The Disease of American Freedom in Light of the COVID-19 Dead

At the height of the pandemic in New York last year, Sunset Park near the Statue of Liberty was being used as a giant morgue. In one news photo, Lady Liberty looks down on neat rows of refrigerated trucks containing countless bodies of COVID-19 victims awaiting cremation. That Lady Liberty’s torch, having lit the way to prosperity, should now light the way to death was almost metaphorical.

It is well known that Americans love freedom. The American Dream goes back to when a group of Puritans, fleeing persecution, crossed the ocean to build a “city on a hill” in a “land of the free.” Then came the War of Independence, fought for freedom from British colonial rule. Still later, as a result of the century-long westward expansion marked by the blood and tears of Native Americans, America’s supposedly free and pioneering spirit was further strengthened with the space to freely flourish provided by the vast frontier, in turn reinforcing Americans’ freedom-loving mentality.

Freedom is the value which Americans are proudest of. It has nurtured the United States’ pluralism, vitality and innovation, but its wildly unrestrained growth — or rather, its growth that for so long has been permitted no restraints — has become a manacle of its own making. The American scholar Louis Hartz argued that the sheer binding force of liberalism in the United States had wound up constituting a threat to freedom itself. As a providential enemy of freedom, COVID-19 has opportunely exposed the flaws in American liberty.

From freedom of speech to freedom of disinformation. Scientific questions such as whether one should wear a mask or get vaccinated should be easy to settle, but in the United States, they have long been besieged by rumor-mongering. On the one hand, bipartisan conflict has made the issue of the pandemic situation highly politicized, with certain politicians taking the lead in concocting disinformation with impunity. Not only does Donald Trump himself seldom wear a mask, but he also started the rumor that 85% of people who did wear masks had become infected, and put forth absurd theories such as the pandemic magically disappearing if people injected disinfectants. Meanwhile, Republican governors criticized the Democrats’ reinstatement of the mask mandate as being in keeping with neither reality nor common sense, and as having no basis in science. On the other hand, social media’s permissiveness and amplification of the spread of rumors have gone unaddressed by the government, which, fearing accusations of infringing on freedom of expression, has done little and accomplished less. A poll conducted by the Pearson Institute found that two thirds of Americans believe social media and tech companies should be held responsible for the spread of incorrect or false information during the U.S. pandemic. President Joe Biden accused social media companies such as Facebook of “killing people” by spreading misinformation about the pandemic and the vaccines, while White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated that although the government was flagging problematic posts on Facebook, it would not remove any content, leaving that decision to Facebook.

From the freedom to limit government to the freedom to oppose it. There are not many Western countries that practice small government, and few are as extreme as the United States, where anti-government slogans such as “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” or “I love my country, but I fear my government” are rampant. This deep suspicion of governmental power has its roots in the United States’ unique and stubbornly liberal culture and is only aggravated by the fighting and mutual muckraking between the two parties. In recent years, the political positions of the Democratic and Republican Parties have become ever more polarized and entrenched, with their respective bases as evenly matched as they are fiercely competitive, gradually moving toward a veto politics of “opposition for the sake of it.” Even to this day, the two parties are still at loggerheads over issues such as whether to make vaccinations and wearing masks mandatory. According to a Pew Center opinion poll, between 1958 and 2021, the proportion of the population that trusts the federal government to do the right thing most of the time has dropped from three quarters to one quarter. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama maintained that the deciding factor to look for in response to a crisis is trust in the government. Today, however, the United States is facing a political crisis of trust, and its deepening tribalism is making it difficult for people to be optimistic about its future.

From protecting one’s own freedoms to infringing on the freedoms of others. COVID-19 is aggressively contagious, and this means that wearing a mask and getting vaccinated are in other people’s interest and in the collective interest — they are not simply personal choices. “Not harming others” should be the basic premise of freedom; the freedom to swing one’s fist should end where another man’s nose begins. However, the freedoms supported by some people in the United States have clearly gone beyond this basic measure. Anti-mask and anti-vax protests have continued across the United States ever since the outbreak of the pandemic, and the Associated Press has reported that more than 100 supposed “medical freedom” bills have been introduced in various U.S. states, prohibiting employers from making vaccination a prerequisite for employment. So far, 26 states have filed lawsuits against the Biden administration’s mandate requiring that employees of large corporations be vaccinated, and in an article on the CNN website, Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University professor and father of economic “shock therapy,” said the pandemic proves that the United States is a country with a very peculiar concept of freedom: the freedom to harm others, the freedom to put poor people and frontline workers at risk of death, the freedom to propagate false information. In short, the freedom to be utterly irresponsible.

Almost two years on from the outbreak of the pandemic in the United States, the death toll has already passed 770,000. Overall pandemic levels are still running high, and vaccination rates have yet to reach the threshold required for herd immunity, yet the United States is anxious to fling open its doors to the outside world, while calling off all sorts of pandemic prevention measures at home. Returning to and embracing freedom, given the virus’s mutations and the surge in travel toward the year-end holiday period, the “land of liberty” will inevitably continue to pay the price for its recklessness, and run up against a powerful backlash from a wave of epidemics.

The failures of the United States in fighting the pandemic exemplify the failures of the U.S. liberal system. Perhaps American freedom was doomed from the very day it was made sacrosanct; freedom may be believed in, but it should not be deified. When everyone demands absolute freedom, then no one really receives it. Where freedom lacks boundaries, it leads to selfishness, disorder and chaos. The pandemic too shall pass, but the United States’ chronic disease of excessive freedom is not easily remedied. Once upon a time, Lady Liberty held the United States aloft. She may ultimately have to bring it crashing down.