Despotism and Disease: The New Assault on Democracy
By Preston Lust
On December 30, 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang contacted several hospitals in the city of Wuhan, China, issuing a warning about an increasing number of cases of an unknown respiratory illness. Soon after, Wenliang was publicly reprimanded by the police and made to retract his report. This was merely the beginning of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to stifle early alerts of coronavirus, perceived as threats to its image. Information pertaining to the novel illness was quickly restricted, with massive censorship campaigns breaking up internet chat groups and removing articles critical of the government’s response.
Since those early days of the pandemic’s spread, the Party has proceeded to ramp up its propaganda machine, crafting a narrative that ranks China’s response to the virus as the most effective in the world, as another demonstration of the effectiveness of centralized communist leadership compared to floundering, indecisive western democracies. In reality, the Party’s unwillingness to recognize its own fallibility led to the virus’s spread, and its response to the virus took shape as a heavy-handed enlargement of autocracy.
Playing off popular fear of instability, political strongmen have long used crises such as the coronavirus as opportunities to offer security in exchange for decreased freedom, often refusing to restore that freedom after the crisis has passed. Augustus used the civil wars to end the Roman Republic; Hitler used the Reichstag fire to end the Weimar Republic – the question is, will there be a crisis so dire and global that the republic vanishes as a feasible political institution?
It is clear that democracy has been dying for some time now. Political scientists have noted that in 2017, global democratic indicators slipped back to pre-2000 levels (Valeriya Mechkova, Anna Lührmann, and Staffan I. Lindberg). While only a few democratic governments have outrightly turned to autocracy, many more have adopted elements of autocracy. So-called “illiberal” democracies such as Poland, Hungary, and Turkey hold elections, but have severely curtailed civil liberties. Illiberal rhetoric that emphasizes the menace of a certain socio-cultural group has become extremely common, recalling the tactics of 20th century fascists.
This is the natural result of a global surge of populist political parties such as Golden Dawn, Rassemblement National, VOX, and Bharatiya Janata with identitarian agendas – and also the extremist reactions to those movements. These trends indicate a serious interruption of the post-war impetus towards democracy that prompted our most sanguine macro-historians to envision a utopian “end of history”.
The coronavirus pandemic has only emboldened prospective autocrats. Freedom House, a human rights watchdog, reports that 80 countries have seen freedoms deteriorate in the wake of the pandemic, and 91 have seen restrictions on news and other media (Repucci, Sarah, and Amy Slipowitz). Governments have selectively applied restrictions to quash dissent or chip away at democratic institutions.
Take the example of Hong Kong, where Carrie Lam’s administration, fearful of the rise in pro-democracy sentiment, has delayed legislative elections to next year. Demonstrations against the government have also been banned. It would be naive to suggest that such measures spring from purely benign intentions; it is not the virus these governments are trying to destroy, but democracy by means of the virus.
In practice, even benign responses to the coronavirus entail some reduction in freedom. The right to education, work, movement, asylum, assembly, and participation in cultural life, are all explicitly protected by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Yet it is inconceivable how any policy designed to battle the pandemic will not erode these. The policy-maker must then determine the extent to which the interest of public health outweighs these freedoms. As autocrats have shown, prioritizing the former may lead to despotism; and as the laissez-faire approach of Sweden has shown, prioritizing the latter may lead to death.
In a country such as the United States, where fear of despotism is a fixture of the national ethos, any point between the two risks provoking unrest, especially from members of libertarian and right-wing political circles. Just this month, members of a paramilitary group plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan for what they perceived as a despotic response to the coronavirus. Anti-lockdown demonstrations have also swept the nation. For many Americans, the revolutionary slogan “Give me liberty or give me death!” is not taken lightly; many would rather die from the coronavirus than forcibly alter their daily lives.
Those of libertarian bent are right to consider the very real opportunity the coronavirus presents to autocrats, yet to leave vulnerable sectors of the population helpless in the face of a potentially lethal illness would be a failure of government. If a government is to steer away from autocracy and combat the pandemic at the same time, it must provision for individual choice in its policies. Those who out of genuine concern for their lives opt not to participate in society for the duration of the pandemic ought to receive structural or financial support from the relevant governing authority.
Those, on the other hand, who disregard the personal risk, or for whom the risk is medically minimal, should be offered a mechanism by which they can continue to live and work freely. This would materialize as a novel governmental agency tasked with compensating those with demonstrable medical reasons to withdraw from economic participation. If this proves cumbersome or impossible, and the government finds lockdowns necessary, they must be short in duration, tolerant, and proportionate to the situation. Beyond this, the need to postpone an election is clearly a dubious one; mail-in ballots preclude this as a recourse.
There is no escaping the fact that a coordinated response to any emergency requires at least a marginal abdication of the individual will. But to curb the schemes of resourceful despots, the citizenry must be constantly conscious of how much they are willing to abdicate, and how much they ought not to abdicate. Otherwise, they risk the ascendancy of dictatorship, and the collapse of democratic institutions.
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