This month commemorated the five-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic being declared. A lot of panic ensued. Nothing encapsulated the hysteria more than the lockdowns. I was against them before they were implemented and strongly voiced my issues with lockdowns in May 2020. I criticized lockdowns multiple times throughout the pandemic. I continue to do so five years later. Why? Because its effects remain with us. I have developed such a strong opinion that I ended up writing a three-part series. The first Part was about health costs. Part II focused on economic costs. Today, I am covering the political and social costs.
Still reeling from woke politics that the lockdowns allowed. How did I go from lockdowns to woke political clout? In June 2020, I wrote about how the lockdowns precipitated the George Floyd protests due to the lockdowns and social isolation. There has always been a Far Left presence in politics, but they were on the periphery of the political Left. That changed in 2020 because the woke Left toke advantage of the social chaos and found a way in when society was at its weakest. Those protests, in turn, became an inflection point that opened the floodgates for all things woke, whether that is identity politics, Critical Race Theory, identifying by preferred pronouns, or racism-perpetuating DEI initiatives. While Trump being re-elected signals an anti-woke impetus in politics, we still have a ways to go before undoing all the harm that the woke Left has done both in the United States and abroad.
Lockdowns made people less sociable and ruder. As I brought up in the previous Part, adults now spend less time in social situations. That makes sense because the isolation of the lockdowns created habits that adapted towards isolation and disincentivized socializing. But the effects of the lockdowns went a step further. According to senior advisor Brian Michael Jenkins at the RAND Corporation, prolonged isolation increases irritability and aggression while diminishing impulse control.
Survey data from Pew Research released this month shows that about half of Americans say that people have gotten ruder since the pandemic. Jenkins also noted that in past pandemics and plagues, there was a social erosion and mistrust that was even passed down to descendants. When you combine mistrust along with the effects of prolonged isolation (e.g., anxiety, depression, stress), I would hazard to guess that this coarseness and fear-mongering will not go away anytime soon. Speaking of fear....
We live in a more fear-based world than we used to. As of date, there have been about 7 million reported COVID deaths (Oxford). Even if the United Nations' estimate of 14.9 million deaths or the Economist's estimate of 17.6 million were true, the COVID death rate was nowhere the death rate of the Spanish Flu, let alone the Bubonic Plague.
It does not matter that there have been fewer than 1 million COVID reported deaths since April 2022, and that's assuming those were deaths from COVID instead of dying with COVID. It does not matter that Biden declared the end of the pandemic in April 2023, followed by WHO in May 2023. A Gallup poll from earlier this month shows that 40 percent of Americans believe that we are still in a pandemic. I expressed concern in May 2022 about how the obsession of wearing masks would lead to greater fear.
The lockdowns resulted in more authoritarianism. Sadly, that fear is with us not only in terms of COVID. It persists with the politics of both sides of the political aisle, whether it is the Right clamoring against immigration, crime, and pornography; or the Left fear-mongering about how climate change will end the world or how democracy will cease to exist if their candidates are not in power.
Authoritarianism is bred with anger and fear-mongering (e.g., Butler, 2013). The pandemic gave politicians across the world cover to increase their power in the name of public health and "Follow the Science." To quote a study from Economic Affairs (Andersson and Jonung, 2024) that I analyzed last year:
The restrictions seem to have inspired growing polarization, conspiracy thinking, and protests and demonstrations in many countries. The lockdowns may thus have undermined liberal democracy and economic freedom. Freedom of the press was curtailed...In authoritarian countries, restrictions were used as a pretext for increased repression. Confidence in liberal democracy was undermined when citizens were locked up and prevented from moving freely in society.
Even in the "Land of the Free," there were lockdowns, the school closures, and a Biden administration that doubled down on failed policies and eroding civil liberties along the way. As Freedom House brought up in its detailed report entitled Democracy During Lockdown, government responses to COVID in multiple countries eroded the essential pillars of democracy (see below).
Freedom House's 2025 Freedom in the World report shows that freedom and democracy across the world continues to decline. The Human Freedom Index, which was co-created by the Cato and Fraser Institutes, do not fare much better. Reading its 2024 report on the Human Freedom Index, human freedom recovered a wee bit post-pandemic but is still well below pre-pandemic levels. Freedom of expression, rule of law, and freedom of association and assembly took the largest hits. Even in the Western world, whether it is the United States or Europe, people are lamentably caring less and less for freedom of expression.
It remains unclear as to whether we are taking "one step back after taking two steps forward" or, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of moral universe still bends towards justice but it taking a detour. Time will tell on the long-term trajectory, but two things are clear. One is that the pandemic was an inflection point. For what it ends up being an inflection point for, we will have to wait. And two, at least for the foreseeable future, the trajectory of humanity is pointing in the direction of greater authoritarianism.
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