Since the notion of lockdown was floated, people have been sending me links to the myriad measures taken to prevent the spread of coronavirus, from blockading interstate highways to prevent travelers from one state to enter another and bring their diseased bodies with them, to arresting people in parks for existing with their children. Under any other circumstances, these might be outrageous violations of constitutional rights.
Indeed, they may well be under these circumstances as well, but Inter arma enim silent lēgēs. It’s not that this is a war, or that we’re fighting an “invisible enemy,” but that we were in extremis and are constrained to take extreme action to prevent massive harm. We let go of things that would otherwise demand action because survival matters more at the moment. It’s not a principled view of rights, but then, dead people have no rights.
The tension between private liberty and public health in the United States is hardly new. Americans have demanded the latter in times of plague and prioritized the former in times of well-being since at least the Colonial Era. Politicians and business leaders have alternately manipulated and deferred to that tension for about as long.
If America was a more homogeneous society, perhaps it would have been sufficient for our trusted leaders to implore us to behave for the welfare of all and we would choose to follow their instructions. But we are a society of rugged individuals, feral cats, conspiracy theorists and ideological slaves. We pretend to care about society, but not enough to sublimate our beliefs for its sake.
Yet the same Mr. Barr, early in the outbreak, was seemingly so concerned about its impact that he proposed letting the government pause court proceedings and detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — effectively suspending the core constitutional right of habeas corpus.
Gee whiz, a New York Times editorial about putting aside our politics for the benefit of others taking an irrational partisan dig at a highly partisan attorney general for proposing we not hold trials that would be logistically impossible and ridiculous in the midst of a pandemic. Nothing says “can’t we all get along” better than a gratuitous slap to a well deserving AG for a mindnumbingly dumb reason.
Temporary limitations on some liberties don’t seem to concern most Americans at this moment. Polls show that 70 percent to 90 percent of the public support measures to slow the spread of the virus, even if those measures require temporarily yielding certain freedoms and allowing the economy to suffer in the short run.
People would give up some freedom for safety when they believe the threat to their life is real. This isn’t shocking, any more than people believing that the threat is no longer so real as to keep them locked down for much longer.
Indeed, it is wealthy and powerful conservatives and their allies, including President Trump and Fox News, who are driving the relatively small protests demanding a “liberation” of the states from oppressive lockdowns — as opposed to any overwhelming public sentiment to that effect.
The protests were ugly; armed protesters storming the Michigan capital. The Trumpian cry for “liberation” was unadulterated pandering, as the dolt in chief sought to inflame matters for the sake of his political misfortunes. But there are a lot of people who are neither wealthy nor powerful who haven’t found lockdown as much fun as the TV commercials about how we’re “in this together” suggested.
People are tired of being cooped up. People are tired of not earning an income, the government’s trillions somehow not filtering down to the New York Times’ beloved little people, and certainly not in amounts that suffice to keep them rolling in toilet paper. They may not hit the streets with long guns strapped to their shoulders, but they aren’t all that thrilled at their Zoom-educated children having to eat macaroni again for dinner.
Civil liberties may feel to some like a second-order problem when thousands of Americans are dying of a disease with no known treatment or vaccine. Yet while unprecedented emergencies may demand unprecedented responses, those responses can easily tip into misuse and abuse, or can become part of our daily lives even after the immediate threat has passed. For examples, Americans need look no further than the excesses of the post-Sept. 11 Patriot Act.*
Yes, 9/11 was sold to us as a war, a war against terrorism, a different kind of enemy. a different kind of war, one where we couldn’t tell who we were fighting or how we would win. And in the inflamed passions of the moment, we were asked to sacrifice for the greater good and we did. And it’s still with us, because temporary needs should be temporary. But in this transitory battle against pandemic, are we any more clear where the tipping point is when our sacrifices of civil liberties are no longer necessary? It’s not as if we have a vaccine yet.
It hasn’t been so long that we don’t remember what it was like to walk outside at will, without a mask, and stand next to a neighbor and greet him with a handshake. But we didn’t shelter-in-place to survive the pandemic to hand over our civil liberties to the government, whether it be run by Trump or anyone else. We did this to survive, and once we are confident that we will, we will take them back.
In a large self-governing society, civil liberties exist as part of a delicate balance. That balance is being sorely tested right now, and there is often no good solution that does not infringe on at least some liberty. At the same time, the coronavirus provides Americans with an opportunity to reimagine the scope and nature of our civil liberties and our social contract.
So that’s what this is really all about. It’s not the encouragement to sacrifice our rights for temporary safety. It’s not to remind us that our acquiescence was only temporary and that the government, this government specifically, shouldn’t be allowed to curtail our civil liberties. It’s that having proven our willingness to suffer the loss of civil liberties for the moment, the New York Times wants us to “reimagine the scope and nature of our civil liberties and our social contract” going forward into our Brave New World. Not the government’s vision, but the New York Times’.
Is there no one who won’t seize upon a crisis for their own ulterior purposes? Just because we did what we had to do survive one disease doesn’t mean we’re willing to renegotiate the social contract.
*The name of the law is “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001.” One would have expected the New York Times to be aware of this.
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