I’ve already made clear what I think of the “re-open America” protests that have taken in place in various states around the country. As we learn more about their astroturf origins and right-wing proponents, we can see that they’re less about protecting Americans’ freedom and more about trying to cudgel democratically-elected and largely Democratic governors, as well as constituting an ill-conceived and deadly effort to advance the president’s re-election chances by prematurely allowing businesses to re-open.
But it’s not morally adequate or politically smart to point to their motivations and call it a day. Whether or not we can maintain necessary social distancing is a life and death matter, and requires massive societal consensus. There are very few Americans who don’t long to resume life as usual, and who strain at the current restrictions. The ideas of personal freedom that the anti-quarantine forces point to have broad appeal across the U.S.; who among us is against freedom, for goodness’ sake?
It may at first seem counter-intuitive, but I actually think we need to recognize the ways in which the anti-restriction protestors may be right about our freedom currently being restricted, beyond the crude assertion that we should be free to do whatever we want whenever we want. In particular, restrictions on freedom of movement mean that a host of other liberties guarantied to Americans are truncated or non-existent, including freedom of association, freedom to worship, and freedom to assemble. This last point gets to what I think is an under-rated cost of the current situation — the way that it hampers our ability to organize and act politically.
But recognizing this massive curtailment of American liberty in a variety of areas — which, collectively, help to give our lives purpose and meaning — isn’t the same as arguing that social distancing and other such orders are illegitimate. Rather, it means that there’d better be a damned good reason for these restrictions.
Of course, there is such a reason: a deadly and easily communicable virus that swept much of the globe before gaining a foothold in the United States. Because we’re dealing with such a mortal, even existential threat, you can see how arguments about freedom actually include aspects we might not have thought about before — the freedom to be alive, for example, or the freedom not to be sickened by irresponsible neighbors who don’t take adequate precautions. A wider perspective begins to emerge: government can be seen as restricting our freedoms now to protect them for the future — a trade-off that should always be viewed with deep skepticism, but which really does pass the reality test in our present circumstances.
What makes this freedom-based argument much more persuasive is a point that, not by coincidence, the anti-quarantine protestors totally reject: the concept that governments in the United States are democratically-elected, and are empowered to act in the public name and for the public good. The conflict between the protestors’ stated arguments and those who contend that the restrictions are legitimate comes down to whether the government has the ability and legitimacy to navigate broader questions of freedom, including protecting the long-term liberty of the many — even if it calls for short-term restrictions that nearly all of us would find unacceptable otherwise.
A complicated but very real relationship exists between democratic government and the rights that a vast majority of Americans believe in: for a variety of reasons, the far-right denies this relationship, and the idea that collective action might not just restrict freedom but amplify it (think: universal health care that allows Americans to live healthier and longer lives (more freedom!), public education that allows you to pursue your dreams plus make more money (more freedom!), or environmental protections that allow the freedom not to die from mercury poisoning (more freedom!). A whole cacophony of dumb conclusions follow from the right’s opposition to “collectivist” action, including disbelief that the government might act in the public interest in ways that temporarily restrict important liberties.
Fortunately, most Americans do understand this relationship between their freedom and the governments they elect, though it’s as much an intuitive understanding as anything else, and one somewhat frayed by years of assault by the countervailing conservative perspective. We can tell this is the case by the massive public support for the current restrictions. We may not like them, but we understand they are necessary — and legitimate. In fact, it’s possible that motivating some of this current right-wing resistance is their awareness that this crisis is re-awakening Americans‘ understanding of the collective good, as journalist and historian David M. Perry suggests in a recent opinion piece.
Perry goes on to describe Americans’ mass willingness to restrict their activities as a “patriotic urge toward the common good” and “an act of love,” which gets at how our society thrives not simply on abstract ideas of freedom and responsibility, but on connectedness and compassion that aren’t spelled out anywhere in the Constitution — but that unite us nonetheless.
Yet the current necessity for restrictions on our daily lives shouldn’t for one moment blind us to their severity, their cost, or the culpability of the president whose catastrophic handling of this crisis has made them unavoidable. As has been thoroughly documented, Donald Trump failed to take the actions that might have reduced the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. to a fraction of its current size. Instead of mobilizing the government to fight it, from ensuring we had adequate testing to procuring sufficient protective equipment for medical professionals, he chose instead to engage in a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the American people that the virus was a hoax, a mere flu, something that would sicken only a handful of people. Donald Trump immersed himself in a world of fantasy, and this denialism resulted in a deadly reality for the rest of us.
So if the right wing wants to talk about freedom, then let’s not shy away from the debate. Let’s talk about the freedom Donald Trump has cost us all, starting with the jobs lost, the religious services curtailed, and the ability of millions of students to continue their education, and moving on to the mortal blows to our liberty — the tens of thousands of Americans dead, whose freedom is lost forever, and whose deaths diminish all of us. As writer John Stoehr argues, Donald Trump is the one who has come for our freedoms, not state governments. In his encouragement of premature openings and hoax cures, he allows the coronavirus to continue to pin us down in fear and uncertainty. Only when he has been driven from office will we be able to fully regain our full sense of possibility, as a country and as individuals.