Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins wrote a piece this week for the Atlantic titled, “Why didn’t facing a common enemy bring us together?” The article is worth reading, but the real answer to the question posed by Collins is simple: Politicians and bureaucrats and their enablers in the press saw an opportunity to wield power over the public, and they took it.
Unlike in World War II, which saw the armies of President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill join forces with Joseph Stalin’s Red Army to defeat Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, our leaders lost focus on defeating the external threat posed by COVID-19 and turned their guns inward toward their constituents.
As Rahm Emanuel, former White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The ruling class certainly capitalized on its opportunity to make tyrannical hay while the sun shone.
Former President Donald Trump allowed bureaucrats such as former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci to dictate federal policy, and governors across the country seized their opportunity to cosplay as communist dictators. Businesses were forced to close, entire professions were deemed “nonessential,” pastors were arrested for holding church services, schools were closed for years in some jurisdictions, and nearly every elected official responsible for the tyranny was reelected, most by wide margins.
The public was so compliant and docile in the face of the largest explosion of government power in generations that Democrats ran in 2020 on the promise to be even more irrationally authoritarian than Republicans, a campaign promise they immediately fulfilled.
In one sense, the pandemic did bring people together. Leftists dutifully wore masks and received countless vaccines and booster shots that, at best, did little to prevent COVID-19 transmission and viciously attacked anyone raising skepticism of such measures. Democrats, in true communist form, snitched on their neighbors for going to work or church and bought Fauci prayer candles. People huddled around their televisions to hear their governors tell them if they were allowed to leave their homes while waiting patiently for inflation-supercharging “stimmys.” The Left became so tribal that a majority of Democrats polled said hospitals should refuse to treat unvaccinated patients.
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How could the freedom-loving minority who values individual liberty and the Bill of Rights unite with the hordes of rabid leftists bent on ending the American experiment? When a government breaks bad, “coming together” with the state, its enablers, and its beneficiaries becomes a deeply immoral act.
The fact that there was a remnant of patriots who stayed committed to the idea of freedom when all of society abandoned America’s first principles gives me hope that liberty still stands a chance in our country. If America truly came together under the banner of Faucism, there would be little hope of emerging from the next crisis with our birthright as American citizens intact. If America’s best days are still ahead of us, thank the folks who refused to “come together” during the pandemic.
Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.