This is a salutary reminder that the taming of the American wilderness was only ever provisional. And the broader political and cultural response to such forces of nature in turn reveals an unexpected twist, in the ongoing election-year battle for the future of the American empire.

Bears once stood for everything about the American wilderness that had to be conquered. Early pioneers gained ground for their settlements via a pitched battle with the bears. As journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling puts it, they hated their ursine foes “with the sizzling, white-hot hatred that comes from living in constant fear”. Marauding bears would eat crops, livestock, or even — sometimes — human children. In response, the settlers hunted them ruthlessly, gradually beating back the bear population and wild forest to create space for farming.

In the 21st century, though, as Hongoltz-Hetling recounts, the same stubborn individualism that sustained such settlers in their endeavour ended up inviting the bears back in. In A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear (2020), he describes how a libertarian takeover of Grafton, New Hampshire failed after their aversion to collective action left them unable to maintain consistent, community-wide bear-proofing measures, such as secure bins. As a result, the local bear population grew dangerously numerous and intrusive, eventually precipitating the initiative’s collapse.

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The inference of this cautionary tale is perhaps that we’re all only as radically independent as technological buffers against the elements (and bears) make us. Radical individualism, ironically, works best in a context already pre-cleansed of the kind of material threats that require human cooperation and ingenuity to overcome. And this matters: for despite the fact that America’s continent and civilisation are more stereotypically associated, today, with ultra-processed lifestyles of junk food, air conditioning, and driving everywhere, its forests are still there, and still full of bears.

This is difficult to grasp in Britain. Despite the best efforts of rewilding campaigners to reintroduce wolves and even bears to the temperate British Isles, humans have been apex predators here since the last wolf was killed in 1390. This epistemological gap is no doubt worsened by the urge to reimagine Alaskan brown bears as game-show contestants; something that also attests to just how far modern America has also slid toward forgetting its own underlying wildness.

America’s founding economy was one of republican localism, practical industry, and (in some regions) an ongoing war of attrition against the wilderness (including its bears). But modern, imperial America achieved hegemony precisely by tilting away from material practicality, toward an economy of ideas and information. And those of us out here on the imperial periphery, meanwhile, receive little except the culture that empire has since exported globally: one more likely to foreground the comic anthropomorphism of Fat Bear Week and Disney’s Baloo than the grim-faced, gun-toting mindset of American settlers guarding crops and livestock in 18th-century New Hampshire.

And as its reach has expanded and de-materialised, so America’s governance has also adjusted from the original, fiercely localist model beloved of the early settlers, toward a more centralised and managerial one. First articulated by Woodrow Wilson, this “progressive” mode of governance views the checks and balances baked into the older American republican tradition less as enabling conditions for liberty, than as obstacles to progress. In turn, one conservative commentator has recently characterised the resulting imperial order as no longer republican at all, but rather a “total state” that subordinates atomised individuals to a totalising, technocratic tyranny.

And whether or not they go this far, many modern conservative critics yearn for that bygone localism — even as others worry that the modern polity no longer possesses what Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart” required to achieve it. After all, the success of early American settlers at cooperative bear-hunting suggests they excelled at working together on highly focused local objectives. But following a century of imperial expansion, material comfort, and Wilsonian technocracy, is this still true? And yet, even if these habits of the heart have withered somewhat through lack of use, it’s possible they will be forced to make a comeback, for the same reason as Grafton’s libertarian experiment failed: keeping back the wilderness is not an achievement but an ongoing war of attrition.

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In the American interior, this war has lost manpower as well as (perhaps) “habits of the heart”. Even as Wilsonian technocracy undermined republican praxis, the information economy drained talent to urban centres and the American coasts. In turn, as Hongoltz-Hetling recounts, much of the New Hampshire wilderness once clear-cut for farming has regrown — and as the woods have encroached, so have the bears.

But this is bringing its own backlash. For America’s persistent wildness exists in constant challenge to the softer coastal culture of bureaucracy and anthropomorphic bears. This, at least, is one interpretation of the way the Helene disaster response has been absorbed into America’s ongoing culture war. Social media has been full of images of aid efforts organised by practical people: mule trains, dirt bikes, and even Nascar. These images are emblematic of the kind of smaller-scale cooperation and practical skills strongly associated with America’s older “republican” culture. And against this FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been the subject of rumours and criticism such as having spent its budget on illegal immigrants, or even obstructing independent aid efforts so as to protect for-profit aid contractors or prioritise foreign-policy goals over the needs of citizens.

The US government has made vigorous efforts to debunk these rumours. But they have proliferated because they dovetail so neatly with longstanding perceptions of hostility toward “flyover country” — a world that, in this narrative, is descended from the pioneer culture that first beat back the bears, but whose capacity to flourish has since been parasitised by economic changes, cultural decline, and managerial politics. From this perspective, perceived shortcomings in the federal Helene response demonstrate the weakness of the “total state”, usually identified with the Left. Implicitly: managerial bureaucracy is no more equipped to manage a large-scale hurricane response than the cosseted coastal liberals it sustains would be to cope with a real-life bear, as opposed to one with a cute name on the laptop screen.

But I’m not sure it follows from this that a Trump win in November would tilt the scales back toward the more practical, republican America of collective nostalgia. From what I can make out, all the way across the pond, that capacity to mobilise for prosocial ends is already abundantly in evidence, in local Americans’ self-organised aid efforts. Meanwhile, to date, the main interventions from the Trumpist camp seem to have been firstly amplifying mistrust toward the government, and secondly a contribution of aid by Elon Musk.

This latter intervention is especially significant for the emerging Right-wing consensus, in that it didn’t come in the form of food, vehicles, manpower, or clean-up efforts, but distribution of Starlink satellite wi-fi routers. So much so that, to me, it foreshadows the new “fusionism” emerging out of the cold ashes of the 20th-century Reaganite variety.

The “New Right” has been fiercely divided for some time on what this should look like. Musk’s Starlink transmitters provide the answer. What use, after all, is a Starlink connection when your home has been flattened by a hurricane and the woods are full of bears? Well, one possible answer is that if you can get online it’s much easier to organise help. In other words, that internet connectivity enables the older, more decentralised American sociopolitical model to re-emerge from the technocratic grip of the “total state”.

In the same vein, since buying the social media platform X, Musk has been an energetic advocate of retrieving the republican free speech tradition. But it’s also true that this decentralisation obscures new forms of control. My speech on X is not free in the same sense as, say, a private conversation between two bear-hunters in 18th century New Hampshire — because Elon Musk owns the platform I’m using to speak. The same goes for Starlink, which remains a tool of decentralisation for as long as Musk wants it to be.

What this all foreshadows is a Right-wing consensus that opposes the post-liberal “total state” — but not exactly by trying to reanimate 18th-century republicanism. Where the post-liberal Left dreams of individual freedom governed by omniscient administration, for the post-liberal Right, the way forward looks like a tech superstructure owned and operated by an Olympian class of plutocrats and financiers, within which ordinary people are more or less left to figure it out for themselves.

At ground level, this probably looks like a dividend of freedom and flourishing to those able to forge strong local communities for practical support, while taking advantage of dematerialised opportunities for work or political organising afforded by the digital revolution. And by the same token, for those who lack the connections, capacities, or skills to flourish, it probably means “devil take the hindmost”.

What does any of this matter to the British Isles, thousands of miles away and still (thankfully) innocent of bear-based “rewilding”? Well, as long as Europe lives in the shadow of the American empire, when the Land of the Free sneezes the rest of the world catches cold. So should we end up with a post-liberal Right-wing government at the imperial core, we will probably, in due course, need to rediscover our own modes of localist cooperation. Even if the only bears that trouble us are those of London’s dematerialised, oligarch-riddled, and increasingly American-owned financial markets.

In Appalachia, one of the poorest regions in the country, the common belief is that the mountains protect the locals from storms. Unfortunately, this is true only up to a point: when a hurricane like Helene hits — bringing once-in-a-thousand-years levels of rainfall — the mountains become a curse rather than a blessing. Helene has brought the mountains down, triggering mudslides and rockfalls that have destroyed entire towns and obliterated almost every road in a vast radius.

When the lowlands flood, that is bad enough: in 2005, New Orleans stopped being a vibrant city and turned into one big, murky lake. But with storm surges and flooding, you can often navigate much of the disaster area by boat. Up in the mountains, it is the earth, not the water, that becomes your worst enemy. With the roads gone and bridges smashed, driving is impossible, travel by foot is next to impossible: isolated settlements can often only be reached via helicopter. Those I have spoken to in North Carolina describe a disaster of “biblical dimensions”. The only thing that comes close to it in recent history is the “Great Flood” of 1916 in North Carolina, but Helene has easily beaten the river gage measurements from back then.

The death toll of Helene is currently inching closer to 200, already making it the second-deadliest storm after Katrina. But this number will rise and then rise again in the coming days. In truth, with the reality of unnavigable mountain terrain, an obliterated road network, and massive power, cell phone and water failures, nobody knows how many are dead. Without sufficient rescue efforts, more Americans might end up succumbing to the lack of water in the wake of the flood. But despite all of this, and despite the fact that the clock is ticking for many Americans trapped without food, water, or means of communication, coverage of Helene has been strangely muted. This silence has, in turn, masked a far darker problem: the lack of resources and manpower going into the rescue effort.

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Bush’s response to Katrina was criticised at the time for being lumberingly slow and ineffective. But the relief effort being mounted now is a pale shadow of what was done a mere 19 years ago, and that makes the silence around this disaster even more ominous.

In 2005, significant planning and resourcing was being carried out days before the storm even made landfall. Ten thousand members of the National Guard had gathered from several states to deal with the damage Katrina was about to cause. The final number who helped with the effort measured closer to 20,000. But those guardsmen did not stand alone: the US Army was preparing to assume overall command of the entire rescue effort through US Northern Command, where its battle staff coordinated response forces over various state lines. The regular Army helped too, including forces from the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army Corps of Engineers.

This time, things are very different. At the time of writing, fewer than 7,000 guardsmen are helping with Helene disaster relief, and there was no equivalent preparation before the storm actually hit. US Northern Command, which can only assume responsibility if it is asked to do so by other government authorities, is not coordinating the overall effort. During Katrina, more than 350 military helicopters were involved with the rescue efforts. This time, in a mountain disaster zone where many more helicopters are needed than in a coastal area, well below 100 helicopters have currently been committed.

The Katrina response had its fair share of problems. But the criticism it attracted had less to do with a lack of helicopters and more to do with the bureaucratic inertia that dogged the relief effort. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) proved to be slow, inflexible and often hostile to efforts to circumvent red tape or unrealistic rules in favour of things that were practical and simply worked. In one case, the supplier of bottled water that FEMA had on contract failed to turn up on time. Local rescue crews then went to pick up water from local Wal-Mart stores, which could track every litre of water entering and leaving its stores. The water was right there, sitting on the shelves; people needed immediate help, so why not distribute it now and have the government simply pay Wal-Mart for it later? Wal-Mart was more than happy to go along with this arrangement, but FEMA was horrified that someone had circumvented their own chosen contractor. Grudgingly, they accepted the deal already struck, but then acted forcefully to shut down future ideas of dangerous and unauthorised innovation.

So while it can be said that Bush’s administration fumbled parts of the Katrina relief efforts, they at least did so in the context of America as it existed back then. The planning wasn’t always good, but there was planning. The helicopters didn’t always go to the places they were most needed, but at least they were there in large enough numbers. This is worlds apart from the reality of America in 2024. Today, the institutions are weaker, the deficits are bigger, and the US empire itself — then at the height of unipolarity — is critically overstretched. There aren’t enough helicopters, nor enough troops. A decent portion of the Tennessee National Guard, rather than helping rescue Americans in their own home state, are currently deployed to bases in Kuwait. In 2024, the only way for the US military to source enough men for its various far-flung bases and military commitments is to lean heavily on the National Guard. The Guard is supposed to be the primary muscle when it comes to domestic disaster relief, but as the regular Army is falling apart, there simply aren’t enough resources available anywhere in the system anymore.

This means that even though the victims of hurricane Helene have found themselves stranded within a stone’s throw of some of the US military’s more significant military bases — Camp Lejeune and Fort Liberty are both located in North Carolina — very little help has been forthcoming. There remains a belief in the West that, despite various recent reversals and losses, the US military is a machine with near-godlike powers: if it really wanted to, it could fill the sky and blot out the sun with an uncountable number of helicopters and planes, whenever and wherever it wants.

Almost a week into the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, those endless helicopters have failed to appear. And as America readies to surge more troops to the Middle East to potentially fight Iran, it’s clear that they can’t appear, at least not without seriously breaking something somewhere else. Troops and aircraft busy in Tennessee or North Carolina can’t be deployed to Jordan, Iraq or Syria. In theory, the US military exists to protect the lives of Americans — that’s why it falls under the Department of Defence. In practice, Americans have largely been left to fend for themselves, 50 miles away from their own military bases, just in case those soldiers and helicopters are needed on the other side of the world.

Trying to get a sense of the attitude in Washington, D.C. about the very worrying state of the Helene relief effort, I asked friends there to tell me what people were saying about it. Without exception, the response from everyone turned out to be the same: there was no talk. Helene wasn’t even on the radar; it was, after all, just a storm. Besides, hadn’t the situation already been handled? There were 6,000 guardsmen on the scene; that ought to be more than enough.

All of this is becoming eerily reminiscent of Chernobyl — and the accident that in many ways defined the last days of the Soviet Union. That too was just a minor accident that at first seemed like nothing more than a blip to the complacent authorities in Moscow. Only over time did people start to realise that this was truly serious. Chernobyl has since come to be seen as one of the proximate causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union, though the reason why has often been misunderstood. Chernobyl wasn’t actually that lethal: approximately 30 people died as a direct result of the reactor explosion, with maybe 4,000 people dying years or decades later from illnesses related to radiation exposure. Hurricane Katrina, by contrast, led directly to 1,392 fatalities.

The real reason Chernobyl looms so large in stories about the last days of the Soviet Union was because of all the lying, the governmental incompetence, and the shared sense that the Soviet Union itself was a senile construct that no longer had any real point. A healthy society, one in which people still feel a sense of purpose and common belief, could have endured far worse disasters than Chernobyl. But by 1986, the Soviet Union was a place where neither the rulers nor the ruled believed the system still had a reason to exist. By the end, talk of socialism, Karl Marx and historical materialism seemed like nothing more than an absurd joke.

What happened to Russian Marxism, is now happening to American patriotism. Consider the lyrics to “Over There”, one of America’s more famous military-themed songs:

Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming everywhere!
So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware! –
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there!

Twenty years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, a song like this would have been the embodiment of American patriotism and martial pride. Then, the song had real meaning to it; people felt it. Don’t mess with our proud America, the song warned — if you do, we’ll come over and make you regret it.

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If you were to sing those words today to a mother stranded without water in North Carolina, or a Tennessee guardsman in Kuwait who still doesn’t know if his parents back home are even alive, the lyrics will appear like a particularly cruel joke. Indeed, that guardsman won’t come back to help Tennessee, not until “it” is over, over there in Kuwait. What that “it” is, nobody yet knows. The yanks are coming, the yanks are coming: they’re coming to bases in Iraq or Syria, they’re coming to Romania, to Bulgaria, to Poland, to Korea. They’re coming to endless gruelling deployments overseas that the US can’t afford, that talking heads in Washington insist are the most important thing in the world even as America slowly falls apart.

When Iraqi militias fired missiles that killed three servicemen stationed in Jordan, the reaction from most Americans was not patriotic fervour and hunger for revenge: it was exhaustion. Why are they even there? Why can’t they just come home?

Contrary to popular belief, Hurricane Helene is not “just a storm”, in the same sense that Chernobyl was not “just an accident”. Beyond all the destroyed roads, the flooded towns, the ruined electrical networks and the stranded American families, Helene is also an indication that the US political system, followed by its military, is very close to the point of moral and physical exhaustion.

Appalachia has always been forgotten; the people there are used to being treated like dirt. Talking to locals whose families were still stuck in the disaster area, the common refrain was that the help wasn’t arriving because the elites simply hate the people now in need of help. Talking to people in D.C., however, quickly dispelled that notion. What is going on right now isn’t malice, it’s somehow even worse: it’s senility. People weren’t enjoying the suffering of fellow Americans; they were simply so oblivious and zoned out that they couldn’t even notice a problem.

Currently, a hurricane disaster that is significantly more challenging than Katrina is being serviced by something like a third of the resources that Louisiana called upon. And yet few people in Washington even think this is a problem. At the same time as Congress has borrowed another 10 or 20 billion dollars to hand over to Ukraine and Israel, presidential candidate Kamala Harris has announced that the victims of Helene will be able to apply for $750 in relief assistance to help them get back on their feet.

As Chernobyl was, Helene is now becoming: a point at which the sheer absurdity and uselessness of the machine becomes too obvious to ignore. Looking at the disaster unfolding in Appalachia, the winners of the Cold War are now starting to ask the same question that eventually brought down the Soviet Union: what the hell is even the point of all of this anymore?