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After so many years of Social Darwinism, Hurricane Katrina could reawaken the American people's appetite for compassion in government.
It takes a lot to shake America to the core - 9/11 did it four years ago this weekend; the war in Iraq still has not.
It's 70 years since the satirist Eric Linklater noted in his novel Don Juan that life in America was spread over so vast an area that any number of strange and sinister interludes could be enacted without upsetting the national equilibrium.
Hurricane Katrina is one of those rare interludes which has upset the national equilibrium. While 9/11 made Americans angry, the fate of New Orleans has gone beyond that. In varying degrees the whole population is angry, ashamed, and fearful.
Angry at the incompetence and buck-passing between inept local, state and federal authorities; ashamed at those relentlessly recycled pictures of the abandoned black underclass; and fearful to see that the country is still unprepared to cope with a major terrorist attack.
There will be hell to pay for Katrina.
In my view, it is likely to have as traumatic an impact on American political life as the Great Depression of the 1930s. That catastrophe ushered in two decades of Democratic presidents - but even more, it reversed America's entrenched dedication to laissez faire Social Darwinism, a philosophy embraced by both major parties for 150 years.
Natural selection
Social Darwinism was a doctrine of individualism invented in England by the 19th Century philosopher Herbert Spencer, a friend of Charles Darwin's. It was Spencer who first coined the famous phrase "the survival of the fittest" and he did so nine years before the great man himself published his Origin of Species.
Social Darwinism never infiltrated politics as much in Britain as it did in America where it was brilliantly propagated by a Yale polemicist named William Graham Sumner.
Interventions by government to regulate housing, public health, factories, and so on, were wrong, he argued, because they impeded individual enterprise that alone created wealth. My mind, said the steelmaster Andrew Carnegie, was illuminated in a flash by Sumner's theorem that mankind progresses through the "ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong".
Politicians of all colours agreed. It was a Democratic president - Grover Cleveland - who epitomized the philosophy in a memorable decision in 1877. Asked to release $10,000 of surplus seed for drought-stricken farmers in Texas, he declared: "I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering... The lesson should constantly be enforced that though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."
The attitude has never entirely disappeared and probably never will. Its appeal is not only to the economically powerful with a central faith in the sanctity of the marketplace, but also to the romantic ideals of Jeffersonian individualism.
America has long been entranced by stories of fortunes made by hard work and perseverance without help from government. More tellingly many of them come true, truer in America than anywhere else. It is just that they are not the whole story. When people fail it leaves, exposed as a raw nerve, the question of moral duty in a civilized society.
So Social Darwinism has remained in the American psyche, sometimes submerged in the current, sometimes coming to the surface like a log in a fast-flowing river. Cleveland's sentiments might have popped up any time in the 1980s on Ronald Reagan's teleprompter. His remark that "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" was an echo of Cleveland and many presidencies thereafter.
The log came clearly into view again when turbulence in the wake of 9/11 led to the re-election of George W Bush. His instinct for low taxes and small government has been neatly encapsulated by the evangelical tax cutter Grover Norquist: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Judgement day
My judgment is that the log of Social Darwinism will disappear again under the toxic flood waters of New Orleans. The corpses floating face down in the muddy overflow from broken Mississippi levees are too shocking a sight for Americans of all classes and parties. They are too kindly a people. They will look once again for vigour and compassion in government, even at the price of higher taxes.
Before Katrina, America's greatest natural disaster was another Mississippi flood - that of 1927 - which made half a million homeless. At the time Republican President Calvin Coolidge refused even to recall Congress to vote emergency money. He was so inactive that when Dorothy Parker, a few years later, was told he was dead, she asked, "How do they know?"
Two hundred people had drowned in the 1920s before the federal government intervened. It did so in the person of the Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Only three died after Hoover got involved. He waded in - literally up to his knees in floodwater - galvanizing everyone in six endangered states.
His vigour standing on the tottering levee amid the raging floods helped to win him the Republican nomination and then the presidency. He was called "the great engineer".
So why then is Hoover almost a dirty word in the history books? It is because faced with a bigger challenge than the floods - the Great Depression with 13 million out of work - he refused to recognise the responsibility of government to relieve individual suffering.
He believed that economic depressions, like natural disasters, were acts of God that must run their course. He expected voluntary acts of compassion by business and good neighbours would be enough, as they mostly had been in his humanitarian work in World War I. But the Depression affected so many millions it was too big and complex for that.
So slow was Hoover to respond that the shanty towns of the unemployed became known as Hoovervilles. He refused to believe that anyone was starving.
Of the men selling apples in the streets, the symbol of the depression, he said, "many persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples." It was not a joke. He had a tin ear, rather like George Bush.
When GW belatedly visited the flooded region, he reminisced about his good-time days in New Orleans. His intentions were good but his off-the-cuff remark was as unfortunate as his rhapsody to the homeless about how the former Republican majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi was going to build a "fantastic new house". Brother can you spare a dime?
And Bush, like Hoover, has found it hard to confront reality. He has said nobody expected the levees to break - thereby flying in the fact of scores of predictions in official reports, science journals and newspapers.
Back in the 30s, clinging to the log of Social Darwinism did not save Hoover. He was swept away by a riptide of anger and fear like that which may threaten the Republican ascendancy today.
In 1932 Hoover lost both his reputation and the presidency in a landslide to his Democratic challenger Franklin Roosevelt. The New Deal FDR ushered in - signing 15 bills in his first 100 days - almost drove a stake through the heart of Social Darwinism. Never before had government so directly shored up the lives of individual Americans at every social level and class.
It was the foundation of a welfare state - a ringing reaffirmation of America's commitment to huddled masses yearning to share in the great American Dream.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4230372.stm
