My Concern Is That Authoritarians May Use COVID as a Cover
The coronavirus pandemic has already altered daily life beyond recognition. It will shape our lives for years to come, mostly in ways that are impossible to predict, let alone understand. Esquire asked twenty people to share their experiences in the first few months of the outbreak. Each of their first-person accounts is a reassurance that none of us are facing this alone. Check out the full list here.
One of my big concerns is the potential for the abuse of power by authoritarians that rises in parallel with the pandemic under the guise of responding to a global health crisis.
Historically, when a nation augments its arsenal of emergency powers, it’s very hard to put them back in the box. So there is grave danger that this repurposing isn’t short-term, and that the costs are going to be extremely high on fundamental rights, like the freedom of movement, speech, assembly, participation in elections.
Percentage of Americans willing to yield certain freedoms to support public measures to slow the virus: 70 to 90%
When people are afraid for their own health and that of their family members, we tend not to balance that immediate fear with the long-term harm to our freedoms and rights. That’s precisely the sort of imbalance that many states are counting on right now—that individuals will give up the idea that there is a realm of privacy that is rightly theirs, that individuals will give away the most intimate of their health and biometric data to the government.
There isn’t a tension between rights and security. They’re absolutely necessary to one another. A life in which your physical health is guaranteed but every other right has been taken away—that would be meaningless.
You Might Also Like