Katrina’s next victims

Cultural disintegration is present when two or more strata so seperate that these become in effect distinct cultures; and also when culture at the upper group level breaks into fragments each of which represents one cultural activity alone.
t.s. eliot, notes towards the definition of culture

Eliot is writing about culture in an artistic literary sense; but his observation seems apt for the chasm opening between right and left in American politics and the great divide between the political activists in both parties and the public at large. Katrina underscored drifts which began with the Bush/Gore election and which have been widening ever since.

Democratic politics make certain baseline assumptions. They assume rough agreement as to what the broadest aims of government should be, they assume agreement as to the relative status of persons, they assume disinterested motivation in the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary - disagreements are about means, not ends. Most importantly, democracy assumes a shared culture robust enough to tolerate its more disparate strains.

For politics to work, the idea of a winner take all world is subsumed to the idea of pragmatic compromise.

The American political class and its media and entertainment arms seems to have lost sight of the essential civility which has to underlie a working democracy.

For the left the world is seen in terms of things which are Bush’s fault, things which might be Bush’s fault and things which might hurt Bush. Katrina went from a natural disaster to a racist dereliction of duty faster than the hurricane swept past New Orleans.

For the right Katrina served to underline the implicit liberal bias in the press and the gormlessness of state and local government.

In neither case did statesmen seem to be seeking to get on with the actual job of saving lives, cleaning up and considering how best to deal with a million refugees and a ruined city and region. The blogs were as bad if not worse than much of the mainstream media in looking for ways to spin a natural disaster for partisan advantage.

It may well be that the political cleavages in the United States have grown so vast that the committed on either side have become Eliot’s two cultures. Certainly it is possible for a politically active American to gain all his or her information from sources which reflect only their particular political position. And, increasingly, as red and blue extend from states to neighbourhoods, it is possible to almost never meet anyone whose politics are different from your own.

I wonder, though, if those two cultures have not, in their passion for purity and isolation from any contaminating thought which might challenge their orthodoxies and articles of faith, inadvertently created a third culture. The culture which, when faced with a million refugees does not wait for the finger pointing to end and the federal/state/municipal aid to arrive but rather gets to work finding clothes, toys, food, water, shelter and whatever else people need, one person at a time.

Despite the best efforts of pundits, bureaucracy, the chattering classes and assorted preachers, a million people were evacuated and have, somehow, managed to survive for two weeks away from their homes. This has not happened by accident and there is nothing in the least political about it. People, individuals, business owners, community groups, fire brigades, housewives, school boards, churches, volunteer organizations and local governments have spontaneously created the basics for a million of their fellow citizens. Some of this was planned, much of it was not.

Fifty years ago, art and literary criticism was read by hundreds of thousands of people. T.S. Elliot, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Clement Greenberg and a host of other commentators made good livings discussing novels and paintings seriously. But, slowly, the critical conversations became more and more technical. The academics drowned wit in waves of footnotes. Criticism became polemical and, shortly afterward, irrelevant to all but tenure committees. The public moved on.

As the left and the right of American political culture cease to be able to speak to each other for lack of common premises there is the very real danger the public will move on again. When you have worked twelve hour days for two weeks as a volunteer finding people shelter in your town, politicians arguing over when an emergency order should have been or was or might have been signed begins to look entirely divorced from your reality.

Unlike literary criticism in our world, politics will not cease in America; but it may be transformed by the first leader who manages to combine realism with a strong sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with politics as usual.

America has a rich tradition of populism and insurgency. From Teddy Roosevelt forward there have been men who simply stood outside the pieties of the existing political system and insisted that Americans deserved better. The gusts of warm air blowing from Washington and the zephyrs of accusation rising from Louisiana look like the sniping of politics as usual to the media partisans on both sides. What they may be missing is the growing realization of Americans that all the chat in the world is not rebuilding a single home or bringing a hot meal to one child.

Common wisdom has Katrina as a blow to Bush and a boon to the Democrats. In fact, it may well be the storm which destroys the rickety edifice of culture war polemics, celebrity finger pointing, (thanks Sean), CYA emergency response and, with luck, the dysfunctional political cultures which support them.

To the envy of the rest of the world, the American Constitution begins with the words, “We the People”. Right now, throughout the South and on up the Mississippi watershed, the people are helping the people deal with a natural catastrophe. As they do they may well be asking how well their politicians and media have served them during this crisis.

Politicians of every party should worry when people start asking questions like that. In the end, it is not any particular politician or political party which is held to scrutiny - it is the entire system and the class of professional politicians which it supports. At the moment that system is about as popular as a ball of fire ants on a New Orleans roof.

Written by jay on September 14th, 2005 with 4 comments.
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