For all that the logic of raison du monde is predicated on the discovery of global problems and a proliferation of global solutions unconstrained by law or natural right (or democracy, while we’re at it), the drivers at the personal level are much baser: suckling at the teat of governments and charities and extracting a nice living that way for as long as possible – usually while persuading oneself that one is doing something terribly worthwhile.
If it turns out that the population is not so vulnerable after all, and men, women and families can improve themselves and their communities without the aid of the state, then the entire structure upon which the edifice of raison d’État rests becomes radically unstable. This is at least part of the reason why these movements are so frequently smeared and traduced by the chattering classes which are so reliant themselves upon the state and its largesse.
They have little interest in traditional liberal values such as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of conscience, and in fact are often implicitly contemptuous of those values and think them to be dangerous. And they are fairly comfortable with the idea of the authorities bossing people around so long as it is for their own (purported) benefit. They, in other words, see themselves as being something like Plato’s class of ‘guardians’, who possess the wisdom to coordinate society as they see fit.
During the Covid era, we see the same schema writ large in the responses taken by governments across the globe. For the first time in human history, the availability of mass-testing allowed us to convince ourselves that we could measure the health of the population, holistically, in real time, and to generate precise statistics permitting us to do so – right down to the last ‘case’ or ‘death’.
For the Robespierres of lockdownism, the object of pity became those “vulnerable” to Covid, and set against this “more touching calamity” the needs of other classes – chiefly children and the poor – were held to count for little. Indeed, the members of those classes could be visited with all manner of cruelties given the bigger goal the lockdown proponents hoped to achieve.
Justin Trudeau’s contempt for the truckers is therefore genuine and profound. He sees in them not an obstacle to Covid policy or a potential threat to public health. Not even he could possibly be so stupid as to think it matters whether or not these people take their vaccines. No: he identifies in them a barrier to forces in which his political future is entwined – an ever-increasing scope and scale for governmental authority, and the opportunities to buttress his own legitimacy that would follow from it.
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