In a more rational political environment, the chief executive’s role when it came to natural disasters would be limited. But some things are beyond rationality.
Of the controversy surrounding President Biden’s reluctance to comment on the devastating wildfires in Hawaii, Jeff writes:
Presidents are neither soldiers nor firefighters nor riot police nor members of the Army Corps of Engineers, for that matter, and that 99 percent of those shouting at Biden to hop on Air Force One and go for a photo-op in Maui are participating in an ultimately empty gestural politics. You don’t want him to do it (or are criticizing him for not doing it) for them; it’s about you.
Informed by a memory of, among other things, George W. Bush’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina and the resulting pile-on, Jeff admits to a position of sympathy with Biden here. Loath as I am to confess to something similar, I nonetheless do. I think, moreover, that there is something deeper, perhaps even primal, in this reflexive desire for presidents to be seen as somehow involved or caring when faced with a natural disaster somewhere in the country.
It reminds me, of all things, of John Boorman’s 1981 Arthurian epic Excalibur. In that film, the sins of Arthur (tricked by Morgana) literally despoil his kingdom. As his loyal knight Perceval, having retrieved the Holy Grail to heal him, says: “you and the land are one.” Thereafter, Arthur rides off with his knights for one final battle. As Arthur travels through his ruined kingdom, flowers bloom in his wake.
This link between a ruler and his kingdom, and even its environs, is deeply rooted in human culture, antedating even Arthurian legend. It’s not entirely ridiculous. Poor agricultural practices or other reckless policies have bedeviled many polities. On that score, hardly anything beats the Soviet Union’s disappearance of the Aral “Sea,” now a desert interrupted by a handful of lakes (and a former biological-weapons facility on what was once an island). In that regime, the conditions of rulers and of their lands was infernally aligned.
But most modern alignments of rulers and their domains are far more mythical and attenuated. In our country, the desire for presidents to visit the site of every natural disaster seems to arise chiefly from this primal urge. It is hard to explain otherwise. Unlike in Excalibur, the mere presence of our chief executive in a blighted land is not going to heal it. Sure, it may convey a sense of compassion, and, at its best, highlight the destruction and facilitate remedy. But the sense of caring is typically contrived for the purposes of photo ops, poll numbers, and opportunistic self-aggrandizement. And is there really much logistical or material assistance derived from presidential presence in a specific disaster area? (No, having the president toss paper towels to people doesn’t count.) Suffering is genuine, and heartbreaking, whether a president is there or not; it is, moreover, possible to express sympathy, and even to act on it (or to encourage others to), without going to an afflicted locale. If anything, staging a chief-executive appearance in a locale that is still burnt, waterlogged, or otherwise ruined probably diverts needed resources. And, fundamentally, it makes the whole affair about the man, not about the people or the community affected, which is perverse.
Our politics could do without the spectacle, or the desire for it. Of course, it won’t go away. This phenomenon sits at the nexus of two of the more injurious trends in our politics: president-worship and partisanship. The former has roots in American politics as well as the more mythic ones already discussed here. The presidency has come to bestride our politics as a colossus because of the growth of government, especially of the administrative state. “As more and more policy-making of consequence leaves the parts of our political process to which people feel most directly connected,” I wrote on Election Day 2020, “the presidency takes on a bloated importance in effecting meaningful change.” There are also media and cultural incentives arising from the presidency’s singularity, as the office “provides a convenient focus on which to project all of the nation’s political drama.” As against the messy and multitudinous Congress, “there is only one president, and in an attention-starved, sensationalist age, it is much easier and much more dramatic to follow his every word and action, to infuse every story involving him with such weight as to make it seem the most important thing ever to happen in America.”
As for the latter: There is little partisan incentive to de-escalate presidential stakes in these disasters. Each party is happy to opportunistically castigate the other for a disaster that occurs on the other’s watch. If it can be cast as mishandled, all the better. Perhaps in some instances it is justified; more often, the parties will trade off appeals to powerlessness or omnicompetence as political advantage dictates. And now there is the additional complication that the Left is keen to blame the Right for natural disasters. This related sentiment has a primal root as well, best expressed during ghastly instances of bizarre gloating about the suffering of one’s political opponents: the desire to see God point the finger of doom at our foes. (An adjacent notion: that deity propitiation can stave off disaster.)
In a more rational, less president-centric political culture, federal involvement in disasters would be restricted to the aid and support stipulated by law and demanded by a particular situation. What a president thought of a given event would matter little. In case the interests of the nation as a whole were somehow implicated, he would tend assiduously, with little public fuss, to securing them through the proper channels of our federalist architecture — unless there were some genuine, traceable way in which those aspects of the government a president influences were discovered to be directly culpable. The business of being on the ground of disaster areas would be better left to state and local officials, who know their lands better anyway. We may be far off from such a political environment. But we’re better off working towards it than pining for King Arthur.
He’ll be back when we really need him, anyway.