Across all of human politics, the Western liberal tradition stands out for its ambitions to circumscribe state power. The people, in this tradition, are held to be the locus of sovereignty, and most Western governments are bound by elaborate constitutions which purport to constrain their jurisdiction over citizens, and which many regard as bearing a nearly religious authority. In Germany, an entire government agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, is granted wide powers to hunt down potential constitutional enemies. These constitutions do many things. They extend a wide of variety of rights not only to citizens, but often to all of humanity. They often divide state powers by placing the judicial, executive and legislative branches of government in quasi-independent silos, hoping that each of these branches will defend their respective prerogatives from depredations by the others and, in the process, impose self-interested checks on the reach and the arbitrary exercise of power.
This approach to politics has not aged well. Covid was a low point, simply for revealing the steely and actually quite anti-liberal authoritarianism these systems have been nurturing in their innermost chambers for many decades. Western liberal states in the modern era do not behave like limited systems which derive their sovereignty from the people. Every day, they more and more resemble the kinds of unchecked, totalitarian regimes we remember from the Soviet period. If anything, they seem poised to become a good deal worse, for they are able to achieve relatively prosperous economic conditions and to harness popular support far more efficiently, thus evading the harder constraints on the ambitions of the old Warsaw Pact governments.
State power wishes to be free, in the same way that water wishes to flow downhill. The problem with liberal checks on power, is that they forced the state to develop novel legal and cultural solutions to overcome them. State politics in liberal systems has thus come to resemble antibiotic-resistent bacteria in hospitals – it has evolved a general resistance to constitutional limitations, in the process becoming an altogether worse and more dangerous animal. The mutual checks and balances imposed on the state by its competing branches, for example, have merely incentivised the political establishment to develop and enforce among its members a uniform elite outlook, which encourages cooperation towards shared goals among erstwhile rivals. This cultural solution has proven wildly successful, not merely releasing the state from many old encumbrances, but even extending its reach across many more facets of society, as ordinary people adopt and enforce the prestige ideology of the regime.
Rights and individual sovereignty have required a rather different, perhaps even more insidious solution. Rather than undermining or qualifying these prerogatives, state ideologues have leaned into them instead. Rights in the liberal conception are fundamentally pre-political; men are endowed with them by their creator and they are inalienable. The concept thus promises many avenues for subverting the popular, democratically expressed will, and the state has worked vigorously to expand the concept of rights, investing ever more regime clients with a vast palette of novel rights. This growing field of unquestionable, sacred entitlements circumscribes popular political expression and undermines those less convenient rights that liberalism started out with. Via recognising – even implicitly – a right to health, for example, the state supersedes the older, far less convenient rights to freedom of assembly and expression. These novel second- and third-generation rights generally expand the power of the state by being positive, rather than negative, in nature; and they are typically framed to encourage the passivity of the individual who possesses them. Crucial is that the state assume all responsibility for defining and realising these rights on the individual’s behalf. More and more, one has the impression that individuals do not possess rights at all. Rather, the state has arrogated to itself the right of defining and defending the special status of specific collective minorities.
Nowhere do novel liberal rights metastasise so rabidly as in the discourse surrounding sexual and gender minorities. The ever-growing rainbow coalition, symbolised by a flag that every year gains new colours and a puzzling initialism that is forever acquiring new letters (LGBTQQIP2SA appears to be the latest version), is a cutting edge of state power. Each of the identities subsumed into this juggernaut abounds with utility for the administrative state, and opens all manner of avenues for government bureaucrats to define and regulate the most intimate aspects of human culture, behaviour and sexual expression. It is no accident that the pride flag has become the most pervasive and probably the most sacred political symbol in the Western world. It will increasingly displace national symbols in prominence and moral significance.
Modern states are powerful things, vast machines built of human components that act according to their own logic and towards their own ends. Technology and the rise of mass society following industrialisation have expanded their reach as never before. They don’t need liberalism to be terrifying or perverse, but it is increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion, that liberalism has made many modern states much more terrifying and perverse than they would otherwise be – and their depredations much more difficult to oppose, for being all the harder to recognise.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Stop Press: Read a profile in Politico of Patrick Deneen, a conservative critic of hyper-liberalism who’s just written a book called Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future.
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Thanks for this – interesting.
Seems like governments were responsible for a lot of it, directly and indirectly. So much for the government being pushed into action by the public clamour.
I think the biggest reason the press followed government policy on covid is money. Always follow the money. At the beginning of lock down most corporate advertising plummeted, at the same time money from government advertising for covid measures rocketed, along with money from “vaccine” manufacturers. No journalist was allowed to bite the hand that feeds.
Spot on. They were paid. Who are the biggest financiers of the fake news? Government and Pharma. UK Guv spent some £500 million on the BBC et al to spread the propaganda?
Funny how the ‘money’ never makes into these useless whitewashing Covidiot inquiries.
Medical Nazism. TPTB learnt that the sheeple love to follow and will happily kill themselves ‘if it saves one life’.
Which shows they were and are in the wrong job.
They could have parroted the official line perhaps with a quizzical look to imply their hands were tied. Algorhythms are not so clever as to pick up body language.
No – I firmly believe the vast majority of journos were as stupid and credulous as my neighbours and swallowed the lies whole.
Honourable exceptions exist but they had to speak via podcast or substack- I’m thinking Planet Normal and the many people of integrity on substance.
“We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since.”
Lines from the preamble to “Journal of the Plague Year”, Daniel Defoe’s forensic reconstruction in the year 1722 of London’s Great Plague of 1665.
Meaning British media has been going for over three hundred years. Over the last thirty years, the silicon chip has taken invention to a whole new level. Witness the pandemic that never was and the climate heist.
The madness of crowds has a lot to answer for. Keep those critical faculties primed.
In my mind there is no question it was ordered at a global level, which applies to the whole ‘pandemic’ narrative – and not only the latter: where is the media questioning of Net Zero, of the gender narrative, of the billions and billions senselessly spent on Ukraine?
Unlimited immigration is only now being questioned – after how many years? – because so many populations are becoming sick and tired of the various atrocities performed by our invited guests.
Richard Nixon warned in 1983 in this short video against the power of the media – perhaps hardly surprising – but his comments were very intelligent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEX6ONLvJg0.
The world’s media are currently owned by a surprisingly small number of individuals. The questions is, who are they taking their orders from?
Thanks for that Richard Nixon link. Can’t find link to cassette recordings, but Nixon tapes from inside Oval Office make for interesting hearing:
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes
Very interesting, thank you. Does every ex-President have such a library? That would make a lot of fascinating reading.
The saddest thing is that the mass psychosis and hysteria of the Covid crisis is nothing unusual. Which, unfortunately, implies it can happen again.
In Adolph’s Germany most of the population believed in and supported the great leader.
Likewise Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, all totalitarian systems were capable of whipping up mass hysteria.
We laugh at the medieval witch hunts – human nature hasn’t changed that much.
It is happening again right now – Climate hysteria!
I never understood why journalists were afraid to do their job. But it’s clear they were psychologically nudged by government groupthink and captured regulatory agencies in cahoots with big pharma to peddle a false narrative. David Southwell’s article is an honest and articulate exposé of what went wrong during the pseudo pandemic. Well done.
Money – they have mortgages to pay and families to feed like everyone else…
The BBC was probably one of the worst. I recall a highly plausible story of a BBC reporter sent to cover an anti-lockdown protest, with the sole purpose of capturing any violations of social distancing rules. The reporter admitted this when asked.
“..is fed to us by governments, authorities and experts even in, or especially during, ’emergencies’.”
Like so many well meaning articles what is missing is what really matters. Nothing about the paymasters of all those listed. The Big Pharma. Strange omission for an experienced journalist.
6. Unlimited taxpayer funded government advertising in MSM, printed and broadcast.
No excuses.
The only questions were asked by Mark Steyn, who was sacked, is now wheelchair bound, bankrupted by the establishment.
Every ‘journalist’ who submitted copy to either justify or disregard the greatest crime in British history should resign.
Now.
Articles such as these tend to discount the enthusiasm with which ordinary citizens were torch-carriers for extreme Covid policies. Determining whether media was responding to that, or driving that, is chicken and egg.
Julia Hartley Brewer of Talk Radio appeared to be a lone voice of sanity. The BBC a government mouthpiece, as it is with the Climate lie
I always found it strange we were shown videos of Chinese people collapsing in the street with covid but never saw any such thing in the West. Was it a Chinese invention Psy Ops to break Western economies.
They are still not doing their job now. They should be calling out the climate nonsense all those dangerous clowns in Davos, questioning Nut Zero and basically anything that comes out of a politician’s or scientist’s mouth. There are some brave ones Neill Oliver, Mark Steyn, Bev Turner and of course all those at TDS to name a few but the rest are just abject cowards.
Indeed, and look at what happens to them; quietly sent into the dusty attic, if they keep their jobs at all.
What this article fails to mention is the role played by the mainstream media (and the BBC in particular) in bullying the Johnson government into adopting such over-the-top and excessive policies in the first place. If you remember, Boris Johnson was initially favouring a ‘herd immunity’ approach, one which might well have seen the UK following a similar path to Sweden during the pandemic, a country whose population suffered far less economic and societal dislocation and whose excess deaths ended up the lowest in Europe. The general media ‘pile-on’ during that period in March 2020 when scare stories from Italy and elsewhere were circulating daily proved far too much for Boris and his ministers to withstand. So the path we eventually chose reflected possibly a lack of moral fibre amongst Conservative ministers and the change that seems to have taken place during the last 30 years in which governments, lamentably, often change course and have their policies shaped by the hue and cry emitting from a generally shallow, left-leaning and holier-than-thou media.
If journalism has a public policy role beyond mere description or stenography, it should be to relentlessly question what governments, authorities and, yes, even ‘experts’ are saying and doing.
I would suggest from that paragraph – especially experts!
So-called Experts got us into that mess (and others – Climate, Ukraine). In the case of “Covid” only a small subset of credentialed experts were listened to, other critical experts were shunned, shamed and silenced, and that is why the whole horrific debacle was as bad as it was!
Neil Fergus – Good
Sunetra Gupta – Bad
Jay Bhattacharya – Bad
Martin Kulldorf – Bad
Anthony Fauci – Good
Bill Gates (!!!!!) – Good
“This is Why the Media Failed During Covid”
And failed over immigration, rape gangs, climate change, the 70 year long failure of the NHS, anti-white racism, “transgender” crap, wokery, debanking, EEC/EU and Brexit… it’s a long list.
Is there a pattern I wonder?