New Orleans and America's Credibility

Listening to the BBC on the radio tonight brought to my mind the effect of the images from N.O. on the world's view of America, especially right now when our government is trying forcefully to promote democracy and progress in the Middle East.  The horrible situation at the Convention Center as of Thursday night -- thousands of mostly poor people, stuck in the city often for reasons related to their poverty, with the various authorities seemingly losing control and inexplicably (so far as I can see) failing for two full days to get water and food to the heat-stricken people -- dramatizes the severe problems we ourselves have, "the unacknowledged inequalities" in David Brooks' words.  It's more and more apparent that the mess can't be chalked up just to the natural disaster; there have also been disasters involving governments and societal structures, as well as some criminal acts by individuals.

The large number of people around the world who view America's assertion of moral leadership as arrogant and hypocritical will see these images as powerful confirmation for their belief.  The terrorists will certainly make hay of it.  How can America preach to the world, they will say, when it has such horrible problems festering right below the surface, and inherent in its own system of individualism and competitiveness?  Reinhold Niebuhr described the phenomenon almost perfectly more than 50 years ago in The Irony of American History:  "The progress of American culture toward hegemony in the world community as well as toward the ultimate in standards of living has brought us everywhere to limits where our ideals and norms are brought under ironic indictment."

It's unfair and unwarranted to treat every moral failing by America as evidence of hypocrisy.  No human individual or group can stand for ideals without also failing to meet them.  But there's also some legitimacy in asking a nation to fix its own serious problems before -- or at least at the same time as -- it undertakes aggressively to fix others.'

It's now a familiar thesis that Brown v. Board of Education and other federal government moves against segregation were motivated in part by the need to shore up America's image among people around the world who were choosing, during the Cold War, between capitalist democracy and Communism.  See, e.g., Mary Dudziak, Brown as a Cold War Case, 91/1 Journal of American History (June 2004), abstract here.  Could the new global war against terrorism ever be an impetus to do something more vigorous about poverty here, to improve America's image among the world's persuadable Muslims?

Tom B.