The Halting Movements for Disaster Socialism from Above and below: US Disaster Politics in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.

In spite of the considerable public attention and resources that recent natural disasters generate in the United States, these events rarely trigger the kinds of broader social, economic, or political change hoped for on the left. Instead, discussions of humanitarian relief, blame games, and culture wars dominate the public sphere until attention and concern moves elsewhere. When we do see grass-roots experiments to build alternative economic, cultural, and political institutions in the aftermath of disaster, they are often ignored. Moreover, these organizers find themselves in a dilemma: are their efforts to generate alternatives on the ground effectively building political power in support of a more democratic, ecologically sound responses to disaster? Or are they falling into a neoliberal trap of self-help, surrendering what claim to government support that they had under the administrative state? In this paper, I argue that this political inertia and the movements to overcome it are responses to an unfulfilled promise of America’s administrative state. I provide an analysis of the evolving thinking and experimentation on display in response to major disasters in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, starting with the Great Galveston Hurricane (1900) and ending with Hurricane Maria (2017). This record demonstrates how disasters have been sites of political reform in the past, generating an emerging social contract of environmental security from above. Today’s political inertia is shaped by the perceived failure of that social contract. Any progress made toward a fairer, ecologically sound response to disasters in America will have to contend with that legacy and the public’s waning trust in administrative authority.