Wartime coronavirus powers could hurt our democracy, without keeping us safe

Wartime coronavirus powers could hurt our democracy, without keeping us safe

By: Cass Mudde

Taken from: The Guardian

We are not at war with a virus. I don’t care how many politicians say it, from Xi Jinping’s “people’s war” to Donald Trump’s “our big war”, or how many pundits repeat it: we are not “at war” with the coronavirus. I know that in deeply militarized countries like the US, the term “war” is now simply used to emphasize the importance of an issue – from the non-existent “war on Christmas” that conservatives talk about to the liberal “war on poverty”. But words have meanings, and often real consequences, as we are still seeing in the “war on drugs” and “war on terror”.

During a war, the liberal democratic order is temporarily suspended, and extraordinary measures are passed that significantly extend state powers and limit the population’s rights. Some of the extended state powers only marginally infringe upon the lives and rights of citizens, such as the creation of a “war economy” (ie making economic production subservient to wartime efforts), but others have traumatic consequences, such as the mass internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war.

Across the world, government leaders have declared (and extended) states of emergency, in countries such as Spain, provinces such as Nova Scotia, Canada, and cities such as Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I’m writing this column in my liberal college town of Athens, Georgia, which declared a state of emergency a week ago and recently added a “shelter-in-place” ordinance to it – which is partly undermined by the much laxer response by nextdoor (Republican-run) Oconee county, so that Athens residents can still dine and shop there.

State-of-emergency measures are necessary in a real crisis, whether economic or health-related, but they can be taken without the use of “war” language. They also should be strictly related to the crisis at hand and proportional to the threat. At this stage, the threat of contagion is very high, which means that measures to limit the movement of people are legitimized.

Similarly, most countries are woefully ill-prepared for the pandemic, with hospitals dangerously overcrowded and underresourced, requiring urgent state intervention. In addition to using massive funds to buy much-needed medical supplies, this could also include enlisting the military to create temporary hospitals, as New York is currently doing.

But many politicians have gone much further, trying to use the health crisis to push through dubious repressive legislation. For instance, in the United Kingdom, where the Conservative government response so far has shown almost criminal negligence, Boris Johnson has pushed through a draconian “coronavirus bill”, which, among others, gives police and immigration officials sweeping powers to arrest people suspected of carrying the coronavirus – this could make innocent Brits of Chinese descent targets of state repression in a similar way that post-9/11 measures have targeted innocent British Muslims.

In Israel, the embattled prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hoped that the coronavirus could do what three elections have failed to achieve: extend his government rule and keep him out of prison. Linking anti-corona measures to anti-terrorism measures, Netanyahu proposed a package that critics have called “anti-democratic” and has led to public protests in several Israeli cities.

Never to be outdone, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has jumped on the coronavirus to push the final nail in the coffin of the country’s bruised and battered democracy. On Monday, the Fidesz party-controlled government will vote on a law that, according to one prominent critic, would “give Viktor Orbán dictatorial powers under a state of emergency to fight the coronavirus”.

In the US, President Donald Trump, forced to finally acknowledge the reality and seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic after weeks of delusional statements, is starting to see the political potential of the crisis. In a recent speech, he stated, in his own unique English: “I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime president.”

What this “wartime presidency” could look like we could see in the emergency powers the Department of Justice “quietly asked” Congress for. Most involve, unsurprisingly, powers to further restrict immigration – undoubtedly influenced by the anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller, Trump’s longest-serving key adviser (outside of members of his own family). It also includes the request to grant chief judges the power to detain people indefinitely without trial, which critics fear could mean the suspension of habeas corpus (the constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest and seek release).

There are very serious problems with many of the proposed measures, many of them similar to the repressive measures taken after 9/11. First, in many cases the proposals are combinations of repressive measures that are unrelated to this specific crisis. Second, many measures are disproportional to the threat we face – habeas corpus is at the heart of the rule of law; should we really sacrifice that for a health crisis whose lethality is still largely unknown? Third, while they are all explicitly billed as “emergency measures”, limited to that emergency, the language is often vague and could be used to justify (endless) extensions. We know from experience that temporary measures often become permanent measures.

To prevent another Patriot Act, each new “emergency measure” should be assessed individually on the basis of three clear questions: what is its contribution to the fight against the coronavirus?; what are its negative consequences for liberal democracy?; when will it be abolished? If any of these three questions cannot be adequately answered, the measure should be rejected.

While it is important to take the threat of the coronavirus seriously – really, people, stay at home! – and to provide the state with the powers it needs to fight the pandemic, we should not let our fear be used to drag us into yet another false “war”. Because if we do, politicians will use it once again to strengthen the already far too strong repressive powers of our surveillance states.