Posted on 08/30/2021 3:46:04 PM PDT by algore
The policy response to the covid panic of 2020 in the United States was one of the most widespread direct attacks on fundamental human rights in decades. Overnight—and without any deliberation, debate, or checks and balances—millions of Americans were denied their basic rights to seek employment, to freely assemble, and to engage in religious practices.
Business and churches were closed, and countless Americans were ordered to stay in their homes and abandon their sources of income.
This was all done with no legal process other than the issuance of edicts from a tiny handful of politicians, usually executives such as state governors and city mayors.
Those who pressed for lockdowns and the effective confiscation of property—for that's what a forced business closure actually is—denied that any sort of due process or “checks and balances” were necessary.
Rather, the lockdown advocates insisted that the public instead embrace unreservedly the “recommendations” of experts in government offices, who insisted that coerced lockdowns and business closures were the only reasonable response to the assumed threat of covid-19. Were one to suggest in mixed company that businesses ought to be afforded a hearing before being forcibly closed—or that an individual ought to receive some sort of due process before being deemed a “nonessential” worker—this was likely to elicit scoffing and contempt.
There’s no room for due process anymore, the official narrative tells us.
This new turn toward obedience to expert-fueled executive power didn’t appear from nowhere. Rather it is, in part, a manifestation of a long ideological process that has gradually replaced respect for legal checks and balances and due process with a deference to scientific experts. These experts, it is alleged, must not be subject to the slow and inefficient process of legal constraints on state power.
This process is explained in a 1963 essay by French political scientist Bertrand de Jouvenel titled “The Political Consequences of the Rise of Science.”1
De Jouvenel’s basic premise is this: with the rise of liberalism in the West—what some call classical liberalism—greater care was taken to erect legal obstacles that slowed or prevented state action against individuals. This was done to ensure due process was afforded to ordinary people. This position became especially widespread and respected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as many gained a greater mistrust of government institutions and their agents. The idea was that political institutions could not seize life, liberty, or property from a person unless the state was first subjected to a reliable and stable legal process.
But this due process was slow, and was backward looking in the sense that it had been built up on legal foundations of avoiding past abuses by regimes. In a certain sense, it is conservative by nature.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says that while people need to get vaccinated to "overcome this pandemic," nobody's job should be on the line if they refuse.
Think of the crap we have been accepting in recent years, corona or no.
Fear.
Instilled via non stop propaganda and reinforced by activity.
Answer: Cowards. In a fairly mild society the cowards take over, since they always outnumber the bold. Then the cowards, being cowards, use the full power of govt to oppress anyone who scares them. Just see big mouthed cowards like AOC and Hitlery their use of power. They are happy to call the full power of the US Govt on US Citizens but bow and defer to foreign bullies.
They received political lobotomies in public schools and from listening to the enemydia.
Absolutely! And the number of those gutless pukes who have posted here over the past 18 months is nauseating.
bmp
Very good answer. Cowards are slaves to their fear.
Remember how hopeless Osama’s first term felt and then he got reelected.
Then Trump.
Karens are wannabe tyrants.
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
RAH
This started long before 1963.
One of the foundational concepts of Progressivism is the rule by “experts”.
We’re looking at the end of the common law.
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