It’s hard to shake the awful memory of 30,000 New Orleans residents huddled in the The Louisiana Superdome, living for days in squalid conditions after escaping the flooding caused by the levee failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005.

People around the world asked, “How can this happen in America?” It was the first time the U.S. appeared closer to a failed state than the world’s most advanced society.

Tragically, that was a harbinger. Fifteen years later, it feels like the entire United States is stuck in a metaphorical Superdome with no relief in sight.

Of course, most Americans today aren’t experiencing the horrors Katrina survivors did as they waited without adequate food, water or medicine for buses to evacuate them, while mourning lost loved ones, homes, jobs and neighborhoods.

But everyone has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. And many are paying a fearsome price — the more than 20 million who have lost their jobs, the 5.4 million who have lost their health insurance, the 5.8 million who have contracted COVID-19, and worst of all, the 180,000 and counting who have died. And — egregiously but not coincidentally — as with Katrina, those hit the hardest are disproportionately people of color.

There is a straight line connecting the two catastrophes — failed responses by Republican administrations that valued political loyalty over competence.

Remember: after Bill Clinton built up the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s capacity, George W. Bush appointed cronies with no disaster relief experience to run the agency — first his campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, and then, the hapless Michael Brown, whose “qualification” was running the International Arabian Horse Association. Plus, Mr. Brown’s two top aides were Bush campaign operatives.

So FEMA became a shell of its old self. Its response to Katrina was marked by lethal delays, mismanagement and blame-shifting. The people of New Orleans were abandoned by their federal government.

Similarly, after Barack Obama strengthened the U.S. public health infrastructure in the wake of the H1N1 and Ebola outbreaks in 2009 and 2014, respectively, President Donald Trump tore it down. He slashed the number of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) epidemiologists in China from 47 to 14, according to Reuters, closed all National Science Foundation foreign offices, and ignored the comprehensive pandemic playbook Obama prepared.

Making matters worse, what Mr. Bush did to FEMA, Mr. Trump has done throughout the federal government — hiring hacks, firing competent professionals, muzzling experts, and leaving key positions vacant. And Mr. Trump also hollowed out and sidelined the one agency supposed to take charge in a pandemic, the CDC.

After decimating the government’s institutional capacity, Mr. Trump abandoned any pretense of leadership. He first denied the threat of COVID-19, then failed to lead a national response, while promoting quack remedies and undermining public health authorities. He failed to provide urgently-needed ventilators and personal protective equipment, failed to sustain the lockdown until the virus’ spread was under control, and failed to use the time in lockdown to ramp up our testing and contact tracing capacity. Just last week, he bypassed the CDC to issue guidelines scaling back testing.

Every other developed nation took these essential steps and today, their residents are back to living near-normal lives. But Americans are joined by only Brazilians in experiencing an explosion in COVID-19 cases. Our exceptionalism — in this case — is shameful.

The bottom line is this: America will never have a properly functioning federal government capable of addressing deadly pandemics, natural disasters and financial crises until the entire Republican Party is annihilated at the polls — and kept out of power until leaders, like Gov. Larry Hogan, who hasn’t been perfect but governs responsibly, become the rule rather than the exception.

This is not just about Mr. Trump. Today, Mr. Bush is often viewed through rose-colored glasses because he’s not a sociopath and is capable of empathy. But Mr. Bush oversaw three of the worst mistakes of modern U.S. history — the Iraq War, Katrina, and the 2008 financial crash. He censored scientists who warned about climate change. And he tried to turn the professional civil service into something closer to a patronage system at the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

In fact, going back to Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has run against government, and sought to dismantle, politicize and privatize the public sector at every opportunity. Mr. Trump has only taken GOP nihilism to its logical extreme.

After Herbert Hoover bungled the response to the Great Depression, the Republican Party wandered the wilderness for 20 years. After the Katrinas, coronaviruses and economic crashes the last two GOP presidencies have brought us, it’s time for a comparable period of exile. To liberate Americans from our psychic Superdome, we must restore the federal government’s capacity to lead, respond, fix our problems and save people’s lives. That means voting Democratic not only in 2020 but for as long as it takes for anti-government, anti-science, anti-truth extremism to be purged from the GOP.

Bruce Kozarsky (kozarsky@starpower.net) is a writer who lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.