Subsidiarity and Katrina

Over at Evangelical Outpost, Joe Carter views the Katrina tragedy through the lens of subsidiarity, asserting that the tools for an effective pre-hurricane evacuation were within the grasp of local officials, who instead simply pointed their fingers at the federal government.  But conservative advocates of subsidiarity do not escape blame, according to Carter, as they fail to live out the doctrine they espouse:

Principles such as subsidiarity, federalism, and limited government are often considered cornerstones of conservative political thought. But when it comes to their actual implementation they are merely given lip-service. While aspiring young politicos sing the praises of states-rights, they prefer to do so on Capital Hill or in D.C. think tanks rather than in the choirs of their state legislatures or local governments. The very idea that our most competent conservative statesmen should be working in their actual states rather than in Washington is considered ludicrous. After all, everyone knows that state and local governments are reserved for the also-rans and has-beens rather than for the able and ambitious. Any job in FEMA, for instance, is considered superior to working in the New Orleans’s Office of Emergency Preparedness.

But mayor’s offices, city councils, and state legislatures all join the “little platoons” that serve as our first line of defense when natural or man-made disasters strike. So why then are we not working to put our best and brightest into these offices? Why do push them to take jobs as Senatorial aides rather than as state senators? Why do we lead them to roles as assistants to assistant directors in the Department of Education rather than as leaders on county school boards? Why do we put our rhetoric behind the local and yet but our faith in the federal?

If we expect to be taken seriously, conservatives must start supporting the principles we claim we believe. One way that we could begin is by “subsidizing” subsidiarity, by using our resources to promote our intellectual and political leaders at the state and local levels of governance.

In the case of Katrina, I think there's plenty of blame to go around at both the local and federal levels.  I do agree with Carter, though, that conservatives often invoke subsidiarity without acknowledging its full import, an argument I've made elsewhere.  (This is not to excuse liberals, who tend to ignore subsidiarity completely.)

Rob