The great British historian Arnold Toynbee created the challenge and response theory of history, in which civilisations — like people — flourish or collapse on their ability to respond to adversity. By that measurement, American civilisation is in free fall.
There is not a single disaster the country has faced in recent years that has not, sometimes within hours of it happening, resulted in driving Americans apart rather than bringing them together. Mere weeks after the 9/11 attacks, people were accusing each other of war-mongering, or appeasement, or anti-Muslim prejudice, or complacency about “fifth columns”, or an unforgivable lack of preparedness before the attacks. Hurricane Katrina was followed by bitter debates over the rapidity, fairness and the adequacy of the federal response.
As for the country’s response to Covid, it hardly seems an overstatement to say that the 19th-century debate over slavery was no less vitriolic than the strife, often vicious, incited by masks, lockdowns and vaccines. The proverbial visitor from another planet would have thought that this argument over a health crisis — it killed over 350,000 people in the US, after all — was in fact an argument over an election. Maybe the contestations around Covid created the atmosphere for the contestation of an election.
In one perspective, of course, even the most heated differences signify a democracy’s health. Authoritarian regimes don’t tolerate altercations in the name of freedom. But disaster is different. There was hot debate in Britain over the Munich Agreement, but there was no debate over how to respond to Germany’s invasion of Poland one year later. In a crisis, healthy civilisations respond to the crisis. They don’t turn on themselves.
It took no time at all for the recriminations to start flying after the worst wildfires in the history of California broke out in Los Angeles. Within hours of the flames taking hold, the New York Times ran, in short order, articles accusing the LA mayor, Karen Bass, of not having had dry brush near houses cleared away, and of not having sufficient water to fight the fires. The newly minted firefighting experts at the newspaper even accused the LA fire department of not having updated its tactics for fighting fires. This was followed shortly afterward, with a sort of mechanical cluelessness, by an article titled “When Disaster Hits, Trump is the Blamer in Chief”.
The problem here was twofold. First, these articles appeared while people were being burned alive, while people were watching their houses, their possessions and their memories being destroyed, while LA firefighters were working 24-hour shifts in horrific conditions to save people’s lives and property. The “gotcha” style of American journalism — it wasn’t just the Times — that has prevailed since Watergate surely could have been restrained until the catastrophe had come to an end.
The second problem with the predictable banquet of accusation was that it wasn’t strictly accurate. What the media was covering was not the result of any kind of impartial investigation. It was the result of the usual infighting among a municipality’s politicians and their surrogates. The media were reporting on a political quarrel over who was to blame, not on who was actually to blame. Apparently, the fire chief, Kristin Crowley, had protested Bass cutting the fire department’s budget in some areas (in fact the 2025 budget ended up rising by over 7%). But city officials fighting with a mayor over how much money they will get for their agencies and departments is hardly a scandal. It’s never anything but murky, either.
It’s a time-honoured convention for newspapers, in America anyway, to end their news articles with a quote from an expert, or some figure of authority, with which to delicately insinuate a moral judgment. The New York Times does this to a fare-thee-well. Its article critical of Bass’s response ended with the customary authority figure, who delivered his, and the article’s, stern judgment of Bass’s performance. “’This is a massive failure of epic proportions,’ he said.”
It was an impressive way to finish, firm with reassuring finality. There was one problem, though. The authority figure was Rick Caruso, whom Bass had defeated in the 2022 mayoral election. To say that he had an axe to grind with regard to Bass would be an understatement.
To make matters worse, the Times had already quoted Caruso, a billionaire real-estate developer, dramatically lamenting the shortage of water, the Times adding, with nary a sliver of critical distance — the Times’ news articles have always been artfully choreographed — that Caruso himself had hired his very own team of private firefighters. The Times writes: “All night, [Caruso] said, [the private firefighters] were telling him that water was in short supply.” In other words, the great liberal newspaper, almost singlehandedly responsible for the woke divisions that have helped rip American society apart, relied on the testimony of a politically embittered billionaire to discredit the efforts of a publicly elected official. The paper didn’t even inform its readers whether Caruso’s private team had enough water in the end or not.
That was the “gotcha” response to the catastrophe. The political response was even more irresponsible. What was the true cause of the LA apocalypse, according to a chorus of ideologically motivated voices? An unusually heavy season of rain, which created an abundance of foliage, which then dried into an enormous tinderbox during a long drought? The powerful gusts of high wind known as the Santa Ana winds? Gusts reaching 100mph capable of driving embers in countless wild directions at once? The historically unprecedented event of six wildfires raging in California at the same time, which would have exhausted the water supply no matter how full it was? Winds fanning fires into a conflagration that no firefighter could enter, and that no planes of helicopters bearing water and retardant could fly through?
Nope. According to experts, such as the conservative commentator Scott Jennings on CNN (where reporters like Nick Watt and Natasha Chen were risking the their lives to report on the fires), it was all the fault of “woke”: “We have DEI… and… I’m wondering now, if your house was burning down, how much do you care what colour the firefighters are?”
Jennings, and others like him, including an increasingly deranged Elon Musk, were responding to a sentence on the LA Fire Department’s website that described a commitment to hiring more black firefighters. Even David Mamet, stunning screenwriter and America’s greatest living playwright, whose moral imagination is the product of some sort of divine spark, was swept up in these pages into the anti-DEI groupthink that is now the default response to DEI groupthink.
Like many people, I think DEI has been a poisonous and divisive plague on true fairness and opportunity. But it is hard to see how a conscientious commitment to diversifying LA’s Fire Department, which would require more, not less money, in the budget, could have caused the LA fires, or made them worse once they had begun. Unless Bass had been moving large sums of money away from basic firefighting needs into creating and enforcing DEI polices, which no one has said she did, it is hard to see how her declared to commitment to DEI — often boilerplate without meaning anyway — could have affected the city’s response to the wildfires one bit.
So much for how America — or, rather, the people Americans permit to represent reality to them — responded to the fires in LA. We are left with the wildfires themselves. As I write, they are threatening to grow and spread again in a resurgence of high wind. Now is not the time for a literary interpretation of an event that has torn lives apart, and taken lives. But one fact, and one image, beg to be understood in a different key.
The stark fact is that — and I gratefully get this information from the Times — so far as one can see, most, if not all the people who have been killed in the fires, have been poor, or of modest means, and most have been black. The stark image is of gorgeous mansions burning in isolation, on cliffs overlooking the ocean. They are images of the zenith of American success, which is the consummation of the American Dream, which is to rise above your fellow Americans, your fellow humans, your community; to ascend beyond all those less fortunate, or not fortunate at all, who are the first to suffer and die, down below, and to live in magnificent isolation. I don’t begrudge the magnificence to anyone. I wish it for my children. And my heart breaks for all that the people in those beautiful houses, the fruit (often) of beautiful achievements, have lost.
But the media does their customary thing, breaking the tragedy down to individual stories, stories that you can identify yourself with and thus use to control the inexplicable and incomprehensible by fitting them into the safe confines of your life. You are left with individual stories, cut off from each other, and from a shared reality with each other. You are left thinking what you would do in that situation, how you would feel.
And you wonder if, amid all the unspeakable destruction, an illusion is also being destroyed, and a reality revealed. The illusion is of American happiness as an invincible solitude. The reality is wholly different. Blame comes easily to Americans because we are all alone. Because there is no “we”. Because our isolation from each other is allowing ghouls to waltz into our midst. And this isolation is allowing us to burn, and to watch each other burn. It is allowing some to relish the conflagration. It is compelling the rest of us — but there is no “us”, only “me”, and “them” — to point fingers instead of, as moist as it may sound, linking arms.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/