I’m amazed at the number of intelligent people who are taking what the government and media is telling them about the coronavirus at face value. In what alternate universe has the federal government and mainstream media earned your trust, especially in the past 10 years? Socialism believes that the government can take better care of you than you can of yourself. And guess what? It has never succeeded — ever. Israel, India and the United Kingdom have all tried it and ended up rejecting it. More recently, you have the socialist disaster of Venezuela to look at if you want to see just how bad the system can be. Even totalitarian Marxist countries like the Soviet Union have been destined to failure. And if socialism isn’t bad enough, totalitarian socialism is even worse, and that agenda, too, has been pushed by the Democrats during this coronavirus “crisis.” Think about it: Marxists do not believe in religion. They don’t believe in personal freedom. They don’t believe in liberty.
Not only is there no evidence that “lockdowns” work, they are unconstitutional. Democrat governors have threatened to arrest anyone who attends a church service during their lockdowns. Freedom of religion, as well as the freedom to assemble, are guaranteed First-Amendment rights. It is the backbone that our country was built on, and no politician, no matter the circumstances, should be able to circumvent the Bill of Rights.
But
it doesn’t end there. People have been threatened by government
officials for walking in a park, using a beach or leaving their homes.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat dictator, decided it was
within her power to ban garden stores from selling seeds. Colorado
police handcuffed a father in front of his kids for playing T-ball in an
empty park with his daughter. And three Massachusetts men were arrested
and face jail time for crossing state lines to play a round of golf.
Totalitarian socialism justified by a disease is still totalitarian
socialism, and no one should condone it.
The Covid emergency has created two sides: the progressive Left want lockdown to continue, borders to remain closed, JobKeeper and JobSeeker to be continued, and the economy to remain weak, as continual growth is thought a Ponzi scheme. The Right proposes an opposite set of policies. Having insisted on a prolonged lockdown, the Left then took advantage of the resulting social vacuum to promote its own wide-ranging agendas, while insisting that society as a whole undertake a self-denying ordinance on activity.
Liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit. In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. Last year, when the pandemic was raging and scientists and public-health officials were still trying to understand how the virus spread, extreme care was warranted. People all over the country made enormous sacrifices—rescheduling weddings, missing funerals, canceling graduations, avoiding the family members they love—to protect others.
2021 is different from 2020, though. Scientists know a lot more about how COVID-19 spreads—and how it doesn’t. Public-health advice is shifting. But some progressives have not updated their behavior based on the new information. And in their eagerness to protect themselves and others, they may be underestimating other costs. Being extra careful about COVID-19 is (mostly) harmless when it’s limited to wiping down your groceries with Lysol wipes and wearing a mask in places where you’re unlikely to spread the coronavirus, such as on a hiking trail. Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning. Public figures and policy makers who try to dictate others’ behavior without any scientific justification for doing so erode trust in public health and make people less willing to take useful precautions. The marginal gains of staying shut down might not justify the potential backlash.
Our culture treats some freedoms, like the rights of sexual and ethnic minorities, as sacrosanct and unquestionable. Yet it treats others, like the freedom to visit family or have a drink at the pub, as conditional, liable for revocation whenever the state decides that the supreme law of public health requires it.
That marks quite a shift. Seen through the older prism of freedom, a state policy, such as the lockdown, would not be embraced. It would be seen as an unprecedented infringement on our liberty. Indeed, the countless deaths caused by lockdown could even be conceived as state manslaughter. The threat of the state behaving in this way would outweigh, morally and politically, the threat posed by a new virus. A pandemic would still be treated with the utmost seriousness, but we would rely more on Swedish-style voluntary precautions, rather than attempt to use the state to minimise mortality at all costs.
Such an approach seems difficult to imagine in the UK today. Instead of ‘give me liberty, or give me death!’, too many now ask the state to ‘give me liberty from death – and from nasty words and microaggressions too!’ The liberal logic of lockdown is clear: if the good life is the gratified one, and the state is the means to protect us from others’ attitudes, why shouldn’t the goverment lock us down, or lock us up, in order to protect our health?
The tentacles of socialism that have wrapped themselves around the
Democrat party didn’t start with COVID-19 and it’s not going to end
with COVID-19. However, what has happened during this pandemic is that
America has allowed the Democrats to advance their socialist cause. They
have made significant inroads that have harmed the country, the
economy, small businesses, the president and our individual freedoms and
liberty.