How the Republicans turned disaster relief into political warfare

How the Republicans turned disaster relief into political warfare
Republicans want to use government to punish people, not help them — and their disaster policy makes that clear

By Mark Lawrence Schrad
Professor of political science, Villanova University
Published October 12, 2024 9:00AM (EDT)


The one-two punch of hurricanes Helene and Milton to Florida’s Gulf Coast — along with the flooding and devastation in western North Carolina — have ignited partisan disagreement and outright misinformation about the scope and role of the federal government in disaster relief. Not long ago, appropriations for aid funding were among the least contentious bills in Congress, typically carried with unanimous bipartisan support. That helping citizens in their time of need has somehow become a contentious political issue reflects a more fundamental backsliding in the Republican Party to a premodern conception of government itself.

Social scientists often speak in terms of state-society relations: What is the role of the government and the society that it governs? The entire American political tradition is premised upon the uncontroversial notion that: “The Government is the servant of the people. It is organized to serve the people. The people are not the servants or slaves of the Government.” The Enlightenment notion of promoting “the common good” predates even the United States itself.

This is not simply a matter of the Republicans’ rightward drift into MAGA authoritarianism. More fundamentally, the Republican Party has uncoupled itself completely from the notion that the purpose of government is to promote the security, liberties and prosperity of the people it represents. Instead, it now views the state as a mechanism to exact retribution, discipline and punish members of that society.

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Since at least 2016, scholars and journalists have consistently sounded the alarm on the Republican drift into right-wing authoritarianism. But even tinpot dictators and autocrats at least pay lip-service to working for the common good. Modern Republicanism’s belief that the core role of government is instead to wield the power of the state to punish one’s enemies goes beyond myopic allusions to authoritarianism, fascism or caesarism to a premodern, pre-capitalist rival conception of government known as patrimonialism, in which the state is not meant to serve society but society is meant to serve the state — and the autocrat who runs it. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/10/12/how-the-turned-disaster-relief-into-political-warfare/