The COVID Libertarian Moment

T he times you live in leave their mark on you. And COVID times have left a mark on me; they’ve repainted a libertarian streak on my politics.

We’ve had a year-long experiment in sacrificing liberties for a common national purpose. At the start of the COVID crisis, I noted that it provided a unique opportunity for “common-good conservatives” to illustrate the necessity of their insights. America was faced with a common challenge: the pandemic. It issued from the malfeasance of the closest thing we have to a national or civilizational rival. And getting through it would require special risk-taking among some segments of the population, such as first responders. Or special sacrifices by other segments, such as service workers. And special demands for leadership by our political class, and cost-sharing by the taxpayer. It would be a crisis, but it would summon different segments of society to help each other.

More fool me.

A year ago, I was worried that some of the very people closely associated with what was called “common-good conservatism” were unusually skeptical of the threat posed by disease, and unusually suspicious of public-health regulations and advice.

I was wrong to be worried. They were largely right.

The language of shared burdens and sacrifice is soaked into COVID politics and regulations like water in a beach towel after the tide has come in and played with it.

And it’s been an excuse for bullying, harassment, and, ultimately, self-gratification. In the most hysterical form, individual decisions not to wear a mask, or to attend some event, or to travel somewhere are conflated with indifference to mass murder. Instead of shared sacrifices and re-learning how the different parts and sections of our society depend on each other for our health, security, and prosperity, something much more sinister has happened.

Our most privileged class immediately captured the language of communitarianism and turned it into the means of copper-fastening their own position in society.

The white-collar class has simply retreated into an exaggerated form of the life they were already living, where they manipulate the world with their finger and the phone — ordering their supplies from Amazon Prime, their food through apps like GrubHub, Doordash, and Seamless, and their entertainment through Apple TV.

Wherever power exists in our society, it has leveraged the crisis and the talk of common good for its own ends. When it comes to public schools, unions have power that disorganized parents and helpless students do not. We have known since before school began again in September 2020 that surface transmission of COVID-19 is rare. Yet across the country, many of the schools that are functioning at all do so with relentless — borderline obsessive-compulsive — hygiene theater that imposes psychological and even physical costs on children.

We have known since last summer that outdoor transmission is rare. And yet, beachgoers were shamed all the way into the fall, and outdoor ceremonies and even funerals were prohibited by law. Outdoor gatherings of ten or more persons were banned in many states, precisely at a time when it was known that the disease transmits in poorly ventilated, indoor spaces among out-of- shape people who are vitamin-D deficient. People should have been encouraged to spend more time outdoors.

But the other sinister feature of COVID communitarianism has been the condescension of our authorities. At first, COVID condescension landed on masks, in which health authorities urged the public not to buy them or use them because, without proper training, one wouldn’t use the mask properly. Health officials at the World Health Organization even held out the notion that laymen were at more risk from wearing masks. None of this was backed up with research, or common sense. It was like saying that home cooks do not benefit from knives because chefs know proper knife technique.

The truth about COVID, or the latitude to take one’s own risks, was always assumed to be too dangerous. Because even medical professionals understand that risk assessment during a pandemic in a novel disease is hard, they didn’t want to offer any solid guidance for doing it. And so regulation piled on top of regulation. Masks weren’t just for when you couldn’t socially distance, but for all the time. Now, some health authorities are still urging double-masking for people who have been vaccinated. Why? Because the risk aversion of experts is held to be infinitely more valuable than the freedom of everyone else.

In my adult life, I’ve never been confused with a libertarian. And at the deepest level, I can’t even say I’m a classical liberal. I believe shared sacrifices are necessary, that some national moments require real national responses. But this past year has chastened me — and made me wish that more school districts, parishes, synagogues, states, and individuals had been given the latitude and the tools to make better judgments for themselves. We needed more decentralization, more free flow of information, and more open contention. The rightly ordered liberty of the individual is part of the common good. I’ll never forget it again.