After a bad year for freedom, let's revive liberalism in 2021

It's been a terrible year for personal freedom. And I'm not just saying that because I happen to find myself in yet another lockdown.

Like war or other disasters, a pandemic shifts priorities. In 2020, individual liberty seemed less important and public health appeared most urgent. State paternalism suddenly looked surprisingly acceptable, or at least necessary.

But along the way, Covid-19 also became an ideal pretext for cynics and autocrats everywhere who already disdained liberty to try to bury it altogether. As 2021 dawns, is freedom in global retreat? Is "liberalism" passé?

The outlook wasn't all that bright even at the start of 2020. In January, I penned a "liberal manifesto" because I feared that classical liberalism was going out of fashion and a new collectivism was becoming vogue. Covid-19 has accelerated that preexisting trend.

To avoid confusion, let's be clear about the word liberal here. It has nothing to do with its American meaning of lefty, woke or big government; nor with its European caricature as "neoliberal" and market fundamentalist. We're talking instead about a venerable philosophy that regards individual freedom as the highest value while fully recognizing the need to harmonize this principle with society as a whole.

For that reason, liberalism can occasionally live with restrictions on liberty. The harm principle, as defined in 1859 by John Stuart Mill in his treatise "On Liberty," says that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

So there's nothing inherently illiberal about, say, a lockdown to slow the spread of Covid-19. Or, about a regulation that requires us to wear masks in public. Nor is it automatically illiberal for the state, in a situation of economic disruption and distress, to step in temporarily as the primary economic actor, paying firms and people until they can earn their livelihoods again.

The trouble starts when these measures are adapted, extended or abused. The world was already tilting toward authoritarianism in recent years. China didn't need Covid-19 to oppress the Uighurs or clamp down on Hong Kong, nor did Alexander Lukashenko need it to tyrannize Belarussians. But many autocrats have seized on the coronavirus as another excuse to crack down on their critics, the free press, minority populations and others they don't like.

Democracy and human rights have deteriorated in 80 countries this year, according to Freedom House, an American think tank. In Zimbabwe, government thugs have, in the name of policing lockdown infractions, arrested, abducted, raped or assaulted opposition leaders, activists and other dissenters. Authorities from Kazakhstan to Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Guatemala and many other places have been almost as bad.

Even where governments don't physically tyrannize people, they increasingly censor them digitally or, under the pretext of contact tracing, build new surveillance tools. China has gone furthest, by connecting biometric, financial and other intimate information about citizens without their assent. Even democratic societies such as South Korea and Singapore increasingly have an infrastructure they could turn from transparent to Orwellian with the flick of a switch.

In mature democracies such as Germany or the US, checks and balances remain robust enough to prevent such dystopias for the foreseeable future. But there too the climate for democratic and civilized discourse, the precondition for any liberal society, has deteriorated.

The main culprits are conspiracy theorists, who always thrive in times of plague. They wantonly abuse the right to free speech and assembly - core principles of liberalism - to spread disinformation and lies.

Liberals will be the first to defend these people's right to disagree with government policies or to interpret medical facts differently. But when people misuse their own liberty to impugn facts and pervert truth they are vandalizing our intellectual, psychological and cultural commons.

Another illiberal trend is economic. It also precedes Covid-19. China in particular has presented its form of state capitalism as a countermodel to the West's open and competitive market economies. In response, Western countries have started leaning toward more state intervention. (Bloomberg)