Remember good old President Mondale?

At one point, Right Wing pundits and Congressional apologists for George Bush, desperate to protect the President from having to take responsibility for his own failures, tried to blame the disaster in New Orleans on poor people.

The problem was, they said, that those darn poor people didn't have the sense to get rich enough ahead of time to afford cars so they could flee the city.  Poverty being always only the result of bad character, the poor of New Orleans suffered from their own bad character as much as from the hurricane and more than from the Bush Leaguers' incompetence, inaction, and carelessness.

This apparently didn't play so well.  Even if you buy the argument that most poor people are poor simply because they are too lazy to be anything else, leaving children, old people, sick people, and the occasional tourist to swim for it just because they had the bad luck to be related to deadbeat dads and welfare queens probably struck even the most Scrooge-like of conservatives as, well, too Scrooge-like.

The plan now seems to be to go back to blaming the local Democratic officials, like Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin, and if that doesn't work, spread the blame so widely that only a little of it butters George Bush.

But this frustrates some of the true believers who just can't bear to let the poor off the hook.  The ever-ingenious Rich Lowry of the National Review has found a way to blame the poor indirectly.  He blames Liberal social programs for keeping the poor poor.

I'm surprised no one thought of it before this.  It's another old song from the Republican repertoire.  The poor are poor because of their own bad character, goes the chorus, of course, but the verse is like this:  Liberal government programs encourage, foster, and make virtues out of the vices that keep the poor poor.  You know, because not letting their children starve, not leaving them to attend rotten schools, not letting the old and young die of treatable diseases, not forcing them to live in squalid housing, all that just makes them lazy and dependent and (shhhh) shiftless.

At this point, a good small-government conservative who knows his hymn book will sing out that after all these years of Liberal social programs, poor children still go hungry, their schools are still rotten, the young and old still have no reliable medical care, and their homes are often squalid, no better than shacks in some places, lost amid noxious slums in others.

Lowry is just such a well-versed good churchman:

New Orleans was partly a catastrophe of the welfare state, which has subsidized inner cities with countless billions of dollars throughout the past 30 years, with little to show for it except more social breakdown.

Lowry meant 40 years, I'm sure.  He just can't face the fact that more than a generation has passed since Lyndon Johnson's time.  Must be a Baby Boomer.

Now, of course, the implication of this argument is that if you can't guarantee a Utopia then you should not bother to even try to fix any problems.  Another way of saying it is that if you can't save everybody, you might as well let everybody drown, which was apparently the thinking behind locking the doors to steerage aboard the Titanic.

But besides the argument's basic cruelty, there is its historical amnesia.

Missing from the argument is any memory of Richard Nixon, benign neglect, Ronald Reagan, soaring deficits, Newt Gingrich, and two George Bushes.

Apparently there have been no Republican governors or Republican-controlled state legislatures either.

The argument depends on ignoring the fact that over the last 40 years the Republicans have either run the government or had a strong enough hand in the running of it that they have been able to thwart, sabotage, stymie, underfund, pervert, or plain mismanage just about every meaningful large-scale "Liberal" big goverment social program.

To hear the Republicans tell it, and then believe them, you have to live in an alternate universe in which Hubert Humphrey beat Nixon, Jimmy Carter won a second term, Walter Mondale found the beef and followed up Jimmy with two terms of his own, and Bill Clinton, with no raging deficit to get under control and no Republican Congressional majority to get in his way, was able to insitute universal health care, expand and not end Welfare, and just generally give us the Village that Hillary says it takes, and that somehow all this led to exactly the same conditions the poor find themselves in this Republicans-ascendent universe.

The way things are now, the way big government social programs work now, or fail to work, is the result of deliberate Republican sabotage.   As Matt Yglesias points out in TAPPED, whenever they can, the Republicans choose the option that looks like it will do the worst job.

This is the basic dilemma the right faces. It's committed to the view that the government shouldn't help poor people. But things happen from time to time that make it politically imperative to do something to help poor people. And if the government responded to those circumstances in ways that were efficient and effective, that would generate more political momentum for further poor-helping measures. Thus, the right finds itself forced to implement policies it knows to be ineffective.

I call the sabotage deliberate but in a lot of cases it's also unconscious.  Republicans don't know they're out to wreck things because a.) they tell themselves out loud over and over again enough times so that the believe it that they are doing what's best for the poor in the long run and b.) what drives them at all times, in all their choices, including inspiring their antipathy to helping the poor, is their absolute horror at the thought of paying taxes---they quite often make the wrong choice, pick the policy that will not work or work well, because it is the cheapest!

This is another way they are able to cover their heartlessness with a veneer of virtue.  They aren't being greedy and uncharitable.  They are being thrifty and prudent.

But whether they are consciously or unconsciously doing it, the effect is the same and the motivation is the same, get the government out of the way of their making every single last dime they can imagine making.

If the Goverment is a car setting out to give every one a ride to work, then for 40 years the Republicans have been puncturing the tires, pouring sand in the gas tank, stealing the distributer cap, and, whenever they can get their hands on the wheel, driving it straight into the nearest ditch and then, pointing to the wreckage as the tow truck backs up to it, saying, See, this proves that people were meant to walk.

And they do this so that they don't have to chip in on gas.

(The link to Yglesias's post comes courtesy of Avedon Carol.  Thanks to Charles Todd for the link to Lowry's nonsense.)

Comments

[Viscount LaCarte]

Awesome post and insights Lance. I will be adding your argument to my own repetoire.

Here is a really nice bit of satire, courtesy of Mr. Cranky.

[Daniel Koenig]

Excellent analysis, Lance. My father contended that Republicans were so enamored of their parent's fawning over their first successful bowel movement as children - "look at what a nice pile you've made" - that they spend their entire lives focused on making a nice pile and little else.

[coturnix]

I just love your way with words! That car metaphor is something to remember for the next time I see the Uncle and the Brother-In-Law!

[blue girl]

GREAT post Mr. Mannion --

And Daniel K: AWESOME comment. That is too funny.

(Lance, don't be jealous of the all caps -- oh, wait...I can. fix. that. OK -- equal kudos all around --:)

[Lance]

Hey, Daniel, no upstaging the blogger! And no making him laugh so much he spits out his coffee either!

Coturnix,

Thanks. I'm kind of fond of that one. In fact, it's so good I'm worried I must have stolen it from somewhere unconsicouly. But I have the notebook in which I worked it out through several drafts---and the notebook's from 15 years ago! So I'm pretty sure it's my own.
The idea behind it thought isn't mine. Lots of people have noticed what the Republicans have been up to since Nixon.

Blue Girl, you and I need to talk.

[carla]

The title of this post reminds me of a class I took in college entitled "American Political Economy". The prof categorized the Presidential candidates (yes..I was in college during the Mondale campaign..geezerette that I am). Mondale came out as the most positive candidate..best able to manage the needs of the country.

The fact that he lost so badly is a tribute to the disgusting politics of Lee Atwater.

[Greg]

Most excellent metaphor!!! The single-best description of Republicans I've ever seen. My old favorite was:
Republicans: Know that God gave them two feet, but refuse to use them to move forward.
Thanks for a great post (as usual)!

[Jennifer]

I, too, loved the car metaphor and have passed it on giving credit where credit is due.
On a different note- and this may be old news, but did you know that if you type "failure" into Google you get GW Bush's bio as a top hit??? Someone's having fun!

[Pepper]

It's also bad economics. Fiscal conservatives in particular don't get the basic concept of prevention.

Like Nawlins ... imagine if someone had invested in the levee. Sure would have saved a lot of money. THAT would have been thrify and prudent.

The next time a Republican tells me they're good with money, I'll have to suppress a giggle. And the next time a Republican calls me a hedonist, I'll say they are truly the "eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow the rest of you die" crowd.

[hilzoy]

Excellent. One minor point: Lowry is by no means the first to blame it on liberals. The most amazing version I've heard is here. It's a video of one Mark Williams, talk show host; here's my transcript of one of the things he said:

"The American black population has been the prototype for an entire race of people being turned into a group of dependents of the government. And these people you saw at the Convention Center, the people who were trapped there -- trapped, I'm using that word very loosely -- screaming 'we want help, we want help', for four or five days, yet they didn't bother to even try to help themselves. Unfortunately, in this country the Democrat party, the same party that fought a civil war to keep slaves, filibustered a hundred years to prevent the implementation of civil rights, has now completed the reenslavement of blacks by turning them into passive, totally dependent economically, and for the common sense to walk out of the way of a hurricane, on the government."

Words fail.

[Earl Bockenfeld]

I, too, loved the car metaphor. Another good summary of GOP ethics from Driftglass, Fuck Everybody But Me!

John Scalzi's essay on 'Being Poor offers a great post to remind us that, there are things you endure when poor that you never forget and still, there are things that others have endured that I can hardly imagine.

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is Goodwill underwear.

Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.

Being poor is knowing where the shelter is.

Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

Being poor is hoping your kids don't have a growth spurt.

Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn't bought first.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn't leave.

[Exiled in NJ]

An amazing little essay, and made more amazing in that you avoided quoting Scott Fitzgerald on the very rich, or using "I've been rich, I've been poor" which Jeeves lists perhaps six sources for authorship.

Seems to me people's wealth reaches a tipping point at which they can't bear to lose any of it, and thus they turn to the party that wants to keep the tax man at bay, allow them to die and pass on their mother lode untouched, and in general, be real pricks.

The key to their success is that through appealing to the emotions of many who have not reached that same tipping point, they have convinced them to vote GOP. If Rove, Atwater, deLay, Cheyney and Bush had been around 70 years ago, Tom Joad would have been working to repeal the 'Death Tax' rather than moving his tribe to California.

[mac macgillicuddy]

Idiot fathead Rush Limbaugh has also been ranting about how the hurricanes have exposed a "failed welfare state" that was created by liberals.

They all sound like my 8-year-old who (only sometimes) fails in his reponsibilities and then says, "I didn't make the mess, someone else did!" The implication being that he should be excused from his responsibility.

(Incidentally, often he did make the mess -- but, he's 8!!!!!)