[Cross-posted from Democracy in Progress.]
The White House Homeland Security Staff this week released its post-mortem on Hurricane Katrina, with a review of lessons learned and a list of 125 recommendations. Predictably, the report contains the usual fawning references to His Majesty the President, and 28 occurrences of the term "faith-based". The first words of Chapter 1 of this report about a hurricane are "Terrorists still plot their evil deeds." (I'm not kidding.)
The report limits its scope to disaster preparedness, so it doesn't address the biggest problem exposed by the hurricane, which was the short-sightedness of capital investment decisions that allowed New Orleans to be protected by inadequate levees. It's interesting reading in spite of all that, especially Appendix A, which has the 125 recommendations. If you're willing to plow through them, you're rewarded with the clearest picture yet of the implications of the "Big-Government Conservatism" that is now in control of the country. And I mean in control.
A casual observer might perceive that much of the inadequate response to the Katrina disaster might be averted by better coordination among levels of government, clearer delineation of authority, better communications, and practice. If one of the main reasons for having a government is to deal with issues like this, then recommendations concerned with improving the way government operates would seem to be called for. Indeed, some of the recommendations rightly focus on communication and planning issues within the Federal government and with state and local government. In this area the report has some good ideas, such as cross-participation in planning activities and even staff rotation. If the report would stop here, it would be a great step forward and could be implemented in short order.
Unfortunately, the report goes far, far beyond making government more effective. The 125 recommendations include 68 references to the Department of Defense, including allowing the military to direct disaster response operations within the borders of the United States. Recommendation 23, for instance, encourages military commanders to plan for taking over civilian control on their own volition, without the consent of constitutional local authorities. Several of the recommendations call for DOD in peacetime to take over essential planning, resource allocation, and management functions that would normally be under State government control. The report describes a vision of America as a militaristic society, where civilian institutions are partially controlled by the military and every individual adopts a bunker mentality of vigilence and submission to an all-knowing and all-powerful benevolent leader. It's a vision that Chairman Mao and Dick Cheney would both heartily embrace. Much like the situation in Iraq, the "conservative" solution to every problem is to throw the military at it.
Prominent among the recommendations are calls to subsume and co-opt non-governmental institutions, including the media, charities, businesses, and "faith-based organizations." For example, recommendation 38 says, "Charities and faith based organizations should be fully integrated into resource planning and be incorporated into the supply chain in their local areas." In other words, why not make the Salvation Army part of the real Army? To add to all the worries and responsibilities our local priest already has, now he can add reporting to the local military command structure. I don't think so. If Wal-Mart was willing to ship a few truckloads of water to New Orleans on a moment's notice for Katrina, well maybe next time they'll allow the military to take over their logistics network. Fat chance.
Conservatives are not all alike. What we see at work in Washington today is the type of conservatism that features top-down command and control, highly constrained personal freedom, and admiration of the military as a model for all of society. In this sense, Americans understand the word "conservative" in exactly the same way as a Soviet citizen would. Even if you admire the US military for its amazing capabilities, which most of us do, they aren't the solution to every problem. They aren't the best people to be directing traffic in Baghdad, pulling over dilapidated pickup trucks in the Arizona desert, or delivering water to disaster areas.
The framers of our constitution didn't make us a military dictatorship, for good reason. They created a system of checks and balances, and distributed power, to try to make it impossible for a militaristic top-down hierarchical society to form. In our history, before and after the writing of the Constitution, there have been genuine national emergencies where the nation's continued existence was truly in question. Even then, our leaders didn't see fit to make allowances to suspend any part of the Constitution for any real or imagined emergency. They had faith in our Constitution, and we should too.