Sacking the New Deal

... and the poor with it.

This is a Financial Times article about what went wrong with the federal government response to Hurricane Katrina and why. It has several very good points, but the following analysis is particularly significant to me:

... For the past quarter century in Washington, since the Republican Ronald Reagan rode a conservative backlash all the way to the presidency, 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.

In Washington, the Republican orthodoxy that reigns at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue has dictated that taxes can go down but never up.

[...]

With the New Deal in the 1930s, helping those who could not help themselves became a mission that spawned a vast expansion of government's role. After a generation of determined effort the conservative movement has succeeded in squelching that mission. In the aftermath of Katrina, its success appears to have come at high cost.

Government exists to provide goods and services (like highways, schools, police) to everyone, but specifically to the poor, who wouldn't otherwise have any means to afford such things.

Democrats, and left-leaning governments in general, usually tend to care for the needy more than right-leaning (read, Republican) governments. I hope that in the Katrina aftermath the underprivileged will realize that their interests are best served by having Democrats in power, not Republicans.