The Strange Death of Liberal America

Taking its cue from Ronald Reagan’s “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” a Republican Counterrevolution swept this country. Its enemy was Liberal America’s belief that the prime role of government is to help keep the playing field level, a belief that held sway from the Roosevelt through the Carter Administrations. Even during years of Republican Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford, that value remained strong, with Nixon proposing a guaranteed annual income, something George W. Bush would consider heretical.

Of course, the idea of government maintaining a level playing field did not begin with FDR. The experience of the American people–and a key theme of American history–has been that from the drafting of the Bill of Rights each succeeding generation applied this principle to the latest attempt by the Haves to stomp on the Have-nots. That is what the Civil War, the Progressive Era and New Deal represent.

As the Counterrevolution has gathered steam it has come to resemble the Great Barbecue of the 19th century, catering to the wealthy and powerful while creating ever larger income disparities that have us sitting on a social powder keg. A year ago as the networks broadcast their horrific pictures of Katrina’s devastation, Counterrevolutionary Bill O’Reilly echoed those century-old Social Darwinists who served as the philosophical apologists for the barbecuing of the American working class, saying, “I don’t think the government is equipped in any way, shape or form to solve anybody’s problems and to get them out of harm’s way at all.”

O’Reilly and his Counterrevolutionary co-conspirators like to trumpet at every opportunity that THEY, not Liberal America, represent the majority, but in fact most Americans disagree with the implications of O’Reilly’s remarks. The respected national opinion service The Rasmussen Reports released a poll a year after Katrina that showed “47% say the federal government should bear the most financial responsibility for areas affected by natural disaster, versus 23% who name local agencies, 19% who name individuals.”

It took Katrina to bring New Orleans’ monument to Counterrevolutionary America to people across the world. Long before the winds reached shore, the city served as a grim reminder of what the Counterrevolution’s budget cuts, educational programs, indifference and opposition to voting rights, support for a politicized media and an ongoing “Southern Strategy” had cost this nation, particularly people of color. As related in The Strange Death of Liberal America, on 8/28/2005, two-thirds of New Orleans was African American with a median household income of $27,133. Forty percent of the city’s children lived below the poverty level. The city’s public schools had already endured the equivalent of Katrina before the real storm. New Orleans represented a classic case study of how the winds of that new code word “school choice” could rip this country apart if the Counterrevolution embarks on a program to privatize education. According to various reports, the day Katrina hit New Orleans, its schools were divided between largely minority public schools and largely white private schools. According to reports, tuition in private schools ranged from $4,000 to $10,000 per year, creating a healthy local school loan shark industry with rates as high as 10%. Then there was the 2004 voting scandal, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cindy Cohn described as “ the worst voting situation in the country when it comes from electronic voting machines.” Barbara Arnwine, Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, viewed the voting scandal as a major reason for the election of Republican Senator David Vetter.

Today the aftermath of Katrina dramatizes what the Counterrevolution has done to America. Franklin Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins would have known what to do with New Orleans. The man who put half a million people back to work in a single day during the Great Depression would create another alphabet’s soup of agencies to raise New Orleans out of the muck. What we heard on 8/29/06 from George W. Bush was “The federal government cannot do this job alone, nor should it be expected to do the job alone,” a promise eerily echoing one he made a year ago.

A year after Katrina, population estimates show New Orleans has shrunk to the size it was in 1880. Half the doctors and three-fourths of the psychiatrists have not returned to the city. According a Brookings Institution report quoted on CNN, roughly a third of the city’s schools, hospitals and libraries remain closed, as do half the city’s public transportation routes. Jaribu Hill, executive director of the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights, states, ““They are rebuilding for the sake of profit, not for the rebuilding of peoples’ lives.” The Katrina Information Network has documented the depth of the indifference and abuse in the rebuilding after the storm. Among the many sources it quotes is “Big, Easy Money” report author Rita J. King who said: “The devastation of the Gulf Coast is tragic enough, but the scope of the corporate greed that followed, facilitated by government incompetence and complicity, is downright criminal.”

Meanwhile both the president and his party struggle to recover from the damage Katrina did to their popularity. Two weeks after Katrina, a CBS poll showed Americans had lost confidence in President Bush with 49% saying he lacked strong qualities of leadership, an increase of 15% over the year before. He has never recovered from that blow, a much more serious one than news from Iraq has done to his standing. In the same poll, a troubling 43% stated that they had “not much” or “none” confidence the President cared about the needs and problems of people like them.