On the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the most striking thing is not the scale of the devastation, but just how badly we misunderstood what it revealed about American society. Amid the dead, and the displaced, and a great American city almost entirely under water, Katrina became a symbolic culture-war battlefield. The shocking images of stranded black New Orleanians waving handmade SOS signs, became proof of “systemic racism”, validating long-standing academic narratives about race, inequality, and white guilt.
In truth, though, Katrina didn’t result from systemic racism. It resulted, rather, from local dysfunction and a critical lack of preparedness for an inevitable catastrophe. The levees failed, in large part, because local authorities — many of them black and operating within a patronage-heavy system — failed to prioritise their upkeep or push for necessary federal upgrades. The relief effort stalled because no one could agree on who was in charge, or who was paying. Even more tragic than Katrina itself, then, is our collective failure to understand who was actually responsible — and how the country’s decentralised system does, or rather doesn’t, work in the way liberals think.
Even as it was happening, Hurricane Katrina became a national scandal. Those images of poor, black New Orleanians stranded on rooftops, clinging to fences, surrounded by floodwaters filled with floating corpses — they simply couldn’t be ignored. Everyone wanted someone to blame. And, soon enough, the target became not just George W. Bush, but the abstract villain of systemic oppression and the generic white power structure presumed to uphold it, not merely in the South, but right across America.
As Al Sharpton put it, the collective response amongst black leaders was, “Where’s the government? How could they do this to us?” The tone implied not just neglect, but malevolence, as if government operatives had engineered the storm and then sat back, watching with grim satisfaction as African Americans drowned. The idea that, under the US federal system, city and state governments bear primary responsibility for local disaster planning, was conveniently sidestepped by media commentators and activist-artists alike.
These ideas swiftly entered the cultural mainstream. A mere four days after Katrina made landfall, during a nationally televised Red Cross fundraiser, Kanye West broke script and declared that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” West’s comments, destined to become one of the defining moments of the summer’s media cycle, spread quickly via a new website then gaining traction: “YouTube.” The following year, Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke doubled down on this essentialist racial narrative, repeating the claim that neglect from the federal Army Corps of Engineers caused the levee failures.
Still assigned in high school and college classrooms, Lee’s film has shaped the cultural discourse ever since. Yet nowhere in its near four-hour runtime is any serious attention given to the dramatic failures of local, mostly black-led city and regional officials. Nor does it explore in any serious depth the history of the levee boards — notoriously corrupt institutions that failed to protect the systems the Army Corps of Engineers had advised them to maintain.
In theory, Louisiana boasted an entire local bureaucracy charged with maintaining the efficacy of the flood levees. And given the city’s vulnerability to catastrophic storm surges, the New Orleans levee boards should have had a singular focus — monitoring and maintaining their levees. That was clear enough when the levees were actually built, in the aftermath of a devastating 1965 storm, one that resulted in dozens of deaths and $1 billion worth of damage.
Unfortunately, the state-chartered levee boards were stacked with specious political appointees, with flood prevention very much not a priority. Post-hurricane investigations showed that local levee upkeep was inconsistent, underfunded, and often distracted by patronage and unnecessary real estate schemes. Instead of focusing on disaster prevention, the city’s levee boards poured time and money into managing marinas, casinos, and luxury waterfront property along Lake Pontchartrain — ventures that often had little, if anything, to do with flood control, and rather more about making a buck.
New Orleans’ near-biblical flooding, in other words, wasn’t caused by anything resembling “systemic racism”, or even George Bush’s general disregard for black people, but rather city corruption and graft. You might say something similar about the response to Katrina. Despite New Orleans being the American city most vulnerable to a catastrophic hurricane — roughly half sits below sea level — local officials were caught entirely unprepared. They had no coherent evacuation strategy, and no meaningful coordination with the state or federal government. At the last minute, they advised citizens unable to flee the city to shelter inside the Superdome. This was a strange and predictable mistake, perhaps stemming from the fact they had given almost no attention to building public shelter systems, or coherent action plans, in the event of an imminent catastrophic storm.
Emergency mass gatherings inside sports stadiums almost never end well. But the city felt compelled to do it anyway, instructing over 45,000 people to hunker down in a facility that lacked sufficient food, water, or sanitation. Soon, reports of violence and sexual assault inside the stadium began to spread. Some of these claims came from local black police officers. One famously (and falsely) claimed that “babies” were being “raped” in the stadium. The entire situation was obscene and chaotic. It looked more like something out of Haiti or Rwanda than a modern American city. And, yes, George W. Bush was an asshat. But how was the post-Katrina meltdown his fault exactly?
You might ask a similar question of the federal response elsewhere. The general perception these days is that federal agencies left the people of New Orleans to rot and die. But this is a massive distortion of the facts. During the disaster, the federal agency most capable of doing anything to save lives was the Coast Guard. And, by all accounts, it acted courageously, saving more than 33,000 New Orleanians by boat and nearly 9,500 more by helicopter. The Coast Guard also deployed more than 4,000 personnel to the city, alongside 60 aircraft and 400 boats. The Coast Guard also carried out dangerous airdrops to try and shore up the collapsing levees with sandbags.
None of this helped Bush’s presidency. His polling numbers were poor already, but they fell off a cliff after Katrina, never to recover. Bush and his cabinet of neoconservative cronies deserved to be cast into the dustbin of history, but mostly for other reasons. Watching Bush finally get politically dismantled by Katrina was a lot like watching Al Capone go down for tax evasion. The justice felt satisfying but, in the long run, the irony was thick.
As the hurricane devastated the Big Easy, the popular perception seemed to be that the federal government maintains large storehouses of food, water, and supplies ready to go that, with the push of a red button inside the Oval Office, could be airdropped into a disaster zone like some kind of humanitarian drone strike. This is a childish fantasy — and not just any fantasy, but a distinctly statist fantasy, one entertained by people who blame their own problems on enduring “white supremacy”.
In the storm’s aftermath, this moral framing gave rise to a redemptive response: Barack Obama. Despite his inexperience and fatuously vague platform, Obama’s campaign of “Hope” was perfectly timed to answer Katrina’s psychic wound. Obama embodied a new, race-conscious vision of American governance and, paradoxically, the illusion that the race question had finally been solved.
It hadn’t, of course. In a sense, Katrina became the first real catalyst of our present MAGA-woke era — not because it created the culture war, that was already there, but because it papered over serious government dysfunction with a divisive racial narrative. More than that, though, Katrina solidified the cartoonish notion that the federal government is a unified, all-knowing entity, one capable of organising massive relief operations at a moment’s notice in the face of local incompetence.
“Katrina became the first real catalyst of our present MAGA-woke era”
That wasn’t true in 2005. And it’s not true now, as evidenced by the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis that left 150,000 residents without safe drinking water three years ago. The disaster stemmed from decades of local officials neglecting their own infrastructure. The Biden administration then mobilised federal resources to help, but the emergency itself was rooted in a local failure to plan and maintain its own public systems.
Should the federal government take more responsibility for local US infrastructure? Perhaps, but that would require no small adjustment in how the country is run. Creating the kind of centralised executive power that could step in and run something like New Orleans’ levee system or Jackson’s water system — without needing the involvement of competent local governance — would require more than mere reform. It would probably require a whole new US Constitution. At the very least, it would require an aggressive executive willing to override institutional inertia, federal constraints, and centuries of precedent — someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt or, indeed, Donald Trump.
Obama spent much of his presidency pretending that the executive branch was basically powerless. In his administration’s cliche feigning of helplessness, it simply couldn’t fulfil the will of his voters, hold Wall Street accountable, or confront the people who crashed the global economy in 2008 because that wasn’t the historic “role” of the president. Obama and his acolytes made statement after statement implying his hands were tied. Meanwhile, Trump makes a mockery of that idea nearly every day. He treats the presidency like a personal tool kit. When he wants to act, he acts. The disjunction between those two modes — the modern weak liberal executive versus the imperial Right-wing strongman — exposes a deeper incoherence at the heart of the American liberal tradition.
On the one hand, the progressive Left insists the federal government is practically omnipotent: capable of unleashing “fascism”, “systemic racism”, and “rape culture” on college campuses. On the other hand, when the establishment Left is actually in power, these same voices insist on total deference to the 18th-century Framers’ supposedly sacred system of checks and balances. They refuse to challenge the sanctity of an antiquated governing structure, even as it repeatedly fails to deliver meaningful economic change for blue-collar workers.
What the proto-woke and their Left-liberal comrades failed to see in 2005, and indeed still resist, is that FEMA and the DC political class would just as readily abandon poor whites as they would poor blacks: clear enough in the Carolinas and Appalachia after last year’s Hurricane Helen. The storm destroyed or damaged over 185,000 homes in North Carolina alone. Many of the communities affected are both white and elderly. But the Trump administration has hardly moved heaven and earth to help victims of Hurricane Helen — nor the victims of last month’s floods in central Texas — as race-based ideologues would anticipate.
Indeed Trump, supposedly the great racist champion of rural white America, has actually begun dramatically shrinking FEMA as part of Elon Musk’s ideological project of destroying social safety nets for the poor and middle classes. Two decades after Katrina, the issues are mostly the same, only now stretched to the national stage. The US government expresses a consistent lack of interest in offering rapid, much less efficient, relief for the poor and working classes, no matter their race or location, even when their livelihoods have been destroyed by no fault of their own.
Nothing about this is the result of hatred or bigotry. They’re the result of fragmentation, corruption, and institutional decay. Katrina, though, exposed a media system, and voting public, that no longer understands who’s actually responsible for what and believes that the only obligations of living in a “democracy” means showing up every four years to vote for an all-powerful chief executive.
All the while, Katrina revealed what happens when no one is held accountable for state failure. In a system where political power is deliberately diffuse, blame becomes easy to shift and nearly impossible to pin down. Any political movement serious about reform, or even just staving off national collapse, must begin by confronting the country’s deeply localist design. Until Americans understand where power actually resides, they will remain powerless to change anything. And that’s exactly what corporate lobbyists and billionaire donors are counting on.
