No, we don't lose liberties forever
History shows we do get curtailed liberties back after emergencies pass.
There’s a rhetorical tactic by libertarians that goes like this:
“If you let your liberties slip away you will never get them back!”
I have probably heard some variation on this an average of five times a day since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been unfailingly deployed against every American COVID countermeasure. As a rhetorical move it implies that the people who say it are staunch and brave Defenders of Liberty, righteously sounding the alarm as The Herd mindlessly shuffles itself off to the slaughterhouse.
The problem is, it isn’t true.
During WWII millions of Americans were conscripted into military service. 12,000 conscientious objectors went to work camps and nearly 6,000 went to prison. About 120,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in internment camps. The federal government imposed price and wage controls. An amazing roster of goods were rationed: from rubber, gasoline, sugar, butter, and meat to canned dog food, toothpaste tubes, shoes, and typewriters.
When the Axis was dealt with, the conscripts (that had survived) returned home. Japanese-Americans were no longer incarcerated; though certainly the hardship and loss that they suffered is hardly to be minimized. Most rationing ended in 1945 and rationing of the last rationed commodity, sugar, ended in June of 1947. President Eisenhower dismantled wage and price controls in early 1953.
The emergency had passed. And the liberties that had been sacrificed in the name of the emergency were in fact, generally restored. I’m not arguing that these sacrifices had all been beneficial or legitimate. Some — the Japanese internment in particular — were cruel and unnecessary. Nevertheless, they did come to an end.
To a lesser but significant extent liberties were infringed to prosecute the follow-on wars in Vietnam and Korea. But again, the curtailments of liberty, by and large, did not survive the cessation of the emergency.
The Prohibition of alcohol in 1920 was a response to a different kind of emergency — a perceived crisis in the social order. At least as that emergency was conceived, it never even ended. Rather, it became clear that the restriction of liberties related to alcohol production, distribution, and consumption were ineffective; and worse, that they were creating their own kind of emergency, in the form of a dramatic rise of organized crime and related violence. Nationwide restrictions were lifted in 1933. There are still some “dry” counties in the United States, but they are few and far between and not too many people have real trouble obtaining alcoholic beverages.
Marijuana use in the United States has been restricted on federal and state levels for all of living memory. Federally it is still illegal. But enforcement in friendly jurisdictions has been restrained, and the liberty to use marijuana has already been restored to one extent or another in a majority of states: 36 states have legalized medical marijuana and 16 states plus Washington D.C. have legalized it for adults over 21.
At the end of Reconstruction, Black Americans lost many of the liberties that had been restored to them after emancipation. They were subjected to the segregation and the despicable Jim Crow laws. It took a mighty struggle to restore these liberties, to be sure. But it’s important to recognize that even though regaining liberty may be very difficult, it does happen. The claim that liberties lost will or can never be regained is simply wrong.
This is not to say we should be bla·sé about opening Pandora’s Box. And there certainly other ways that the changes in the size and nature of our government can be exceedingly difficult to reverse.
But this idea that any liberty lost or curtailed in the name of an emergency is simply nonsense. And given that the number of Americans that have died of COVID will soon exceed the number killed in all U.S. wars combined, maybe this rhetoric is just a tad bit hysterical and misplaced when we are talking about wearing a cotton mask on your face.