A friend recently told me about a Massachusetts school that is explicitly leveraging peer pressure to influence families’ medical decisions related to COVID.  The initiative seems to encourage a form of bullying that is unhealthy for both the students applying and the students receiving the pressure, and it reminded me of past initiatives that gave me misgivings.

Even as far back as the ’90s (and even as I was swept along in it), the push to have children guilt their parents about smoking seemed somehow inappropriate for schools.  The explicit teaching of values also has had a religious feel implicitly at odds with the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment.  Indeed, while it has not appeared to have originated in schools (yet), encouragement among progressives to pester family members about ideological policy generally during family gatherings has become the stuff of memes and parody.

Each step of this sort makes the next one easier.  Encouraging students to move their parents toward the obviously healthy decision to quit smoking established the principle that schools could serve such purposes.  Mandatory vaccination against horrible diseases transmissible in a school setting with religious exemptions became, in Rhode Island, mandatory vaccination against a sexually transmitted disease and is now becoming mandatory follow-up vaccinations for a disease that hardly affects children… and with no exemptions.

These things ratchet because a ninth-level crisis isn’t much better than the tenth-level crisis that justified a new imposition and on down the scale.

To be sure, human relations are gray and fluid, and limits often arise not from stark thresholds but simply because a critical mass of people aren’t willing to tolerate the next stage of erosion.  This protection is fleeting, though, and only awaiting an excuse.

Thus, Jon Miltimore highlights, for the Foundation for Economic Education an academic’s argument that governments sometimes have to edge into authoritarianism in order to remain legitimate.  Specifically, the American Political Science Review of Cambridge University published an essay by assistant professor of political theory Ross Mittiga of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile arguing that this principle of legitimacy was proven during the COVID pandemic.  Naturally, Mittiga drew this lesson in order to apply it to “climate change,” which many skeptics have long seen as an excuse for authoritarianism awaiting sufficient fear.  Miltimore writes:

Say what you will about Mittiga’s proposal—which is myopic and dangerous—his logic is sound. If “legitimate” governments embrace authoritarian measures to combat a deadly pandemic that poses a genuine threat to humans, why should they not embrace authoritarian measures to combat climate change, which many argue poses an even greater threat?

There’s a popular meme among libertarians: “If you allow politicians to break the law during emergencies, they will create an emergency to break the law.”

Exactly.  We can implement all the safeguards for freedom we want, but every exception will create incentive for power-seekers to find reasons that they apply.  COVID turned the ratchet such that provisions to address an immediate emergency could apply to a long-term crisis.  Well, anything can be sold as a long-term crisis if the rewards of money and power are high enough.

Featured image by Zulmary Saavedra on Unsplash.