Untitled Document
Numerous critics have noted the current administration's lack of effective response
to the New Orleans catastrophe and explained it merely in terms of incompetence
and callousness. Something more fundamental, deeper than Katrina's storm surge,
is at play here, however.
The administration's "response," especially regarding the
poor (predominantly people of color) who lacked the wherewithal to get out of
the way of Katrina, is the direct result of several decades of the neoliberal
scuttling of the social good, the abandonment of the last remnants of a positive
interventionist liberal state (the so-called "social safety net")
held up as sacrosanct from the time of the New Deal.
The neoliberal ideology of the "free market" as savior and
provider, the belief in the capacity of untrammeled capitalism as "problem
solver" and fixative for all -- espoused by DLC Democrat and neo- and paleocon
Republican alike -- indubitably played a major role in what has taken place
in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The abandonment of the social good, commonly
referred to as "privatization," not only weakened the levees below
Ponchatrain over the course of successive Administrations. It defunded and degraded
emergency response infrastructures, and worse, created a habit of neglect that
put a rapid rescue effort out of question.
"Neoliberalism" must be understood as a return to the age
of classical "laissez faire" liberalism, that last quarter of the
19th century here in the US when "the market" ruled; that age commonly
referred to as the "Age of the Robber Barons" when the federal government
served no one but the rich and the US Senate was nothing but a "Millionaire's
Club." (The bourgeois referred to it as the "Gilded Age." Mark
Twain called it "The Great Barbecue".)
The dominant secular justification for the untrammeled right of the rich to
rule in that era came to be known as "Social Darwinism," propounded
initially by the conservative British ideologue Herbert Spencer and his Ivy
League admirers, all academic servants of power. Drawing from a skewed misreading
of Charles Darwin's breakthroughs in the understandings of evolution, Spencer
and his colleagues concocted the notion of "survival of the fittest"
as the primary motor force for the advance of human "civilization"
and "progress." Combined with an older notion of an American mission
preordained by a Christian god and pseudo-scientific racist "explanations"
of non-white inferiority, this Social Darwinist thread effectively moved into
the American mainstream, where it still resides, commonly explained as "natural
law." An important component of the current neoliberal mindset, social
Darwinism has had a horrific resurgence, exemplified by both the promise of
a Bill Clinton "to end welfare as we know it" and the constant conservative
refrain to "get the government off our backs."
The "laissez faire" age of classical liberalism created mammoth
social crises. Void of any social protections, that earlier era of dog-eat-dog
aggrandizement for wealth and privilege led to unprecedented upheaval, economic
dislocation, and social violence. The situation became so bad that during the
height of depression in the 1870s and 1890s, Federal troops had to be mobilized
to crush strikes and "insurrection" in America's major cities.
At the beginning of the last century, threats to stability from below ultimately
fostered demands from some of the most farsighted liberals for "Age-of-Reform"
concessions to preserve the social order. In response to that earlier age of
unimpeded abuse and privileged accumulation, the rise of a positive, reform-minded
state came in the form of the "Progressive Era," followed ultimately
by the "New Deal" response to the crisis of the 1930s.
At its highest level, the neoliberal offensive of the last several decades
worked to roll back the concessions won during the New Deal and after. That
incessant "privatization" of all that was once deemed part of the
common good and necessary for the general welfare, starting with Carter/Reagan
and reaching new heights with Clinton/Bush, set the stage for the catastrophe
at New Orleans. A resurgent notion of Social Darwinist "survival of the
fittest" so fundamental to right-wing ideology predetermined that the response
of the Federal government would be initially all but non-existent, slow in arriving,
and heavily militarized when it finally materialized. In the meantime, the long-disparaged
"underclass" of New Orleans, the cast-off flotsam and jetsam of unrestrained
capital, was left alone to literally sink or swim.