Democracy and Disaster

In a country as wealthy and technologically capable as the United States, there is no such thing as a simple natural disaster. Every disaster is also a social event, made up by human will and ingenuity--or neglect and indifference. Famines, famously, do not happen in democracies, because no matter how severe a drought or blight, only the voiceless and powerless are ever left to starve. Storms may sometimes wreck cities; but if they also claim thousands of lives, that is a not a natural disaster but a political wrong, and the judgment belongs on the city and the state that left their people there. What does the wreckage of New Orleans say about American democracy?

The pictures seem to confirm Europe's worst suspicions about the United States. In the desperation and vulnerability they portray, they are images of a failed state, of a Third World concealed just beneath American wealth, and of an armed and violent people primed for guerrilla warfare against their neighbors.

That terrible impression is not the most illuminating. The basic failure is in American political culture's tolerance of deep and crippling inequality. The more immediate failure is that the country is now governed by people who do not take seriously either the purposes or the tasks of government.

First let us be clear on where the apocalyptic interpretation is wrong. American civil society is not sick, broken, or made up entirely of homeowners with shotguns. People around the country are offering beds, classrooms, and jobs to refugees from New Orleans, doctors and other professionals are hurrying there as volunteers, and private donations are rising too fast for charities to manage them. Americans are good at charity and volunteerism--better than Europeans, statistics suggest. In crises like this one, despite the ways that race wounds and divides the country, charity is nearly color-blind. Racial bigotry no doubt inflected some reactions in ugly and shameful ways, but it does not account for the disastrous inadequacy of the overall response.

Inequality took the highest toll in New Orleans. Even though the African-American middle and professional classes have grown in recent decades, the wealth of black families in the United States remains on average only one-tenth that of whites. Families in poor, black neighborhoods like those of New Orleans often live on monthly checks, with few or no assets. The hurricane came at the end of the month, when cash was scarce or gone. Some 100,000 people in New Orleans had no car--a common situation for the poor in large cities. Public transport--mostly buses--is grossly inadequate in most of the United States, particularly in the South. The evacuation order came to people who often had literally no way to leave and who, had they found a way out, would have been stranded elsewhere with no money and nowhere to stay. (Not until the disaster was underway did Houston, Texas, a six-hour drive away, begin accepting refugees.) The handful of wealthy whites who remained in New Orleans appear to have been tourists who arrived by plane--who, like the local poor, had to depend on public transport and found they had no way to escape. As the law permits rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges of Paris, so also it ordered rich and poor alike to abandon New Orleans: but for many of the poor, the command came as a cruel--and deadly--practical joke. From health care to education to policing, American inequality constrains and distorts the lives of the poor; here it literally took them.

Why do Americans accept poverty that traps the poor in the path of an approaching disaster? Ironically, one reason is social optimism. Most Americans--about ninety percent, including most blacks--say they believe this is a just country, where the rules of social and economic life are fair and effort and opportunity are rewarded. (Little wonder, then, that twenty percent of Americans tell pollsters they believe themselves to be among the country's richest one percent, and another twenty percent say they expect to enter that charmed circle soon.) The flip side of this optimism is the suspicion that, if you end up poor or sick or alone, the fault must be in you, and the judgment belongs on you. It is the American habit to admire the rich and powerful and recoil from the weak and poor--even if the weak and poor include one's self. The result is a political culture where policies meant to aid the disadvantaged--such as welfare payments, universal health care, and racial preferences in hiring--are regarded as intrusions on the natural order. By contrast, Americans rallied in 2001 to repeal the federal tax on inheritance, enshrining the principle that what you earn you have the right not only to keep, but to pass on undiminished to your children and their children. The money lost to those tax cuts contributed to cuts in federal disaster preparation, and in other social programs. The kinds of policies that would have left the poor of New Orleans less trapped run counter to the American intuition that social life is already fair and favors the deserving.

The idea that poverty and wealth are natural also reflects a basic confusion about state and society. A major strain of American political culture has never admitted that the state has a part in ordering society. This strain is a type of romantic libertarianism: those who hold it believe that private relationships and private virtues--the family, the marketplace, and churches and voluntary associations--are not just important to society, but sufficient to maintain it. They regard the state as a source of intrusion and inefficiency at best, tyranny at worst.

Romantic libertarianism is a doctrine made for neglectful government. It is the doctrine of George W. Bush's Republican Party. The state exists in part to do what private citizens generally will not and cannot do: plan and execute collective action to avert faraway and uncertain disaster. The danger to New Orleans from a hurricane strike was long familiar. After an earthquake in California and a terrorist strike in New York, it was regarded as the leading threat to American lives. Yet after 2001, as tax cuts and the war in Iraq strained the federal budget, funding slipped for flood control and the maintenance of levees. President Bush put the federal agency that plans for and manages disasters in the hands of a political ally with no relevant competence. Preparation for disaster was conducted on gambler's principles--luck and, maybe, superstition--and not as if planning and public infrastructure mattered. Even as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, the government did little to enforce its "mandatory evacuation" order, or to gather and direct resources in anticipation of disaster. In a country where it is hard to throw a stone without hitting a power-boat or SUV, and where the civilian National Guard retains considerable resources at home even during its deployment to Iraq, people remained on rooftops, elevated highways, and levees for days, the victims of an apparent breakdown in the command and control of the rescue operation.

Some of the neglect was opportunistic, and ideology at best provided emotional comfort to the negligent. The Bush administration obsessively rewards its friends and punishes--or, if they are lucky, merely ignores--its enemies. New Orleans, which is poor, black, and Democratic, was never going to be high on this administration's list for infrastructure development or disaster-relief planning. But opportunism has its own philosophy: the supposition, sometimes inarticulate but often explicit, that because government is neither a necessity nor a high responsibility, the president and his allies can use its power and resources without principle. The limit condition of this attitude is the failure to provide order after Katrina struck. In this respect, New Orleans resembles Baghdad, another city where American failure to meet the basic responsibilities of governance created a moral disaster. American libertarians are always shocked and dismayed by spontaneous disorder, and take it as a judgment on the disorderly. It is partly that, of course, but first and foremost it is a judgment on those who duty was to keep order. Thus when President Bush declared of the tepid relief effort in New Orleans, "The results are not acceptable," the vacuity of his statement was stunning: "the results" were his responsibility, and the judgment he passed was either on himself or it was meaningless. In the event, it was meaningless.

The basis of this libertarian indifference is denial that in a complex society, private security and private virtue ultimately depend on the state's monopoly over violence. Private life, even at its most generous and imaginative and free, is conducted against the backdrop of state power: the power that enforces private contracts, distributes private property, and will jail or even kill the intruder who tries to force his way into a private home. Without that security, people become dangerous to one another--not because most people are predatory, but because some are, and in a world without law, paranoia and preemptive violence grow: man is not a wolf to man, but he can learn to be; the law and the state avert that lesson.

Such dangerous naivete also feeds on a kind of metaphysical optimism, a disbelief that anything good ever goes away or is destroyed. The religious belief in an afterlife may figure in here, but probably more important is the relative gentleness of American experience. Generations of Europeans in the last century grew up in cities and nations that war and totalitarianism had destroyed or made unrecognizable by the time they were adults. Nothing of that sort has happened here. September 11, 2001, which still looks likely to be an epoch-making event, destroyed a few blocks. The thought that an important American city is in some sense gone is staggering; it must have seemed a fantastical idea both to those charged with planning for it and to some in the city as the storm approached. Now we should know better; but, then, we should always have known better.

After the disaster of New Orleans--the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the social disaster of the failed response--there is no more room for the illusion that the virtues of charity and voluntarism are enough to keep people safe and well. This is to confuse their goodness with their effectiveness. They are virtues precisely because they express recognition that people are vulnerable and fragile, that we need one another to stay safe and alive. But the point of government is very different: it is to make people less acutely fragile, vulnerable in fewer ways. There is no risk--rather, no hope--that we can ever overcome our vulnerability; but the scenes from New Orleans are reminders of why reducing it has been the great purpose of modern government. They are also grim reminders of how imperfectly the world's richest and most powerful country has pursued that end.