Covid and the Authoritarian/Libertarian Divide
Politics is often betrayed on a left-right spectrum, with those who want to abolish capitalism on the far left and those who want to either defend the capitalist system or push it in more primitive, feudal direction on the far right.
But there is another scale that goes from top to bottom, with those who support a few people or institutions having most of the authority in a society to those who believe that individual adult human beings have the right to say or do anything they damned well please so long as it doesn’t cause direct injury to someone else. Social authoritarians are at the top of this scale, and social libertarians are based because they are at the base of the scale.
One of the easiest and most fun ways to see where you stand on this is to take the Political Compass test.
Yes, my own bias is showing. I’m a Marxist who wants to see capitalism destroyed. I am also a social libertarian, though I’m not an anarchist, who would be found at the very bottom. For total transparency, here are my results from this morning:
There is a tendency, especially in Americans, to think those who want individual rights are leftist and those who support the various authorities in suppressing the rights of those people they don’t like are rightist. This is not only unhelpful, but often misleading. People who wildly disagree on what kind of economic system or government we should have can completely agree with each other on the matter of individual freedoms of speech, religion(or from religion), expression, association, movement, and the Jeffersonian-Marxist-Leninist right to bear arms.
For example, one must look no further to find leftist authoritarians than the World Socialist Web Site. The Detroit Trotskyists came out for Zero Covid in the beginning, swallowed every lie about the disease and the alleged vaccines and masks and lockdowns and all the rest, and are still in favor of them in spite of their self-proclaimed belief in science.
The Communist Party of China(CPC) is another. They went straight to full lockdowns, rigid testing just to get on a train or go to a store, concentration camps for those who refused to comply, separating infected children with no symptoms from their parents, total authoritarian control of movement and association in the name of safety from a disease that posed a serious threat only to a minority of their population, a threat which could have been mitigated by far less drastic measures.
Less drastic measures like we saw in Sweden and Africa. Measures which worked at least as well in preventing serious illness and death as the vax/lockdown/masks approach did; maybe better. Less drastic measures like the CPC is probably wishing it had done in the first place about now.
Many American socialists and communists seemed to support the CPC just because it was the CPC, and because China is the principal rival to the corrupt kleptocratic US Empire that they justifiably despise. They joined with the Big Pharma-funded Centers for Disease Control(CDC), the corrupt federal government as a whole, and most Democrats in supporting terrible policies such as public school closures(while private schools quietly stayed open), public library closures(while Barnes & Nobles could stay open in some states), and small business closures without compensation.
They joined with Trudeau and Democrats to denounce the Canadian truckers who were protesting to defend both their livelihoods and the individual right to travel freely without being tracked by governments, and cheered when the neoliberal Canadian prick froze protestors’ bank accounts.
They mocked small business owners who protested at state capitols against lockdowns that profited large corporations and ruined them, and (horror of horrors for liberals) sometimes exercised their individual right to bear arms.
They screamed at Biden and the CDC for rolling back what remained of the lockdowns in 2021 and are now quietly adopting the recommendations of the Barrington Declaration , which would have been a far better medical method for responding to Covid, though not nearly as profitable for a few if we had just done that in the first place.
They believed all the garbage about Big Pharma’s experimental inoculations preventing infection and transmission even after Fauci his own lying-assed self admitted that they didn’t. They painted people who were in favor of mandatory smallpox, polio, diphtheria, and other proven vaccines as being troglodyte anti-vaxxers just because they refused to take Big Pharma’s and the CDC’s word for the new one.
And there’s the rub. It all boils down to who thought authority should be obeyed because that would provide more security for all, and those who questioned the fiats of that authority and exercised their individual rights to control their own bodies, their own associations, and their own movements.
Generally, the more vitriolic people are about Covid mandates, the more authoritarian they are, regardless of left-right political ideology. For example, I once asked a liberal Democrat friend of mine why in the world Biden kept on Fauci when the latter was such a proven liar.
He exploded. Fauci had a degree from Johns Hopkins University, just like he did, was therefore smart and we had to do what people like him told us to do. If we didn’t, we were ignorant right-wing trash, and maybe traitors. This is a guy who is all in for LGBTQWTFelse-there-is rights, strives to be anti-racist while being unable to define the term, thinks racism created America(Marx would have a good laugh at that one), and trusts the Ivy League-educated Biden Administration to know what it is doing with regards to Russia because they have that Ivy League mantle of authority.
Of course, that old white guy would never live in a majority Black neighborhood like this old white guy, but never mind that. The point is he was horrified that I actually did my own research, thought for myself, applied critical thinking skills learned not only at university but in the school of a lifetime of experience, and reached a conclusion that acclaimed immunologists around the world supported.
I also reached a conclusion that those small business owners protesting the initial lockdowns in Lansing and Columbus did, a conclusion that the truckers had reached, a conclusion that many Republican voters had also reached. That conclusion is that the United States government lied to us about Covid in the beginning, and that they are still lying to us about boosters for two reasons.
First, they are profitable to Big Pharma. Second, they really feel like they have the right and the authority to tell us what to do because of people like my liberal Democrat friend and the Trotskyites who look to them as sources of authority. They also just like exercising that power. Authority can be a real rush for some of us, you know.
Finally, I’ve noticed that authoritarians have a tendency to want to see themselves in the position of authority and to whom others must obey. After seeing the colossal failures in judgment of which these people are manifestly capable, I feel much safer making my own choices about how to live, what to ingest, or where to go.
It’s the American thing to do, after all. Trusting authority just because it is authority is dangerous to both personal safety and personal liberty. Just ask Ben Franklin or Mark Twain if you don’t believe me.
Thanks for reading and have a great holiday week.