Politics & Power Quote by Patrick J. Kennedy

Kennedy reaches for Katrina not as policy shorthand but as moral leverage: a moment when Americans watched institutional failure unfold in real time, then filled the vacuum with mutual aid. The line is engineered to do two things at once. First, it recasts “big government” as a civic mirror, not a bureaucratic machine. Government, in this framing, isn’t an external force imposed on individuals; it’s supposed to be the organized expression of what people already do for one another when the stakes are undeniable.

The subtext is sharper than the soothing language of “community” suggests. Post-Katrina solidarity wasn’t just a heartwarming tableau of neighbors helping neighbors; it was also an indictment of a state that arrived late, fragmented, and, for many Black residents, absent. Invoking Katrina lets Kennedy imply that Republicans offer privatized compassion while Democrats offer durable infrastructure. He’s also borrowing the emotional clarity disasters produce: when the water rises, the ideological argument about “deserving” help collapses into a simpler question of whether help shows up.

The move to claim that this “has defined and united America throughout its history” is a classic partisan universalizer. It stretches a contested national story into a single tradition of togetherness, smoothing over the country’s long record of exclusions about who gets counted in “community.” That tension is the point. Kennedy is trying to turn a politically volatile catastrophe into a founding myth for modern liberal governance: competence plus care, scaled up.