President-elect McCain, his worshipful media coterie in tow, visited New Orleans and declared that the response to Hurricane Katrina had been "disgraceful and terrible," and, according to the doting New York Times, "pledged it would never happen again." The corporate media seemed especially relieved that the "senator from Arizona" had distanced himself from the toxic Texan currently residing in the McCain’s next mansion.
Yet the federal response to Katrina was the natural outgrowth of "conservatism" as it has come to be practiced by the mainstream of the party of Lincoln. The calamity was not an aberration. It was pretty much what would be expected from the combination of ideology, policy and practice from today’s "conservatives."
Maybe the "senator from Arizona" will redefine conservatism. The media desperately want him to be Barry Goldwater (I hear from excellent sources that the elderly Barry, a real senator from Arizona, was dismissive of the carpetbagger McCain). But even Goldwater never ran the government, never contended with the issues facing a 21st century, continental, diverse empire/nation. My experience is that McCain is not much of a hard-core ideologue, except for being a tightwad, a naysayer and, oddly for a combat veteran, trigger happy with the armed forces and eager for foreign adventures.
So what will McCain Conservatism be?
More precisely: how does he see the role of the federal government?
Under more than a quarter century of "conservative" rule, including Clinton’s impotence under a Republican Congress, the federal government has gotten bigger and more intrusive. Except for the Clinton era, it has racked up a debt that now constrains American foreign policy and poses a huge risk to the nation’s future competitiveness.
It would be salutary for the nation if McCain delivered the conservatism of the true believers. In other words, a severely limited federal government that resembled the Washington of the Coolidge years. This would entail eliminating Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, assorted "liberal" court decisions, farm subsidies, almost every program. The federal government would have the duty to provide for the common defense, and not much more. (Coolidge worshipers on the right overlook the fact that he was suspicious of a large military and, for that matter, what he called "the privileged classes"). But this is American conservatism. So perhaps a conservative -voting nation deserves a taste of it.
But we know that won’t happen, because it would result in conservatism’s banishment to the dustbin of history.
So we come to the conservative conundrum. The American people like big government, but they are suckers for conservative rhetoric and promises, as long as they don’t hurt much, or if they hurt poor, black folks. Tax cuts have been especially powerful, and the television-addled public can’t connect these supposed "rights" with the concurrent degradation of schools, roads, etc. Movement conservatives would love to go back to Silent Cal, but electoral reality keeps that from happening.
Meanwhile, three forces have come into play. One is that the business wing of the Republican party used conservatism to deregulate and game the economy to its liking, the result being millions of good jobs lost, along with the props of a middle class, such a pensions. This was abetted by the free-market wing of the party, which believes in market forces with the unswerving faith that Soviet theoraticians applied to Marx.
The second force is a combination of venality and incompetence that has wrecked much of the government. Actually in government, Republicans use their free-market bromides to enact policies that enrich their friends and themselves. The contracting out of the war in Iraq is only one example. They appoint cronies based on loyalty rather than competence. With the religious right’s takeover of the party, an added wrinkle is the outright denial of scientific evidence and its suppression in policy making. McCain’s Pastor Hagee claims New Orleans got what it deserved for "its level of sin."
Finally is the Republican hatred of the federal government. If GOP officials can’t go back to Coolidge days immediately, at least they can "starve the beast," with a slow denial of funds to federal agencies and draconian, demoralizing policies aimed at federal employees.
Put all this together and you almost have modern "conservatism" in power. But we must also add the Cheney "unitary executive" aspect — where over seven years, more power has been usurped by the president than at any time in American history. Sorry conservatives, this is not what Hamilton had in mind when he wrote of "energy in the executive." The Constitution has been badly wounded. Some might worry, fatally.
Interestingly, when the bluff of movement conservatives is called, they change course. In theory, most responsibilities of the federal government should be done by the states. States might also raise taxes, helped by the savings from the low-tax, small federal government. Yet when California and other states sought to limit greenhouse gases, the Bush administration intervened to prevent it. When states seek to help themselves, nationally funded conservative activist groups work to derail the efforts. I can only conclude that they want the law of the jungle, the rule of the powerful ("property rights") and devil take the hindmost. Many of the hindmost were trapped in New Orleans.
President-elect McCain will inherit this entire contraption and he couldn’t change it if he wanted to. So far, I don’t get the sense he does. He promises even more tax cuts. About the only spending cut he imagines is his longtime dream of killing passenger rail service, leaving Americans even more dependent on a horrid airline industry or the personal car.
As a senator, McCain did little for Arizona, leaving the real work to Jon Kyl, a conservative but a hardworking lawmaker. From the start, McCain saw himself as a national figure. His response to pretty much anything involving his "home" state was "@#$%! no!" The exception was work for a wealthy developer in Arizona’s shadowy world of federal land swaps. Ironically, Arizona is also one of the states most dependent on the federal government. So where will his newfound activism, his vow to "never let" a Katrina response happen again, come from?
Maybe McCain would personally come to a New Orleans disaster of the future to personally take charge. Unfortunately, he could be commanding federal agencies weakened by years of cuts and "conservative" misgovernance. And the community of interests in the "conservative" coalition wants to keep it that way — too much power and profit are at stake.
Ironically, that disaster might be when the air conditioning, gasoline and water go out in August in Phoenix. Could the "senator from Arizona" even find his way "home"?