Over the last two days there has been a lot of news about right wing protestors trying to pressure state governments to lift quarantine measures. As with the Tea Party, this appears to be stoked by conservative media and various organizations. The numbers of people in the street aren't really that impressive, but that hasn't stopped the media from giving them wall to wall coverage.
It certainly seems surreal for people to be demanding they risk disease and death so they can go to Applebee's again. However, it makes total sense if you understand the conservative idea of freedom in America.
The name of the concept is a reference on my part to The German Idea of Freedom, a venerable intellectual history by Leonard Krieger. The book posits that in the years before Germany became a nation-state in 1871 that "freedom" was defined in ways inconsistent with liberal values of individual rights and democracy. The book suffers from the same problems of a lot of other histories of its time in terms of treating Germany as "other" in European history to explain the rise of Nazism. That said, it does offer a valuable service in showing that there is more than one definition of "freedom" in the modern world and that conceptions of freedom can be quite consistent with authoritarianism.
The culture of American conservatism illustrates this as well. The people descending on state capitols with signs like "Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death" and "Socialism Distancing" seem to think that the current quarantine measures are a huge violation of their freedoms. It is an important illustration of what these people think freedom is and what it isn't.
This is not freedom in any democratic sense. The same people protesting have no problem with Republicans limiting voting rights They support mass incarceration and limiting reproductive rights. They are fine with immigrant families being separated and children being jailed.
Instead, freedom for them means the freedom to do as they please and not being told what to do, especially by some egghead liberal. It is the freedom to pay your workers peanuts, to pollute as much as you want, to say whatever you want no matter how offensive, and most importantly to buy whatever you want.
This is the low-brow and more widespread version of conservativism stripped of the fripperies and trappings of Austrian School economics. The Tea Party foot soldiers see economic freedom is far less high-flown terms. America's lowest common denominator consumer culture to them represents the end all be all, and having their access denied by rules laid down by public health experts infuriates them. It is a kind of dime store Ayn Randianism, Being forced to make a sacrifice for the good of the collective is completely anathema to them. Sure, you can make a sacrifice if you want, but NEVER against your will. Being free means going to Home Depot whenever the hell you feel like it, pandemic or not.
This has been conservatism's promise to its adherents for four decades now. When Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 he emphasized that Americans did not need to sacrifice anything to defeat the energy crisis. This was a crucial moment, since conservatives had long called for sacrifice in times of crisis. (Just think to the Great Depression and Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover.) After 9/11 Dubya told everyone to go shopping, and he never raised taxes to pay for his wars. Buying McDonald's hamburgers in those old styrofoam containers and tossing them out of your car window is FREEDOM baby! The quarantines have taken that freedom away, and that is unacceptable to conservatives.
As poor a thing as this freedom sounds, it cannot be countered without an alternative version. The left needs to make freedom part of its discourse. The freedom of never having to worry about health insurance. The freedom of having low cost child care. The freedom of your boss not having life or death power over your life. The need for this kind of freedom is something most people in this country understand. Now is the time for our society to have, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "a new birth of freedom." Let's make it happen.
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