Never was Rahm Emanuel’s point that progressives should never let a crisis go to waste more in evidence than it has been for the last two years of Covid. Politicians and bureaucrats saw the opportunity to expand their power and grabbed as much as they could.

But now, a backlash is building as more and more people figure out that the draconian rules were a stupendous overreaction that inflicted enormous socio-economic damage but did very little to save people from Covid. In this Brownstone Institute essay, Jeffrey Tucker ponders the gathering power of the anti-lockdown, anti-mandate crowd.

He writes, “Today there is massive pent-up frustration out there, alongside depression, ill health, financial hardship, and generalized shock to discover that we live in a country where freedom can no longer be taken for granted. We know now that at any moment, they can close our businesses, our churches, and take away our right to travel or even to show a smile. On any pretext. Absolutely astonishing.”

In Tucker’s view, Covid was the perfect excuse for our authoritarian-minded elites to recover some of the control they had felt slipping away. He continues, “If you think of the aim as ‘take back our power,’ it did accomplish that, however temporarily. But that’s not how they pitched it. They said they would stop and crush a virus and that all your sacrifice would be worth it because otherwise you would die or have your life wrecked. That agenda, that propaganda, has been a tremendous flop. In other words, the whole thing is being exposed as a massive error at best, and a complete lie at worst.”

Now, what if masses of people drew the conclusion that our elites — the political class, the bureaucrats, the big business and tech moguls — are not interested in “the public good” but care instead about themselves. That, of course, is the big point of Public Choice Theory and it seems possible that the Covid experience might cause many people to grasp it. What if the disastrous, authoritarian Covid response proves to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, the camel in this case being general acceptance of the notion that those in power wield it for the public interest?

The statists might have overreached badly with their Covid mania, setting the stage for a great counterattack against them. Tucker is suggesting that, and I suspect that he’s right.