When terrorists struck the World Trade Centre, George W. Bush and his handlers quickly adopted a muscular approach to the crisis. Not so with Katrina.

While 9/11 prompted the administration to unleash the full resources of America in response, the deadly Katrina crisis had trouble catching Bush’s attention. But then 9/11 was quickly spotted as the perfect justification for what Republicans wanted to do anyway: mobilize the U.S. for war and enhance the power of the military-industrial complex.

The Katrina disaster offers no such opportunities. On the contrary, it cries out for massive aid that threatens to drain resources from Republican pet causes like war-making and tax-cutting for the rich.

Indeed, Katrina has the potential to finally alert the American people to the dangers of the right’s ideology — an ideology that rejects the notion of the “common good” and instead promotes an unbridled free market where everyone looks out for himself.

For decades the right has been pumping money into think tanks where this “every man for himself” ideology is gussied up and presented as a beneficial force that will lift all mankind to the state of prosperity depicted on TV.

But the Katrina fiasco shows us what “every man for himself” really creates: a society of such rampant inequality that, even as a devastating hurricane rushes in from the sea and the affluent depart, tens of thousands who are too poor, too sick or too old are simply abandoned and left stranded on rooftops as water rises around them.

This immense tragedy has been years in the making, as the right’s ideology — implemented with particular gusto by the Bush administration — has redirected national wealth to the rich, leaving public programs, infrastructure and millions of people badly in need.

Its imprint is clearly visible in the Katrina saga. Despite the well-documented danger of a major hurricane hitting low-lying New Orleans, the White House slashed federal funding for preventative flood control and lifted a ban on developers destroying the wetlands protecting the city. It also downsized and privatized the federal disaster management agency, FEMA, handing it over to inexperienced cronies who cut funding for a nationwide program aimed at reducing the impact of disasters by properly preparing for them.

So minimal was FEMA’s preparation for Katrina that, despite two days warning, the agency had developed no real plan for helping those trapped in New Orleans. As CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported, 15,000 desperate people who fled to the convention centre were cared for for days by a single doctor who showed up on his own, equipped only with a stethoscope and some medicine he’d looted from a pharmacy on his way over. Who needs planning?This could be a turning point — just as the Walkerton tragedy finally alerted the people of Ontario to the dangers of the program-slashing, right-wing ideology of the Mike Harris government.In Katrina and its awesome horrors, the right may have finally met its match.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...