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GELFAND’S WORLD - What do a little-remembered magazine publisher of the 1990s, the plane crash over the Potomac, and the recent disaster in Texas have in common? All three are related, along with the words common and sense.
Charles Peters is best remembered as the founder and publisher of the Washington Monthly. Peters was a voice for a common sensical kind of liberalism that he came to refer to as neoliberalism. He supported economic growth along with equality and justice, but he pointed out that government needed to be effective in everything it did, from building the roads to picking up the trash, from running an army to running a county hospital. And if making government work and work well was inconsistent with supporting the actions of some large union, Peters was willing to oppose the union position. Peters made clear that it was the responsibility of elected officials to make sure that government operated effectively.
When you see law-and-order conservatives say that the first function of government is to keep the peace, a few moments of reflection informs that they are saying much the same thing -- government must be effective at doing its job, which for most of us includes allowing us to drive down the street without feeling terrified.
Conservatives and liberals may disagree about which functions government should take on -- shall the government become the financial manager of national health care, for example -- but we do agree on a core group of needs that government is supposed to satisfy. These include the standard local jobs of supplying electricity and water, sweeping the streets, and arresting armed robbers. Those functions also include maintaining a safe system for air travel and an effective system of weather prediction.
In this era of bad weather and brush fires, the job of predicting floods and protecting lives from the flames have risen in their importance. And this is where the Trump approach fails. Cutting staff for aircraft control without even thinking, firing people involved in weather prediction and hurricane watching, gutting science and medical research, and so on -- all of these actions will ultimately result in people dying who could have survived.
The collision between a military helicopter and a commercial airliner happened early in the Trump presidency, so it shouldn't be assigned to Trump himself in the fault column. Still, the game that DOGE played early on, in which it simply deleted all the new air safety hires -- this by itself will increase danger to air travelers. If we want the commercial aviation system to be safe, then we have to support it with aircraft control, airports, and a rule setting body such as the FAA. The American people have the right to expect that the head of the FAA will be chosen on the basis of competence. Instead, the new FAA head has to get past the politics that the president and Republicans in the Senate throw into the mix. This is the new system under Donald Trump, as everyone knows.
And when it comes to the Texas disaster, you have to look at the Texans themselves, and not just at Donald Trump. Because, after all, the longtime failure to provide warning for upcoming violent weather belongs to the local governments and to the state of Texas in addition to the federal authorities. Floods along that river had happened before -- had killed before. Both the locals and the state failed to take the precautionary steps that would have saved so many lives this time around.
It's clear that there is a profound philosophical difference here when it comes to the liberal vs. conservative approach to dealing with natural disasters. Consider how the governor of Texas responded to a question about government's responsibility. Remember when Donald Trump visited Los Angeles after the Palisades fire and continued to raise idiotic objections to our fire prevention efforts? Remember when he gave an order that caused a huge volume of water to be wasted? And remember how the federal officials who carried out his order didn't outright refuse?
The ultimate, baseline criterion for appointing chiefs of federal agencies has to be simple competence. If that bar is met, then we can think about political philosophy and political identity. But until competence is demonstrated, none of those other things should even be considered. And in this, Donald Trump has turned the function of government upside-down. To him, the function of government is to serve his political purposes -- a fact which he makes clear in everything he says -- rather than simply to guarantee that hurricanes and floods and windstorms get predicted effectively and early.
Want to argue with that point? Then deal with the appointment of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense.
To add to the concerns, isn't it ominous that Trump has been talking about phasing out FEMA?
And isn't it clear that nothing exemplifies the incompetence of the Trump administration more than the tariff policy? Consider a couple of late-breaking stories, one about Brazil and the other about copper and prescription drugs. The Brazil story involves an attempt by Trump to use a punitive tariff (50%) to punish a foreign country for its use of its own legal system to punish a scofflaw. Perhaps it's because the scofflaw in question is guilty of what Trump himself has, so far, gotten away with.
We could go on about the intrusion of politics into what ought to be the requirement for competence in the act of running a government. I think that Trump's cabinet appointments make clear what his mindset is regarding the tension between self-dealing and good government.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
