Post-Katrina Mau-Mauing

George Will on the "racist indifference" meme that is flaring up on the Left:

America's always fast-flowing river of race-obsessing has overflowed its banks, and last Sunday on ``This Week'' Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois' freshman Democrat, applied to the expression of old banalities a fluency that would be beguiling were it without content. Unfortunately, it included the requisite lament about the president's inadequate ``empathy" and an amazing criticism of the government's ``historic indifference'' and its ``passive indifference'' that ``is as bad as active malice.'' The senator, 44, is just 30 months older than the ``war on poverty'' that President Johnson declared in January 1964. Since then the indifference that is as bad as active malice has been expressed in more than $6.6 trillion of antipoverty spending, strictly defined.

The senator is called a ``new kind of Democrat,'' which often means one with new ways of ignoring evidence discordant with old liberal orthodoxies about using cash -- much of it spent through liberalism's ``caring professions'' -- to cope with cultural collapse. He might, however, care to note three not-at-all recondite rules for avoiding poverty: graduate from high school, don't have a baby until you are married, don't marry while you are a teenager. Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal.

Read the whole thing. It is undeniable that Katrina exposed some major societal cracks. Will's point is to highlight the tired old knee-jerk Leftist reaction that more money should have been and now should be thrown at the problems, and to suggest that the issues go much deeper than that and require responses on a more fundamental level - responses that encourage self-empowerment and responsibility.

In essence, this is the old give a man a fish/teach a man to fish debate. Even if this were a pure question, those of us who favor teaching face an uphill struggle in winning the trust of those we wish to help: handing out cash in various forms is an immediate, high-profile, "feel good" action, while setting up the infrastructure for self-reliance involves a lot of behind the scenes drudgery, hard work on the part of everyone involved and delayed returns. This imbalance is rich for the kind of demagoguery one would expect from, say, Ted Kennedy, and which we're beginning to see out of people even like Obama, who claims to be a "New Democrat".

But of course, there's more to it than that, because this is politics, that Hobbesian arena where Consideration Number One is self-preservation. I'm not going to go into a whole big rant on the Liberal Plantation except to say that somehow the metaphor seems even more appropriate when talking about south Louisiana. I am not talking about all Leftists here. There are plenty of good-hearted people on the Left who genuinely believe that the Welfare State and its Big Government ilk are the proper, moral response to issues of race and poverty. What I'm talking about are Lefties who recognize, but who would never openly admit, that it is not in their political self interest to promote ideas and policies that, although they would genuinely benefit the poor, would also reduce their dependancy on the government and therefore erode the Left's political base and reduce its power. To go back to the first metaphor, the guy who owns the fish market has no interest in seeing his customers turned into fishermen themselves. And if you don't think that this sort of calculation goes on way, way up in the Donk hierarchy, then all I can say is bless you for your innocence.

This is going to be ugly.

UPDATE: James Joyner reports that, at least for the moment, the public seems to be doing a pretty good job at not letting itself get caught up in the political hatchetry.

UPDATE DEUX: Brendan Miniter has more on the failure of the Big Government approach.

UPDATE TROIS: Ith passes along an article about another group suffering in the wake of the storm.

UPDATE QUATRE: On the other hand, Jim Pinkerton writing at TechCentralStation argues that the MSM was able to, if you'll pardon the expression, flood the zone and thus gain the advantage in framing the debate.

UPDATE CINQ: Go read. Yow!

UPDATE SIX: Oh, just go visit Villainous Cassandra already. She's got this thing nailed down. Click n' scroll, as they say.