Political Culture and Disaster Response: The Great Floods

This river used to meander all over its floodplain. People would move their tepees, and that was that. You can’t move Vicksburg. (quoted in McPhee, 1989: 32) The name Katrina evokes images of abandoned victims, disorganization, incompetence, and a phrase – ‘you’re doing a heck of a job Brownie’ – that have come to illustrate official detachment from reality. In a speech in Jackson Square, New Orleans George W. Bush pledged $60 billion in aid to the areas affected by the hurricane, but otherwise failed to mobilize public opinion or the federal government for a focused effort. Congressional Democrats also did little to rally public opinion to rebuild New Orleans, resettle its poorest residents, or address the environmental and engineering problems that had aggravated the scope of the hurricane’s damage. What explains the tardy, unfocused reaction? Perhaps the failure of the Democrats to propose a plan of their own was a partisan effort to blame the majority party and a president whose inaction symbolized the broader failures of his term in office. What makes this hypothesis unlikely is the simultaneous absence of a vigorous discourse in the mass media on the possibility and desir-ability of rebuilding New Orleans and protecting it from future flooding. The absence of such a discourse partly explains continuing lags in reconstruction and repopulation, especially in the poorest parts of the city (Brookings Institution, 2008). In this article I argue that an overlooked dimension of this issue was a political culture that had rendered certain avenues of response less credible. Within that culture a set of conventional assumptions about self and nature had transparently influenced the course of the mediated debate. The assumptions were the product of painstaking work by political actors on th