Any brief, unexpressed hope that I had that the catastrophe in New Orleans would change the direction of things in this country has been crushed by the conservatives in my office this week. Most of these guys are not the hardcore, radical types. They’re solidly Republican in the “welfare types are lazy” and “what’s wrong with saying the pledge at school or having a prayer at football games” kind of way. Not terribly reflective fellows, but also not bad guys. Mostly, they aren’t armed with racist assumptions and rhetoric about liberals being traitors. The more moderate third to maybe half of them even expressed things like “I’d have voted Edwards-Kerry, but not Kerry-Edwards” after the election. They all also have at least a little bit of that “the little guy’s gettin’ screwed” populism that the GOP has somehow convinced them can be fixed by the “free market”.

These guys are mostly dismissing reports about misconduct by police and national guard in New Orleans as being conspiracy theory crap. They question whether or not their tax dollars should be going to help house and feed all of these people with no skills, who are likely to just become permanent wards of the state in their view. Moreover, some of them even question whether there’s a duty to help at all beyond evacuating people before and after the storm. They quickly dismiss any criticism of Bush’s handling of this as Democratic spin. Facts about changes in the budgets or organizational structure of the Corps of Engineers, FEMA, or the National Guard are dismissed as “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. I would imagine that the “hard right” in this country is even worse.

If what I’m seeing really represents the moderately conservative to conservative half or more of our country, we’re really screwed. In so many things, these guys have proven to be a good barometer of the more conservative half of mainstream America over the last couple of years. I hope that maybe they aren’t this time.

Also, on a somewhat related note, there’s this column in the post.

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