New Orleans is destroyed, the Gulf Coast's infrastructure is in tatters and tens of thousands of citizens are without jobs as gas prices nationwide rise to record levels. Television sets brought the destruction into all of our homes. But this White House seemed unable to grasp the misery unfolding before its own eyes.

Instead, President Bush treated the disaster as if he were a loutish frat boy when he joked to Americans that he had had good times partying in New Orleans as a young man and hoped in the near future to be able to sit on Senator Trent Lott's rebuilt porch in Mississippi.

But to really understand what went wrong with the Administration's shameful response, we need to look beyond Bush's blame-the-other, pass-the-buck and who-gives-a-____ attitude.

The Administration's ineptitude, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it, was "a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good."

The government's failure was the result not of "simple incompetence" in the Administration but "of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify the role of government in American life," LA Times columnist Robert Scheer argued. And as the Financial Times observed, "For the past quarter-century in Washington...US politics has been dominated by the conviction that what was wrong with America would be solved by getting government off the people's backs"--an attitude that contributed to the criminal inaction on the part of the federal government.

Indeed, you could see what the dog-eat-dog, antigovernment philosophy of the far right has reaped in the bloated bodies and raw sewage in New Orleans's flooded streets.

That philosophy has attained new power under President Bush. While the Louisiana Army Corps of Engineers proposed $18 billion in projects that would have shored up the protective levees, improved flood control and perhaps prevented last week's breaches in the levees' walls, none of these projects were funded. Instead, the White House cut the Corps' budget and actually proposed a further 20 percent cut in 2006.

Which raises the question: What steps should we take to repair the breach that has become so apparent in our social fabric?

Here's one answer: Let's seize this moment by launching a twenty-first-century New Deal--with programs modeled after the Works Progress Administration, updated for these times. Why?

A modernized version of the WPA would help our nation to rebuild New Orleans and Mississippi's Gulf Coast, and repair the racial and class divides that we saw in such dramatic relief these past few days. It would rebuild and improve our nation's public infrastructure and (hopefully) alter the terms of our political discourse in the years ahead.

After all, Roosevelt's New Deal was so much more than simply a vehicle for providing economic relief to citizens in need. It gave Americans a sense of solidarity, a new social contract, as well as the chance to go to work. It also helped bring the country's infrastructure into the twentieth century.

Take a moment to consider these statistics: The WPA, according to historian William Leuchtenburg, "built or improved more than 2,500 hospitals, 5,900 school buildings, 1,000 airport landing fields, and nearly 13,000 playgrounds."

When the hurricane happened the poverty rate in New Orleans stood at 28 percent--more than double the national average. Fully half the children of Louisiana now live in poverty, the second-highest child poverty rate in the country (its neighbor, Mississippi, is number one). And as if to underscore the poverty of our politics, the same week the hurricane devastated the poorest regions the Census Bureau released a report that found the number of Americans living in poverty has climbed again--for the fourth straight year under President Bush.

African-Americans, who are two-thirds of the city's population, suffered the most in the hurricane's wake. As Professor Mark Naison wrote in a letter circulating on the web, this event is nothing short of "a humanitarian challenge of unprecedented proportions."

It showed "how deeply divided our nation is and how far our social fabric has been strained" by the Iraq war and by "policies which have widened the gap between rich and poor."

A post-New Orleans WPA could help to spark a new and desperately needed moral struggle for economic rights. It could provide jobs to Louisiana and Mississippi's poor and promote the goals of equality, justice and economic opportunity across American society.

(Bush's approach, in contrast, favors cronyism. Last week, Halliburton's stock hit a fifty-two-week high, presumably because Dick Cheney's former colleagues may reap the benefits of this tragedy securing government contracts to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Bush's approach has been a complete failure for the poor, elderly and largely African-American population of New Orleans.)

A WPA-style program could also begin to address the related crisis of the inner cities--a crisis that, as the Center for American Progress points out, this Administration has contributed to--as it has "repeatedly slashed job training [to the tune of more than $500 million] and vocational education programs."

The Milton Eisenhower Foundation has argued that the federal government should fund 1.25 million public-sector inner-city jobs. (Its website lays out a series of "what work" programs.)

We need a twenty-first-century WPA to restore the infrastructure not only in Louisiana and Mississippi, but in every state in America. As Representative Dennis Kucinich said this past week, the task ahead that is required to rebuild New Orleans includes a need for "new levees, new roads, bridges, libraries, schools, colleges and universities and...all public institutions, including hospitals." The government's highest priority should be on affordable housing and public infrastructure, not on casinos and luxury hotels, which skew development and contribute to environmental degradation.

We're "the only major industrial society that is not...renewing and expanding its public infrastructure," the Eisenhower Foundation reported. Instead of pork barrel spending on absurd bridges like "Don Young's Way" in Alaska, let's have the federal government spend our money wisely to modernize our hospitals, highways, universities and other institutions.

Senator Kennedy said in a Senate floor speech this week that "we can't just fix the hole in the roof. We need to rebuild the whole foundation." He proposed establishing "a New Orleans and Gulf Coast Redevelopment Authority modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority in its heyday." His good idea is to "plan, help fund and coordinate for the reconstruction of that damaged region."

Finally, we must seek to upend twenty-five years of right-wing political dogma that is responsible for what went wrong in responding to this disaster.

We need a new politics of shared sacrifice and a renewed commitment to a politics of shared prosperity--with a federal government playing a vital role in creating a fairer, more just, full-employment economy. These proposals are common sense ideas; how could they be considered heretical in the hurricane's wake?

This is a moment ripe to reshape Americans' view of government. A twenty-first-century version of the WPA would halt the dismantling and begin the rebuilding of our nation's communities, of lives enmeshed in deep poverty and squalor, and provide some hope that the horrific abandonment by government of thousands of citizens will be an aberration, not a nightmarish portent of what lies ahead.

© 2005 The Nation

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