Conservatism and Collapse

A couple of weeks after explosions rocked Midtown Manhattan, a bridge in Minnesota spectacularly collapsed yesterday afternoon.

Sensible progressive people had been sounding warnings about the decrepit state of urban underground infrastructure for years, among them the always indispensable Rick Perlstein. Meanwhile, New York's Republican Mayor bragged and bragged about how he cut taxes twenty-three times.

Similarly, we discover:

The highway bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River on Wednesday was rated as "structurally deficient" two years ago and possibly in need of replacement. That rating was contained in the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Bridge Inventory database…. Jeanne Aamodt, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, said the department was aware of the 2005 assessment of the bridge…. Many other bridges nationwide carry the same designation that the I-35W bridge received, Aamodt said.

Minnesota's Republican governor vetoed the $4.18 billion transportation package passed by Minnesota's Democratic legislature. Like any good Grover Norquist Republican, the Governor had signed a no-new-taxes pledge. Like any good Ronald Reagan Republican, the Governor embraced the anti-governmnent "governing" philosophy that "Government is the problem."

While it is said that many New Yorkers sighed in relief to discover that the recent infrastructure collapse was not another terrorist attack, they should perhaps have cried out in outrage to realize that a devastating attack is afoot all the same.

And that outcry should have resounded across the nation, not only in New York, given the fact that incomparably more Americans are vulnerable to infrastructure collapse facilitated by the incompetence and criminal neglect directly inspired by market fundamentalist and Conservative ideological hostility to the very idea of good government, than the comparatively fewer Americans who live sufficiently proximate to symbolic targets of the kind likely to attract actual terrorists (Putt-Putt golf courses of the pious Midwest ludicrously included on the Terrorist Watch List notwithstanding).

Most towns have underground pipes and roads that need to be maintained, many depend on bridges that must be maintained. In the words of old school Randroids and anarcho-libertopians (scoundrels and dupes, all): There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The market ideology of the Movement Conservatives, the market libertarians, and the neoliberal globalizers provides the rationale for a relentless project of confiscation, cronyism, looting, and criminal neglect packaged as, of all things, liberty!

In an era of criminal infrastructure neglect, unaccountable privatization and deregulation without end, plummeting investment in public education, climate change denial all inspired by the free-marketeer anti-governmentality this is palpably a matter of life and death by now. It's time for folks to make the connections, outsmart the neoconmen, and demand good, accountable, technoscientifically literate, actually democratic governance.