It doesn’t matter what you think, might think, should think about the Corona crisis.
It doesn’t matter, if you prefer to follow catastrophic or over-optimistic studies. It doesn’t matter, if you trust more the good heart of some magnates or the desperation of the mob. It really doesn’t matter where you stand, in this crisis. It’s not a football match or a reality show, where you have to choose a side according to the color of the t-shirts or sympathy. It really doesn’t matter.
If you think that you still live in a – representative and mutilated – full democracy; if you think that nothing changed since 2019, since before the start of the crisis, think again. You are in denial, because as soon as you start with your explanations “the pandemic requires that” and such, you are admitting that it is in fact not as it used to be. If it were, you would not need any justifications.
It’s not even purely a matter of basic rights. Theoretically, there could be highly democratic governments with less basic rights, and in fact they did exist.
I know that many are affected by the one century long propaganda of the USA, where democracy means good and good means democracy, but the reality is that “democracy” is just word that describes one of many forms of government that have taken place on the planet in thousands of years. Citizens of the Roman Empire had basic rights, for sure different and more limited, but they did. Basic rights, historically speaking, are not an achievement of democracies. Democracy doesn’t necessarily mean the presence of numerous and significant basic rights. Democracy means the rule of the people, direct or indirect. That’s it.
That said, we could also agree with Churchill, when he said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.”
Recently, I read a very accurate and brief description of what is happening with our basic rights, if we talk about them. “Die Grundrechte wurden pervertiert zum „Angebot“ an die Bürger, wenn sie „brav“ sind.”1 Freely translated: “The basic rights have been perverted into offers to the citizens, if and when they behave.” If we talk about democracy, the Economist titles: “Global democracy has a very bad year, the pandemic caused an unprecedented rollback of democratic freedoms in 2020.”2
Even if we could admit that the results of these authoritarian measures, meant for the containment of the pandemic, were better than the ones that a less oligarchical government would have implemented, for example with a less drastic use of moral and civil police, army, propaganda and censorship; even if we admit that everything has been done with the best intentions, without any conflicts of interest, in the best possible way, this is not how democracy works.
Millions of people have been locked up, kept away from working, interacting, traveling, while restricted groups kept living as they used to. Propaganda, manipulation of words and their significance. Polarization and confrontation in the society have been encouraged and fomented. Free speech has been blamed and punished with censorship. Important measures have been implemented without a large consultation. Scientific opinions have been asked just to few complaint individuals, and not to a diverse plurality of equally qualified professionals. Poor people became poorer, rich became richer. Few categories have been protected, while others have been completely left alone to poverty and desperation.
If you’d prefer a different form of government, one could even talk about that, eventually. History provides a long list of already tested examples. We even have manuals for them, if some would bother to open a book. Empires, monarchies, absolute monarchies, enlightened, hereditary or not, theocracies of different kinds, dictatorships, oligarchies, republics, direct democracies, even small signs of matriarchy. Anything, really. Choose whatever you want. Put it to a vote, make a revolution, cut off the king’s head, as a long-lived European tradition wants. Ask a foreign power to help you out with it, we have a couple of possible candidates.
Whatever you think of the Corona crisis, if you think that on a sociopolitical level everything is, all considered, as it used to be, stop and think again.