The Cold Civil War – Tablet Magazine
I live in California, in the most liberal metropolis in the country. Almost everyone I interact with largely subscribes to the New England philosophy of ordered liberty. If we don t force people to get vaccinated, I m told, we ll be forever imprisoned by the most selfish among us who insist on their precious freedoms even when it costs people their lives. It s a perspective redolent of the Puritans who declared in the Westminster Confession of 1647 that Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation. Apart from the very few whom God favored, man was wicked and ungodly, hopelessly controlled by the power of Satan, and ultimately hell-bound. Clearly, such creatures could never be left to their own devices; they could be protected from their own base temptations and appetites only by placing strict limits on their freedoms.
Then I go online and hear a radically different perspective. Masking and distancing rules, lockdowns and vaccine mandates, I m told, have about as much to do with protecting us from COVID as secret mass digital surveillance had to do with protecting us from terrorists. Day by day, we re ceding the liberties we take for granted to nameless government officials and technocrats who are accountable not to us and our families but to politicians, corporations, and oligarchs. A new disciplinary and surveillance regime is being erected all around us, and we re headed toward a future under a creepy corporate biosecurity state run by tech and Big Pharma, with Chinese-style social credit systems and endless mandatory injection protocols. This is a worldview that has survived its passage from the English-Scottish borderlands and the Appalachian backcountry to wide swaths of today s United States more or less wholly intact. Its reflexive distrust of the CDC, the NIH and the political and corporate establishments is not just comparable to the ancient north British antipathy for the avowed authority of the crown; it s literally the same thing.
The argument between these two sides is not about facts and data and experts and science. It s not even an argument about appropriate public policy. In fact it s not an argument at all. It s a head-to-head collision between two vastly different conceptions of what a free society should look like.
There s nothing new about this conflict these two fundamentally incompatible political philosophies have coexisted in America for centuries, and in England before it. But in this new era of endless global emergency, the omnipresence of social media, and the reach of digitally empowered state actors, coexistence has become increasingly impractical. The pandemic forced us into a circumstance in which America s public health response was split between two diametrically opposed policies, each vying to prevail over the other, each side regarding the cost of defeat as existential. Today, mask mandates or other pandemic-related measures are at long last being rolled back, but the war to define America s relationship to freedom and authority is just getting started.
I’m half Irish Catholic and half Episcopalian, with the Episcopalian strain winning over the Quaker strain from my paternal grandmother, I would say, and the Irish Catholic strain mostly winning over all. My politics lean strongly toward what the author is too polite to call the hillbilly attitude, although I think it can be much more sophisticated then this tag would suggest. The only Scots-Irish in my background is not by blood. My paternal great grandfather by blood (to my shame, when I found out about it) abandoned my great grandmother, and her second husband was Scottish. Traditions don’t have to be genetic, of course.