After the Texas flood, we’re seeing yet another attempt to turn a natural disaster into a story of partisan failure.

Long before the flood waters had receded or the death toll was counted in Texas, there were people swarming on social media to blame Donald Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE, Texas, Greg Abbott, MAGA voters, and other favored targets on the political right. While this has become a particularly pronounced tendency on social media over the past two decades among those on the left, it’s an affliction of the populist right as well. As Erick Erickson writes:

This is the behavior of idol worshippers. From Marjorie Taylor Greene to the reporters and Democrats on the left, their gods have betrayed them. Normal people do not rush to assign blame to politicians. Normal people do not rush to examine the political ties to a natural disaster. Normal people pray. Normal people offer support. The ghouls seek to find political advantage.

In seeking that political advantage, as we’ve seen in the national press coverage over the last forty-eight hours, blame is prioritized over heroism. The stories are there of the camp counselor who saved as many girls as possible, the Coast Guard rescue swimmer who saved 165 people, the HEB staff who sprang into action to help the area, and countless others — some losing their lives in the process. But those who worship government, the ghouls of disaster, elevate the political process over those who went through the process of rescuing their neighbors.

Idol worshippers see the world through their world view. Those who have traded God for government, see the world through government and what it did or did not do. They see the machinations of their gods like Homer recounting the flood of Skamander raging against Achilles. Every explanation of every tragedy is about the failures or betrayals of their gods — government and those who control it.

This is unhealthy. It is a soul rotting way to think. It is also increasingly the default for people with an unhealthy attachment to politics.

We were not always like this as a society. I see three causes. One, as Erick notes, is the all-consuming nature of people’s engagement with politics, to the detriment of other attachments in their lives. The second, which is closely related, is the pervasiveness of social media and how it encourages people to say instantly whatever will gain them a momentary bit of rhetorical high ground and the thrill of directing bile at their opposite numbers. We saw this as well with people counting deaths from Covid by state and celebrating deaths in the jurisdictions of perceived political foes. Both reflect the unhealthy tendency to personalize politics: Americans have always had a lively culture of demonizing politicians they disagreed with, but the road to real civic trouble is when voters hate not just the other party’s leaders but its supporters.

For the third factor, I blame the Hurricane Katrina effect. Though 2005 was the pre–social media age, it was the peak of the blog era, when blogs had elbowed their way into a national conversation dominated by cable news and the websites of mainstream print outlets. The combination of 24/7 cable news, migration of print to the web, and the rapid speed of blogs with no editorial filter dramatically accelerated not only the speed at which facts (true and otherwise) could be disseminated but also the speed at which they could be composed into narratives. And what happened in the days after Katrina hit New Orleans was a tsunami of narrative-building that swamped the actual facts (many of which would take weeks to come out) and completely overwhelmed the Bush administration’s capacity to be heard. This was the point at which the George W. Bush strategy of message discipline and rope-a-dope and waiting for one’s enemies to overreach and exhaust themselves — all strategies that had worked quite well over the previous five years — proved completely inadequate to the task at hand.

What Democrats and progressive bloggers discovered in late August and September 2005 was that speed and dialing up the rhetorical temperature could turn a natural disaster into a story of partisan failure. The point is not that the Bush administration did nothing wrong (there were entirely fair criticisms), or that particular false narratives (from myths emanating from the Superdome to fundamental misunderstandings of the causes of the flooding) were so damaging. The point is that Katrina did so much lasting political damage to Bush — who had evaded many efforts until then to bring him down — that the Katrina model became the default response to natural disasters: a rush to fill the gaps in public knowledge with a narrative that could outrun those facts precisely because it was swiftly adopted while emotions were running highest. Just as the print media developed an obsession with re-creating the Watergate model that has never really left us, for 20 years now, people on blogs and social media have been trying to re-create the Katrina moment whenever a number of Americans die from a disaster.