Levees Not War

“Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.”

—Alan Wolfe, “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern”
Washington Monthly, July/August 2006

We have long believed that if either party takes governing seriously, it is the Democrats. Conservative Republicans do not seek office in order to govern but rather to hold power—power to cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations, to privatize the functions of government that can’t be abolished outright, to weaken labor unions, and to give the oil industry and the military/security complex anything they want.

The article below by political scientist Alan Wolfe explains in convincing detail the deadly consequences of the conservatives’ unbelief in governing and reveals why a deliberately weakened FEMA was unable to respond to the destruction and suffering wrought by Hurricane Katrina:

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Just supposing our national government were ever to be infiltrated, somehow occupied by invisible agents of a foreign power (without the public quite realizing it)—If this happened and then the public somehow became aware that the government had fallen into the hands of men loyal to an alien power, then would the people yank the usurpers out of office at once?

For what people—what free and rational people whose votes and taxes empower the government—would willingly entrust the powers of public spending, taxation, foreign relations, and war powers to officials loyal to a foreign power? . . . or to any authority acting without attention to or concern for the public well-being?

Would that government be called a representative democracy?