Another Lockdowner Bites the Dust

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson addresses the nation as he announces his resignation outside 10 Downing Street on July 7, 2022. Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Governments of the world today are among the least popular institutions on the planet. There are a few possible exceptions such as Sweden, Florida, and South Dakota, places with leadership that chose not to bludgeon its people in the name of virus control. Among all the rest, we see instability and public opposition that is without precedent in our lifetimes.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was always a reluctant lockdowner. Like Trump, his initial instincts were good. He did not believe for a moment that locking people down would somehow manage to make a virus go away. It might slow it down, and perhaps this is what changed his thinking: the need to ration healthcare resources. At least, that is what he was told.

Regardless, Johnson buckled and eventually became the most preposterous advocate of lockdowns in the world, a disheveled yet charming playboy with a sketchy personal life lecturing the entire nation about the need to maintain distance, avoid parties, and constantly wash one’s hands.

He was the world’s least plausible convert to Cromwellian puritanism that one can imagine. As it turns out, of course, during the worst of times, while citizens were forcibly hiding in hovels, unable even to enjoy a pint at the pub, Johnson turned 10 Downing Street into a wine-soaked speakeasy with no regard for the rules he imposed on everyone else.

I recall my own fury at seeing the venerable Queen Elizabeth II forced to sit alone in a mask at her husband’s funeral that most citizens were forbidden to attend. Only the night before, Johnson hosted a groovy dance party attended only by those elite enough to break the rules and get away with it. In other words, Johnson subjected the Queen herself to his own despotic rule! That’s a moral outrage.

Johnson also presided over the wreckage of the economy. The UK is dealing now with raging inflation, a depressed currency, grim levels of productivity, and a deeply demoralized and angry public. Johnson very quickly flipped from being head of government, enjoying photo ops with fancy statesmen at those faux-serious global junkets where people of his ilk pretend to run the world, into a scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong.

Probably the UK now will go the way of New York state: leaping from the frying pan immediately into the fire, with the replacement of a bad statesman to a much worse one. So it goes in the lockdown age: lots of heads on platters but they belong mostly to the dupes and dopes who dared take responsibility for a completely unworkable policy, while the real architects of evil remain hidden in their offices as part of the deep-state machinery that never faces accountability.

All of which reminds me of a strangely ominous article written by Henry Kissinger, appearing in the Wall Street Journal on April 3, 2020. In this piece, Kissinger warned of too extreme a policy that could end in the loss of public trust in government and fundamentally destabilize the liberal order. Perhaps he should have been more blunt: I’ve read this prescient piece 10 times since its appearance and the prose remains oblique until you get to the startling ending, in which he says the following:

“The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values. A global retreat from balancing power with legitimacy will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally. Yet this millennial issue of legitimacy and power cannot be settled simultaneously with the effort to overcome the Covid-19 plague. Restraint is necessary on all sides—in both domestic politics and international diplomacy. Priorities must be established.”

“We went on from the Battle of the Bulge into a world of growing prosperity and enhanced human dignity. Now, we live in an epochal period. The historic challenge for leaders is to manage the crisis while building the future. Failure could set the world on fire.”

There we have it: they failed. Now the world is on fire. Kissinger—a deep-state player from another generation—did warn. But no one was really listening in the midst of disease panic. Plus the administrative state was enjoying its sudden totalitarian power too much to worry about what this would do to public trust and economic life generally. Kissinger very wisely saw what few others would acknowledge.

Americans today are watching events in the UK with some degree of jealousy. There are no regularly scheduled elections for the head of government. Instead, when the person loses support of the party and the public, he or she is forced out. It can all happen in an instant. This is very satisfying.

Looking at Biden’s polling numbers—and also the growing stream of resignations from executive positions in Biden’s government—there can be no question that if we had the same system, he would be toast.

A chart like this one would be certain death for any government in a parliamentary system:

We, on the other hand, have to wait another two and a half years to deal with this problem. Blame the Constitution for this but let us also be fair to the document’s framers. They never imagined that a president would accumulate so much power to destroy so much so quickly. They built in the impeachment power to make sure that it wouldn’t happen. All evidence suggests that they expected it to be deployed regularly.

Therefore we wait and watch as the Biden administration melts day by day into a puddle of nothingness, taking his party down with him along with the media organs that have defended him for so long. The people who wanted Biden in office truly hoped to write the history of the Trump administration as the most epically awful in American history but it appears now that this title will belong to Trump’s successor.

Yesterday, I discussed what the next Congress should do. In addition to investigations into the COVID calamity, Congress can begin to address the number one disaster in the federal government today: the massively out-of-control spending. It reduces economic growth, breeds corruption, and pillages the public through taxes and inflation. The budget needs to be slashed dramatically.

Here is the chart that proves it, with overall spending in blue and transfer payments alone in red. This must stop. A good first goal should be to cut everything by 50 percent, with a laser-like focus on the inflated budgets of 432 federal agencies that operate mostly out of the public eye.

Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker

It’s all well and good—and very much necessary—to torch the reputations and careers of the high-profile politicians who pushed and enforced lockdowns, the most disgraceful government policy in anyone’s lifetime. They all need to go down. But if we stop there, we are missing the real point. The corruption is much deeper. It goes to the heart of the administrative state and its entangled relationships with oligarchs in private industry. This is the monstrosity that really needs to collapse.

Boris and Biden deserve their status as scapegoats but they are the symbols not the substance of despotism in our time. The restoration of freedom as a first principle requires far more than changing the names and faces of the marionettes hired by voters to distract us from the much deeper problem.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.