Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region as a robust Category 4 storm on September 26, 2024, causing extensive damage along the Gulf Coast before moving northward. The storm’s remnants led to catastrophic flooding and tornadoes in North Carolina, particularly within the western a part of the state, where communities were cut off resulting from washed-out roads and power outages​.

Tragedies rarely unite Americans as of late.

Every 12 months, terrible crises cause enormous suffering. Most of them are tragic and affect only the directly affected and their immediate families.

A number of, nevertheless, achieve political notoriety and thereby turn into a public tragedy.

Natural disasters, School shootings, Terrorist attack and economic crises can turn into public tragedies. Sexual assaults – especially on women – by violent executives and other men in positions of power recently became a public tragedyin addition to Police violence against African Americanswhich has caused political unrest throughout the United States.

Even the COVID-19 pandemic, an apparent natural disaster, quickly became a public tragedy because the death toll mounted and a pervasive sense of mismanagement, mistrust and blame electrified the general public on each the political left and right.

Events like these reveal that the way in which tragic circumstances are portrayed and responded to within the United States and elsewhere has modified. Public tragedies are heartbreaking events that attract widespread public attention. They involve stylized public expressions of shock, outrage, social blame, victim claims, protest, and commemoration.

My book, “After a tragedy“” examines the recent rise in public tragedies as a specific sort of political crisis that has had far-reaching positive and negative effects on social and political relations within the twenty first century.

As a Sociologist who studies risks, politics and social movementsMy goal was not to check the authenticity of claims made within the wake of public tragedies, but somewhat to higher understand, through comparison, why a few of these events have such a robust impact, while other, objectively similar traumas don’t.

Public tragedies have contributed to increasing political polarization and the sectarian tone of today's political rhetoric. One query I sought to reply in my book is: Why?

Old way: “God, fate, bad luck”

The short answer is that the general public's understanding of tragic events has modified.

Until the twentieth century, tragedies were normally explained in another way than they’re today. Explanations often referred to forces reminiscent of God, fate, bad luck, accidents beyond one's fault, or, in line with the liberal political tradition of the United States, to individual responsibility. Even when the suffering was extreme and known to have been caused or exacerbated by the actions or omissions of others, explanations for the causes typically took this manner.

Take Pennsylvania's Johnstown Flood of 1889by which greater than 2,200 people and far of the town were swept away by a flood after a dam broke. The wealthy South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club had built the dam to create a personal lake. Although the dam failed as a consequence of poor construction and maintenance, neither the club nor its wealthy members can be held accountableIn probably the most significant court case against the club, the tragic explanation for death and destruction was attributed to forces beyond our control in the ultimate verdict.

Today this explanation would now not be tenable.

New path: “Government, industry, culture”

After a tragedy, today's reports concentrate on assigning blame. I've found that in addition they typically concentrate on social blame, where societal institutions reminiscent of government, industry, civil society, and even American culture are held accountable.

Social blame attributes blame to social forces, to not individuals or God. And because blame is placed on a gaggle or aspect of society, public tragedies are linked to political conflict.

Another reason for the political significance of public tragedies lies within the changing mentality of Americans today.

Survey show that many Americans feel fear and a deep sense of vulnerability within the face of circumstances they appear unable to regulate.

This mindset creates sympathy for the victims of tragic circumstances, especially when the harm they’ve suffered is portrayed by the political elite, the media and social activists as a manifestation of political failure and an unjust society. Political interests on each the left and the fitting routinely use victim claims to acquire support and advantage.

The murder of George Floyd: A public tragedy

Let us take the story of George Floyd, killed in 2020 by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Floyd's murder sparked nationwide outrage Video footage of this circulated first on social media after which through sustained news media coverage. The news and social media story about Floyd's death emphasized his innocence: As a black man, he had died unjustly by the hands of police.

This portrayal was unusual on the time. Standard reporting on such killings often focused on resisting arrest, previous indiscretions or the victim's criminal record, which suggests individual responsibility. Reports on Floyd's death didn’t highlight these elements.

Nor did the reports suggest that Floyd's death was a mandatory a part of police crime fighting – one other common feature of reports reports. Nor did the reports emphasize that Chauvin was a criminal cop, suggesting that he was solely liable for Floyd's killing.

Rather, initial reports linked Floyd's killing to police violence across the country and seemed that it was a standard police practice.

Floyd’s murder was quickly “Police work” is guilty”, which garnered enormous public sympathy and notoriety—and with it political significance. It became a public tragedy that illuminated plenty of societal conditions surrounding Floyd’s death in a way that few police killings of black men had managed to do.

“Good people were brought down”

In the past, Americans may need attributed Floyd's killing to fate, bad luck, an accident or his individual responsibility, which may need mitigated public outrage.

Yet explanations of this type are not any longer as credible as they once were. Instead, the heartbreaking stories that characterize public tragedies follow a routine storyline that I call the “trauma script.” It is a stylized narrative that capitalizes on Americans’ fears and vulnerabilities, triggering emotional responses and moral panic.

The script focuses on innocent victims who’re harmed by unforeseeable, uncontrollable and unjustified circumstances and who’re blamed on the actions or omissions of “society”.

In this narrative, public tragedies convey an ethical struggle by which good persons are degraded by a nasty society. This tragic struggle isn’t internal and private, but external and social. It is a scenario by which bad things occur to good individuals who haven’t any selection.

The public perception of trauma and loss and their underlying causes has subsequently modified over time.

In earlier times, Americans often justified hardship by saying it reflected the sacrifices mandatory to get ahead. Today, a shift in mood reflects a change of heart. Americans now concentrate on unjustified hardship brought on by society. This reflects a cultural shift from a progress-oriented to a risk-oriented worldview.

Victim role as political identity

As Americans turn into more aware of the risks, they increasingly view them as an expression of political decisions.

Whether it's climate change, energy sources, guns, sexual harassment, discrimination, policing, abortion, and even free speech, these issues are actually understood as risk decisions that profit some and harm others.

Politically speaking, these are actually zero-sum games which can be resulting in political polarization amongst Americans and societal distrust of American institutions.

Recent Pew polls show that two-thirds of Americans consider that other Americans have little or no trust in the federal government or other residents. Gallup has also shown that Americans' trust in the federal government and other vital social institutions has fallen to a historic low.

Americans' growing distrust of their fellow residents and perceptions of unfair government have also increased political competition. Americans increasingly blame their political rivals for his or her plight and show only compassion for many who share their beliefs. This shift has also generated sympathy for claims of societal victimization and elevated victimhood as a political identity.

Under these conditions, public tragedies have gotten an increasing number of frequent because they’re political events that polarize somewhat than unite.