Yet, damned if those wretched deplorables didn’t pull together when that hurricane, and the monstrous flooding that came with it, arrived: CNN was full of video of black people helping white and white helping black and Hispanic helping and being helped, all of them looking out for one another.

As Ron Nirenberg, the mayor of San Antonio, a city the hurricane narrowly missed and where many evacuees have headed, said of his city’s opening up of shelters, “No one will be turned away.”

In the first hours particularly but even now, these were citizens, civilians, volunteers, Texans helping Texans, as they like to say down there. Folks who had boats got them out and then went to save some lives. The grace and grit, of both helpers and helpees, was marked. No one seemed to be complaining. No one appeared to be looking for the government to come and rescue them, though in fact, this time the government (I mean that generalistically) was fast off the mark.