Norquist's Bathtub: In many respects, August 29, 2005 is already turning out to be a more important date than 9/11, and not just because the number of fatalities caused by Hurricane Katrina will dwarf the best efforts at savagery by Osama's thugs. The collapse of the levees of Lake Ponchartrain seems to have awakened us to the rotten underpinnings of our institutions, our government, our leaders.

We are undergoing an ideological, not a partisan, reawakening. Historian Timothy Naftali compared the events of the past week to the core meltdown at Chernobyl, where the inability of the Soviet Union to protect its own people was laid bare, leading to the fall of Communism, but we need not look overseas for historical precedent. The combination of the Watts Riots and the first heavy casualty figures from Southeast Asia in 1965 brought about the beginning of the end of Cold War liberalism, coincidentally in the first year following the reelection of a President, just as the ineffectual responses to crises led to the obliteration of the Republicans in 1932 and the Democrats in 1980.

Although the blame has deservedly focused on the Bush Administration, and their typically inept response to Hurricane Katrina, the Democrats bear a great deal of responsibility for what happened. Obviously, there were failures at the state and local level to quickly respond to the impending disaster; the call to evacuate came less than 48 hours from impact, not enough time to get safely away from the storm, and certainly not enough time to prepare the mass evacuations of the destitute. If anything symbolizes the local failure, it was the row after row of empty buses that were parked in a flooded lot in New Orleans, instead of being used to transport people out of the area. That neither the state of Louisiana nor New Orleans and its surrounding parishes can be considered well-governed sovereignties even in the best of times (a problem shared throughout the South, as the slothlike measures taken by the buffoonish Governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, while his state's coastline disappeared, attest) exacerbated the problem, particularly afterwards.

More important than the failure of its local politicians, though, the Democrats have failed to provide any effective opposition. Just as with 9/11, we were victimized by our own lack of imagination. You can go through all the preparedness drills and make all the contingency plans that you like, but if you don't have political leaders who will make a stand and insist that we be prepared for any contingency, if your party lacks the will to stake out unpopular stands, even in the best of times, then democracy fails. The most telling fact so far is that even if the funding to repair the levees had come through, in full, they still probably wouldn't have been ready in time to stop what happened.

So, Republicans didn't think that budgeting money to protect a city from a semi-centennial disaster was important, and the Democrats didn't put up enough of a fight. Bush nominates a political crony to head FEMA, then a small-town lawyer straight from the world of show horse competitions, and the Democrats silently assent; both Joe Allbaugh and Michael Brown breezed to confirmation, with no Democratic filibuster. This disaster was predictable, inevitable, and overdue, something we knew for decades, and still the Democrats failed to do enough, either in opposition, or even in those brief times we controlled the government. No wonder Clinton was so reticent about attacking his successor over what happened last week.

But in the end, the events of the past week, when combined with the ongoing debacle in Iraq, has thoroughly discredited the governing ideology this country has had since 1980. It is a philosophy that holds that tax cuts are the panacea to prosperity, that no one need sacrifice for the common good, and is best encapsulated by Grover Norquist's infamous phrase that his aim was "...to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub". Although the federal budget has increased during the Reagan-Bush Era, its effectiveness, its ability to accomplish things, has diminished. "Conservatives" have, with malice aforethought, strangled the initiative of society to publicly confront issues of poverty, racism, and inequality, and to adequately protect the safety of the public. This week, the Gulf Coast is that bathtub.

It is the Republican philosophy of governance. Our infrastructure rots, our military is undermanned, our environmental protections are being sabotaged. Starve the beast, and let the private sphere, the realm of Enron and Halliburton, take care of things. As Naftali points out,

Not all of the questioning about the rapid growth in government since the 1960s was wrongheaded and Reagan at least admired Franklin Roosevelt and having experienced the depression first hand understood that government had a positive role to play. But Reagan's imitators ever since, mainly Republicans but also some Democrats, have lacked that historical perspective and have mechanically espoused the view that government had to be lean and mean and, when in doubt, could be underfunded lest money be taken from the pockets of "ordinary Americans," who knew best how to spend it. Underlying this was another, more amoral, message that those who fall behind in this society get what they deserve.

For a quarter of a century, we have also been told we could have our cake and eat it, too. Local property taxes could be kept low, state budgets could be balanced and federal taxes could be reduced progressively with nothing but a positive effect on our national quality of living. For fifteen years, we have been told that the US military is large enough to handle every conceivable threat to the country because high technology would allow us to project force more efficiently. For three years we have been assured that our government is reorganizing to ensure that an urban disaster such as we witnessed on 9/11 would not happen again. Many Americans, unfortunately, came to believe these assertions and forgot not only the value of good government but that it costs money.

This week we saw the cumulative effect of these illusions. For six days thousands of babies were starved of formula, countless old people died of exposure and families lived with almost no water and had to defecate in public by a city Convention Center because the federal government lacked the resources, skill and troops to rescue them.

David Brooks, who is no liberal, noted over the weekend that "the first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield." It is pathetic that the Bush Administration, whose greatest innovation to conservatism has been to honor political loyalty at the expense of talent or competence, would attempt to (dishonestly, as it turns out) shift the blame to local officials. Ineffectual local government is to be expected when dealing with a Category-4 hurricane; in Mississippi and Louisiana, corrupt politicians are a feature, not a bug. In the post-9/11 world, we expected the Federal Government to handle the big stuff, and, as in the War against Terrorism, the Bush Administration was not up to the task.

If any good is to come out of the horrors of this past week, it will require us to abandon the notion that the public sphere can accomplish nothing worthwhile, that people must settle for inefficient, cheap government, or that individual desires must always trump the needs of the rest. I have a feeling we might have already begun to turn down that path.