New Yorker Magazine Is Afraid of the Cajun Navy

Not even the Washington Post could help but admire the spirit displayed by individual citizens who spontaneously organized in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, without waiting to be saved by the remote, coercive bureaucracy worshiped by progressives:

After the storm blew into Houston, a remarkable network of boat owners with smartphones, worried neighbors with laptops and digital wizards with mapping software popped up to summon and support an army of Good Samaritans who motored, rowed and waded into dangerous waters to save family, friends and total strangers.

The “We the People” response seemed distinctly Texan, an outgrowth of the state’s almost genetic disinclination to rely on the government for anything — and in some cases, resolute willingness to defy it. Just as some Texans defied mandatory evacuation orders ahead of the storm, many rescuers ignored repeated official warnings to stay off streets flooded with treacherous and fast-flowing waters.

But the insufferably elitist leftists at The New Yorker are not pleased:

Among the heroes of Hurricane Harvey have been hundreds of volunteer boaters, members of the so-called Cajun Navy and other similar groups, who have patrolled the flooded streets of Houston in their own boats, pulling stranded families off of roofs and bringing them to shelter. … The heroism of the boaters is so vivid and so moving that it obscures the most important question about them: Why are they so needed in the first place?

We are fed the predictable answer: resistance to liberal authoritarianism has prevented Big Government from becoming ubiquitous enough to meet our every need. A stubborn refusal to embrace anthropogenic global warming as the One True Religion supposedly compounds the problem, as if the hurricane had anything whatsoever to do with harmless CO2 emissions.

A better question might be why we need moonbats who ask why we need self-reliance and non–coercion-based solutions.

There is a cyclic pattern to the erosion of faith in government, in which politics saps the state’s capacity to protect people, and so people put their trust in other institutions (churches; self-organizing volunteer navies), and are more inclined to support anti-government politics. The stories of the storm and the navies exist on a libertarian skeleton. Through them, a particular idea of how society might be organized is coming into view.

That particular idea horrifies elitists and authoritarians, but is an inspiration to the rest of us. Maybe we don’t need to live on leashes after all.

On a tip from J. Hat tip: American Thinker.