one that had created a highly stratified society in New Orleans with, evidently, little local concern for the poorest and most needy. On even a local level, this most assuredly resulted from a focus on the joys that the truly free market can bring--that is a market for music, sex, drugs, and pleasures of all kinds. It was virtually the only way that New Orleans was making any money at all and that was spread fairly thinly throught the society.

So yes, it is a problem with American Culture but it is something that moralizing and finger wagging will do little to solve and for which even the staunchest faith in the purest vision of Christ almighty can be little more than a placation.