In the discussions of the failed governmental response to Katrina you will often hear that the problem isn't ideology or philosophy. The problem is fundamental competance. Although Bush's lack of basic competance in crisis has become a defining feature of his Presidency, I believe that the root causes of the failed rescue of the people of New Orleans are deeper than individual managerial deficiencies. I believe that the horrible events of the past week, in which thousands needlessly have died, call on us to build a more just society.
There has been a three thousand year dialogue in Western civilization of the meaning of justice. In Plato's Republic, Augustine's City of God, More's Utopia, the meaning of justice has been worked and reworked. A few years ago, Francis Fukayama claimed that we had solved the problem. That the discussion was at an end. This is patently false. How would you describe the ideal community? What is the Good City? What is the meaning of justice? The catastrophe in New Orleans is more than a narrative of incompetance. It is the result of politics. It should be obvious to anyone that where we have been going is not the way.
I'll try in this diary to to put a few ideas forward to reflect my own thoughts on the main ideas of justice underlying the political struggle in America. I hope we can have a good discussion. It goes without saying that our party has been in ideological retreat since Reagan. Whether this is a cause of losing politics or the effect of losing politics is one of our main arguments we have here in the threads. Maybe it's both. However, I believe that New Orleans has changed everything. Truths which were hidden or difficult to articulate are now easy to see and easy to express.
In Book I of Plato's Republic, Thrasymachus, who is well-known for the assertion, "Justice is the advantage of the stronger," violently disagreed with the outcome of Socrates' discussion with Polemarchus about justice. Socrates counters by forcing him to admit that there is some standard of wise rule and then arguing that this suggests a standard of justice beyond the advantage of the stronger.
In modern America, I think there are two main philosophies of justice in conflict, Objectivism (or Libertarianism) versus Utilitarianism (or its related ideas in the Political Liberalism of John Rawls). Libertarian ideas had their most famous advocacy within the Objectivism of Ayn Rand (although distinctions are often claimed between these communities). In Objectivism, the proper moral purpose of one's life is to pursue one's own rational self-interest. The only moral social system is full laissez-faire capitalism, with a government strictly limited to courts, police, and a military. This philosophy opposes itself to collectivist `socialist' philosophies. In the Objectivist or Libertarian worldview, the individual is the only agent with `rights'. The just society is economically organized solely by the free, private transactions of individuals.
While Utilitarianism is not opposed to free market capitalism. A particular society's economic system is merely seen as a means to an end. Bentham's formulated the rule of utility: that the good is whatever brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. The Political Liberalism of Rawls makes important adjustments to Utilitarianism, by essentially creating an individualist framework to justify utilitarian ideals. His ideas can be distilled to these two propositions:
a) Each person has an equal claim to basic rights and liberties.
b) Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first there is fair equality of opportunity, and second, the economy ensures benefit to the least advantaged members of society.
We must demand a politics of the greatest good to rebuild the fabric of our communities. If anything, the events in New Orleans of the past week are devastating to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. In the face of a genuine crisis affecting a great city, libertarianism stands revealed as a moral catastrophe. Individuals in the poor neighborhoods were abandoned. They were on their own. Look at heroic individual, the old man floating in his attic or the baby dead on the sidewalk outside the Convention Center. Thousands died for lower taxes. Not only did they lack the individual capacity to escape. Our ability as a society to act collectively to rescue them, FEMA,has been degraded by the libertarian magical thinking in control of our government. The GOP were trying to privatize FEMA.
As a party, I think it's past time to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off. It's been a hard twenty five years to be a Democrat, but there has never been a moment so utterly revealing of the ideological bankruptcy of the GOP.
Without the shining city on the hill, America is just a seedy story of people on the make. New Orleans changed everything, and it must never be permitted to happen again.