How the Republicans turned disaster relief into political warfare

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.

This is a truly alarming development.

Consider the parties’ competing policy platforms ahead of the 2024 election. The Democratic platform includes pretty standard fare: well-paying jobs, infrastructure, lowering costs for health care and housing, investing in public health and public education, a clean environment for all, and expanding civil liberties and opportunities for political participation. All of this is in accordance with the state serving the common good.

By contrast, in the 2024 Republican platform, government for the common good gives way to the politics of resentment, punishment and retribution. The officially stated goals of today’s Republican Party include “the largest deportation operation in American history,” which specifically targets “Christian-hating Communists, Marxists and Socialists”; “cut[ting] federal Funding to sanctuary jurisdictions” that don’t discriminate against migrants; “revok[ing] China’s Most Favored Nation status” within the World Trade Organization and “defund[ing] schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination” as the GOP defines it, meaning “leftwing propaganda”; and deporting “radicals” — defined in terms of their political position on the war in Gaza—in order to make college campuses “PATRIOTIC AGAIN” (all sic).

This is all a far cry from Republican platforms of the recent past. As recently as 2008, the GOP dedicated entire sections of its platform to  “Reforming Government to Serve the People.” 

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.

In 1921, German sociologist Max Weber wrote: “The patrimonial office lacks above all the bureaucratic separation of the ‘private’ and the ‘official’ sphere. For the political administration, too, is treated as a purely personal affair of the ruler, and political power is considered part of his personal property.” Updated for the modern age, frameworks of neopatrimonialism have been employed to explain clientelism, corruption and the allure of authoritarianism in Africa, Central Asia, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and beyond.

American political dynamics are in no way exceptional. Neopatrimonialism well explains modern MAGA Republicanism, in everything from the merger of Trump’s business interests with state interests, his allusions to “my generals” — who are meant to carry out his personal whims — and placing sycophants and unqualified family members in positions of political power, both within his administration and then in the leadership of the Republican Party apparatus.

Still, given their roots in premodern, personalist, “l’état c’est moi” government, it makes sense that these patrimonial dynamics not only predate modern capitalism but also our bedrock Enlightenment notion that sovereignty is derived from the people, and that the state is meant to serve their common good. Given this context, “making America great again” means turning back the civilizational clock to the principles of medieval government, quite literally.

The most obvious indicator of this premodern turn is the longstanding Republican hostility to any policy meant to promote the public good. Public schools? Defund and privatize them. Department of Education? Abolish it. Medicare, Medicaid and public health care? Slash and repeal them. Public transit? Kill it. Public libraries? Defund them, ban certain books and doxx librarians with the threat of criminal penalties. Community and public health? Attack and undermine it. Community centers? Shut them down. Public lands? Sell them off. Public and national parks? Slash them. Public servants? Attack and fire them. Public restrooms? Monitor them, and make it a crime for people to use what are deemed the “wrong” ones. Aside from the military, modern Republicanism is fundamentally allergic to any governmental or public-sector actions that promotes the public interest, safety and well-being — in other words, to the core Enlightenment understanding of government itself. 

So, since when has the Republican Party’s understanding about the core role of government shifted from serving the American people to punishing them? This is where the role of disaster relief comes in, offering a shifting standard that allows us to chart the Republican Party’s gradual descent into neopatrimonialism.

Since hurricanes, floods, wildfires and earthquakes don’t discriminate between red states and blue, much less between red or blue households, it used to be that federal disaster-relief bills would sail through Congress with unanimous support. Helping fellow citizens in their hour of need was not a thorny partisan issue, and nobody expected to score political points by refusing to help tragedy-stricken individuals. The bonds of nationality, community and common decency were understood to supersede partisanship.

When Hurricane Katrina smashed the Gulf Coast in 2005, a $52 billion relief package sailed through the House of Representatives 410-11, and a companion bill allowing the National Flood Insurance Program to borrow more money passed unanimously, 416-0. Yet when Hurricane Sandy tore apart the East Coast in 2012, a nearly identical $51 billion relief package was opposed by 179 Republicans and one Democrat, while the same companion flood-insurance bill was suddenly opposed by 67 Republicans, based on unfounded claims that the bills were “full of pork" unrelated to the disaster. This should have been a clear signal that Republican dedication to the bedrock principle that the state should serve the people was wavering.

The emergent Tea Party movement of the Obama years was fertile ground for the growth of modern Republicanism’s premodern turn under Donald Trump. During the subsequent Trump administration, disaster declarations and relief bills became politicized, hinging on whether those hit by, say, the Iowa derecho, California wildfires and, especially, hurricanes Irma and Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico, were somehow worthy of the most basic obligations of government.

A recent Politico article underscored the fact that, in 2019, Trump refused to authorize wildfire aid to California because of the state’s Democratic leanings. He changed his mind only after aides “pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.”

Pulling back from this single data point about disaster relief reveals a broad pattern of the first Trump administration, in which everything from education funding and health care resources to public transportation and immigration policies largely benefited red states, while tending “to punish states that voted Democratic.”

There is every reason to believe that neopatrimonialism would be the bedrock of a second Trump administration, too — particularly because Trump himself tells us so.

Just last month, he threatened that, if again elected president, he would withhold federal wildfire aid to California unless Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom (a frequent target of Trump’s ire), diverted more of the state’s water to rural farmers.

Newsom replied that Trump had “just admitted he will block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas. Today it’s California’s wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina of flooding assistance for homeowners in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump doesn’t care about America — he only cares about himself,” about as succinct a description of neopatrimonialism as I can imagine.

But the consequences go far beyond disaster relief. The much-discussed Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project sets out a 900-page blueprint for Trump’s executive takeover of the state, described by critics as “four years of personal vengeance at any cost.” The plan is far more audacious than can be summarized here, but largely consists of neopatrimonial policies intended to punish the American people, rather than serve them.

Project 2025 envisions firing up to 50,000 civil service employees and replacing them with what has been described as “an army of suck-ups” — that is, those personally loyal to Trump — while assuming direct Republican control over the major administrative institutions of the federal government, all of which can only be described as neopatrimonialism 101.

Beyond a complete reorganization of the American administrative state itself, Project 2025 also calls for an entire slate of policy decisions that will unquestionably harm individuals and American society rather than promote the common wealth as traditionally understood for centuries. Project 2025 aligns with Trump’s long-stated goal of repealing the Affordable Care Act that provides health care for millions of Americans. It goes further by slashing Medicare and Medicaid, upon which millions of elderly and disabled Americans rely, allowing pharmaceutical companies to jack up their prices by repealing Medicare drug-price negotiations, allowing health care providers to deny gender-affirming care, restricting access to Medicaid by adding work requirements and other bureaucratic hurdles, and denying access to contraceptives.

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By reviving the Comstock Act, the proposal would allow the government to back up proposed bans on contraceptives and morning-after pills with criminal prosecutions against both those who receive them and the doctors who prescribe them. Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, has championed this measure since 2023. Here too, an issue that once centered on promoting health and well-being has turned to disciplining and punishing the citizenry.

Likewise, instead of protecting and expanding civil rights, Project 2025 seeks to curtail individual rights by removing legal protections based on race, sexual orientation and gender identity, effectively legalizing discriminatory practices, while reworking civil rights-era legislation to focus instead on prosecuting “anti-white racism.”

The GOP’s aforementioned platform of mass deportation of migrants will reportedly be accompanied by sweeping raids, giant detention camps and mass expulsions, tearing apart migrant families and entire communities. Here too, the common good gives way to collective punishment. 

Ultimately, what unites all these data points — from opposition to hurricane relief and attacks on civil service, public education and health care to targeting individual political opponents and minority groups for harassment and discrimination — is the Republican Party’s slide into neopatrimonialism, in which the interests of the state become fused with the whims of the leader, and the purpose of government is no longer to serve the American people, but to punish them.

Many have understandably pointed to the ways such proposals in Project 2025 and the Republican platform would erode the rule of law, separation of powers, the separation of church and state, and the protection of civil liberties, decrying Project 2025 and the official Republican platform as “post-liberal,” “unhinged and un-American.”

More accurately: They’re not un-American, they’re pre-American.

The personification of the state and its utilization as a means of selective punishment is precisely what America’s founding fathers fought against. Everything from the separation of powers and equality before the law to the protection of individual rights and liberties against the incursions of state power are Enlightenment concepts, which became the cornerstones in building the forever-unfinished project of American democracy.

And all these dynamics can be viewed with maximum clarity through the prism of partisan disagreements over federal disaster relief.