With a hurricane of historic proportions on the verge of causing catastrophic destruction to a major American metropolitan area and a large swath of surrounding countryside, I am reminded that at almost the same point in his first term, George W Bush faced an unthinkable tragedy befalling the United States. The tragedy of 11 September 2001 set the course of the Bush presidency for the remainder of the first term, and continues to dominate it in the second. However, if the natural disaster predicted from the landfall of Katrina comes to pass, a new national tragedy may very well indeed enter the public consciousness. And the nature of the disaster, and the response needed to deal with the consequences of that tragedy, are very different from the tragedy that shaped the first term of office.
The tragic events of 11 September 2001 shook the American people like few events in the past century. The sense that the American homeland was safe from the threat of attack resulting from American involvement in overseas affairs was shattered. The nature of the attack evoked a response that fit in with the characteristics of an aggressive, individualist ideology that forms the heart of modern Republican conservativism - emphasis on military power, resort to use war against real or perceived enemies, and a dramatic upsurge in hypernationalism and xenophobia. President Bush therefore was able to frame the debate on all issues as a debate over being resolute in the face of foreign threat, and those who opposed the conflict were deemed as traitors to the national self interest. The result was a dramatic shift in the right of the American electorate in 2002, and while the intervention in Iraq did by 2004 lead to a slight shift to the left, it was not enough to overcome the dramatic shift in 2002.
It is now the summer of 2005, and the intervention in Iraq so highly supported by the American public at the time has borne bitter fruit. Nearly 2000 American soldiers dead, tens of thousands of Iraqis dead, tens of thousands of American soldiers injured, some permanently disabled. Public support for the conflict has dropped below 50% and a majority now disapprove of the President's overall leadership. In some ways, Bush's numbers now are akin to what they were in August 2001, before the great tragedy of the first term struck America.
In the next thirty-six hours a new tragedy, potentially on a scale even larger than the events of 11 September in terms of number of casualties, may very well unfold as the dramatic changes of trajectory and power of Hurricane Katrina caught the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts quite off guard. Unlike the tragedy of 2001, the response to the tragedy that will unfold in 2005 requires the kind of mutual support and community cooperation that are in many ways the basis of the ideology of liberalism and the Democratic party. Should the disaster unfold in Louisiana and Mississippi as many fear, the nation will be looking directly at the Bush administration for a response to meet the sheer scale of the tragedy. Should the administration be perceived to falter in its handling of the response to this potential tragedy, it could very well accelerate the decline in public support for this administration and, potentially, the Republican program itself, as the American public may realize that, indeed, the state can play an important and constructive role in the development of society. The events of the next week could very well set the trajectory for the evolution of politics in the United States for the remainder of Bush's second term.
Godspeed to the residents of the areas that will be affected by Katrina, and hopes that the Federal Government will surprise us and actually develop a solid response to this looming tragedy should it be needed. Alas, my hopes are not high that this will be the case.