You can't go home again

Has the permanent emergency of Covid robbed us of Western liberal democracy, or have we been running on fumes for decades?

“This is about human rights. Our humanity has been consistently and persistently attacked for two years now…it’s the worst shit stain on history I think that humans will ever leave. It’s so colossal…I haven’t even begun to think about how we are going to recover from this. This is horrific, what has happened. I’m not blaming a handful of people, I’m blaming everyone. We all have to look in the mirror and really do some self reflection. All of us.” —Dr. Jessica Rose

For four decades or so, I lived in a comfortably progressive bubble. I hung out contentedly over there in the libertarian-adjacent-but-nothing-too-crazy corner of nanny state and night watchman, where I could nurture a healthy skepticism of the corporate and political spheres but still vigorously agree that the fundamental institutions of American life were strong and sound and oriented around The Greater Good. I traveled extensively around the world and saw up close just how exceptionally dysfunctional it is almost everywhere else, and that gave me tremendous appreciation for the U.S. system: mostly rational, mostly fair, mostly meritocratic. I could rest easy knowing that there were enough Very Smart People swarming around at the top that sanity and diligence would largely prevail, that nothing was likely to go too terribly awry for too long before the system more or less corrected itself.

My general faith in institutions, (mostly) well-intentioned actors, a (mostly) free and vigorous press, basic rule of law, and all the rest was a very cozy position from which to feel nice and smug about how Something Must Be Done. I was in general agreement that Something Must Be Done about lots of things, but especially inequality and injustice, collective action problems like climate change, and basically just doing a better job of taking care of everybody. Who could argue with such apple pie values? As one of my early mentors, an up and coming legislator in the Alaska State House, told me once: “we all look after each other. That’s what democracy is all about.” So lofty and compassionate! I loved the sound of it, the dulcet ring of virtue. And I believed it, truly. That sounded like exactly the kind of place I wanted to live, the kind of institutions I wanted to have.

What I didn’t fully appreciate until Covid was that such starry-eyed virtues—and the activist state that they empower to promote them—rest on the presumption of a broadly benevolent, rational-legal, and competent state. A state where personal autonomy is very carefully balanced against social harms, where bureaucracy is not ideologically captured but generally (if imperfectly) meritocratic, where our political leaders lie some of the time but not all of the time. Where legacy media tacitly propagandizes on behalf of the state on a lot of things, but can also still hold it meaningfully accountable, at least occasionally, when it really matters. 

Well. Two years of Covid have utterly unraveled those illusions and revealed the state for what it really is, and I no longer want anything to do with it. I do not want to receive, finance, or in any way facilitate its efforts to “improve” anything. I hear something like “build back better” and understand it to mean “meddle incompetently and make things even worse.” After this, I don’t trust the state to get things right even occasionally, by accident. I see the U.S. now on a continuum of state failure—it’s not, like, North Korea or Belarus, but it’s also not exactly a healthy, consolidated democracy. It’s rotten at the core, it has been for some time, and it is clear that it cannot be saved. Reimagined, managed, I don’t know. Maybe. But I’ll never see it the same way again.

It’s a little like how the wife in the French film Force Majeure finds herself reevaluating her marriage after her husband reveals himself to be an incompetent gaslighting lily-livered twatwaffle who pushes her and his kids out of his way when an avalanche hits (and then denies doing so for the rest of the film.)  Like, yeah, maybe the marriage will “survive,” in a technical sense. But it will never be the same. She will never be the same.

If our social contract pre-Covid was dependent on some kind of foundation of  transparency, legitimacy and accountability, it is beyond obvious now that all three of those pillars have collapsed. I do not trust that the state has my best interests at heart—quite the contrary. It feels like a toxic relationship with an abusive, gaslighting partner who keeps telling me the beatings will continue until morale improves. My trust is  broken. Institutional legitimacy is just totally lost. I am like every weary authoritarian expat I’ve ever met around the world: simultaneously aghast at what has happened and nostalgic for what has evaporated seemingly into thin air. I can’t go home again, even though I never left. Home was taken from me.

And it’s not just the loss of country and creed that I am feeling. As I posted a few days ago, it’s the loss of coalition. It’s the quiet, unsettling surprise that I find myself largely alone in this disillusionment (fine readers of this missive excepted of course). Many of those whom I believed shared my moral center have not made this journey with me in the same way, and I don’t understand how that can be so. And my despair grows as I realize: it’s not that they don’t know. There isn’t something that they are missing about this. Something essential to them that was formerly hidden has been revealed, as it has been revealed in our rotten institutions.

My disillusionment is not a question of persuasion. It’s a question of perception. The enlightenment principles that I value most are under such sustained and grievous attack that if you did not already arrive here with me some time ago, I don’t believe there is any “okay, this has gone too far” moment looming in your future. It’s the open questions that I have about everything that set off my alarms, not the smoking guns. That is, in fact, the entire point. My uncertainty is disturbing—but your certainty is very much more so. So much certainty. So much “safe and effective.” So much science-as-shibboleth. The certainty itself reeks of paternalistic authoritarianism. How does anyone not smell it?

I’ve utterly lost faith in the state, and the state has revealed its evil to such a degree that I’ve also lost faith in those who still, in the face of such overwhelming evidence, keep faith with the state. Those who rush to its defense, even, eager to protect it from critics. What are you doing? Where have you been? What movie are you watching?

Joe Biden says his “patience is wearing thin” with the 15% of adults who remain unvaccinated. Justin Trudeau says it’s time to decide if Canada will “tolerate” its own unvaccinated population. Shrug. Applause. “Now that’s leadership!” This language does not disturb you? It does not keep you up at night to hear nominally democratic leaders talk about whom among their citizens they are going to “tolerate?” You don’t find yourself wondering what happens when their patience runs out?

10,000 reported vaccine-related deaths don’t give you pause? The fact that Omicron increasingly appears to be, itself, a lab leak doesn’t make you the least bit suspicious? China’s unprecedented analytic warfare doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies? The organized crime vibe at NIH and NIAID doesn’t make you wonder what (or who) else might be sleeping with the fishes?

It is astonishing to me that anyone can look at the state of things and shrug and say “this is fine.” Or, worse still, “this is justified.” My overriding instinct looking at the state of things is to say: “okay, what else have you been lying to me about?” You don’t spot a termite scurrying across your floor one day and hope for the best. You gird your loins and launch a full investigation and accept the consequences. Just how deep does the rot go? How much needs to be burned in order to save the rest, if indeed anything can still be saved?