Plague Journal (29): creeping authoritarianism

I noticed protests breaking out here and there. In Detroit, for example, and in Raliegh. People are chafing against the restraints, and I suppose there are bound to be more of these protests.

One wonders, as well, about the post-coronavirus world. Some people worry that we have ceded too much power to government, allowing too much infringement on personal rights in the name of the emergency.

I think this kind of worrying is--should be--a necessary part of the conversation we have as a people. The governing elites will always be infringing, and so the people have always to be pushing back, drawing their line in the sand. No further!

These thoughts are sparked by this article by Matt Purple. He says we should bear two stubborn facts in mind:

The first is that government authority is programmed to grow, never shrink. I slightly depart here from the economist Robert Higgs, who’s been frequently cited since the pandemic began. Higgs thought up what he called the ratchet effect, which holds that the state gains powers during a crisis, then surrenders only some of them afterwards, yielding a net growth in government. Yet at least since 9/11, the feds haven’t relinquished much of anything at all. Instead an authorization for use of military force has become a permission slip for ever-expanding empire. A gigantic surveillance apparatus has grown out of the NSA. Fear begat action, which created precedent, which became the license for even more action. Now we’re assured the current measures won’t beckon this way, that they’re only temporary. Are we so sure?

The second fact is that our responses to crises don’t arise inorganically. That is to say, much of what we do under threat are things we’re inclined to do anyway.... Certainly the urge to snitch is deeply embedded within some of us, as so many totalitarian polities have demonstrated. Rod Liddle expresses this well: “There is a certain tranche of the population,” he says, “which yearns for its fellow citizens to be chastised, punished and, if possible, banged up.” We’re also attracted to those civic-minded catchphrases, national security and public health—if we must conform, we prefer the line to be simple. And of course, everyone wants to feel safe. Authoritarianism, in other words, isn’t something artificially imposed; its pieces naturally interlock at a time like this.

This is well-put. He goes on to say that this increase in government authority never gets rolled-back completely when the "emergency" comes to an end.

What lingers are the less tangible changes, the full-body scans that affect us only when we fly, the drone strikes we never see. And that, I think, is the danger of a post-coronavirus world. The restaurants will eventually reopen; social distancing will end. The snitches will go back to harassing smokers or whatever dreary things they otherwise do. But in that invisible and unfelt space, something may be lost forever. That could mean a more powerful presidency or a heightened health surveillance network or a clampdown on unhealthy and unpopular vices. Or it could mean we’re just a little more atomized than we were before, unconsciously suspicious of the uncleanliness of others.

In the "post-coronavirus world," these things should concern us as much as, or alongside of, our worries about the next virus episode and how we will prepare for it. Creeping authoritarianism ought to be the subject of candidate debates, op-ed page opinion pieces, spirited conversations at town hall meetings, etc. The political parties won't lead this debate--they're the ones vying for power, after all. It must come from the rest of us.