The Scary Ease with Which Some Americans Accept Authoritarianism

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a troubling element in American society—the ease with which some Americans accept authoritarianism. I don’t know how broad this strain of American society is. But typical of this mindset is a letter published in the 5/7/20 New Jersey Star-Ledger. Under the title “Protests ignore that lives are at stake”, Howard Whidden wrote:

As seen in Michigan and other places, groups of armed conservatives, flying tea party and Donald Trump flags, find it necessary to protest government’s right to force compliance on wearing face masks, maintaining social distances and requiring citizens to stay home. I’m sure they are aware that over 70,000 Americans have already died as a result of the virus, and it may go higher than 100,000.

However, they argue their rights are being infringed, such as not being able to leave their homes when they want. Which is more important: the lives of fellow Americans or their constitutional rights being infringed?

A third paragraph, an insultingly sarcastic diatribe, is not worth quoting here.

There is a reason why the Declaration of Independence links the right to life with liberty and the pursuit of happiness and, later in the Constitution, property. They were considered by the Founders as inseparable. In the long struggle for individual liberty, from the Magna Carta to the American Revolution, untold numbers of people died for that cause. Why? Because liberty is essential to a life proper to a human being. The phrase “live free or die” is not a hollow slogan. It is a crucial truth. Life without liberty constitutionally guaranteed by the moral principle of individual rights is the life of a subject or a slave. It is an existence where one can be imprisoned without just cause; where one’s property can be seized at will; where one can be dragged off to Gulags, gas chambers, or killing fields; where one can be guillotined as an “enemy of the people.  

Note Whidden’s hierarchy, “government’s right to force compliance” over “constitutional rights being infringed”. But what I described above is what happens when governmental authority is allowed to take precedence over individual rights. There is a reason why the American concept of government protects individual rights as inalienable—so our rights cannot be infringed by the government.  

Whether one agrees with the protestors or not, a true American should always be on alert to restrictions on their liberties. Restrictions are inevitable, of course. Hence, the concept of unalienable individual rights, which defines both the scope of a person’s liberty and the boundary beyond which the individual’s freedom cannot go—the boundary being the same rights of others. 

But as the Founders understood, restrictions on government power, the power of legal coercion, is the primary restriction. They understood that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,” but that the government’s power must be “just”, “drawn from the consent of the governed”, and grounded in the principle of protecting inalienable individual rights. Free people should always be ready to hold the political authorities accountable. They should always demand that the politicians justify any restrictions they place on our liberties, based on individual rights as the standard of accountability. Government certainly has a role in a serious disease pandemic, because an infected person can infect others, potentially infringing on their rights. But the restriction should be justified by the seriousness of the illness, and within the context of inalienable individual rights. 

Whether the statewide lock-owns were ever justified, are the restrictions in the current pandemic justified or are they open-ended grants of arbitrary power to politicians? After two months, the risks and scope of COVID-19 are now widely known. Contrary to Whidden, the risk of COVID-19 deaths does not justify draconian crippling of people’s freedoms. Nearly 40,000 Americans are killed in auto accidents every year. Do we ban the freedom of driving? Of course not, because everyone knows that each time s-he gets behind the wheel of a car, s-he is running the risk of getting themselves or others killed. The choice is up to each and every one of us, as rational adults, to weigh the risk of driving death and liability against other needs, and act accordingly. Is the forced mass quarantining of people without evidence of infection still justified after all of this time, given the now widespread knowledge we all have of the COVID-19 risks? That’s what the protestors are challenging. Kudos to them. 

If the draconian universal lock-downs were ever a governmental exercise of “just power”, they are increasingly unjustified now. According to infectious disease experts, COVID-19 will be with us until vaccines are available, which could take up to two years. Until then, the virus will continue to run its course, regardless of political orders. My New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, instituted his state-wide stay-at-home order in March. He just issued another in a series of lock-down extensions, this time to June 5, 2020. How many more extensions do we, the free people of NJ, tolerate? Like all Americans, we have a right to demand answers, and the politicians have a duty to answer. Murphy’s rationalization that the lock-down is required to “save lives”—that “public health creates economic health”—has become untenable. Life requires health. Health requires productive work and trade. Productive work and trade requires liberty. Economic health comes before physical health. An increasingly crippled economy will make it harder, not easier, to beat the pandemic.

Our lives have meaning beyond avoiding death at all costs. Death is ultimately inevitable in any event. Shame on people like Howard Whidden and his ilk for ridiculing the efforts of the protestors. I find interesting, psychologically, Whidden’s use of the phrase “their constitutional rights,” as if the norm in America is the life of a subject who placidly obeys the orders of their imperial rulers. It is just Whidden’s type, the type who unquestioningly accepts the “government’s right to force compliance” to its edicts, that paves the way for dictatorships. And it is just that, dictatorship, that makes living impossible. 

Related Reading:

Don't Get Fooled by Fake Photos of Coronavirus Lockdown Protests COVID-19 lockdown protests are spreading and so is misinformation about them. By Elizabeth Nolan Brown for Reason.com.

‘Reopening’ the Economy: It’s Not ‘Money vs. lives,’ or Even ‘Money or Lives’

Money-Making and Commerce go Hand-in-Hand with the Fight against COVID-19

Moral Rights and Political Freedom by Tara Smith