Ed Brodow: Cowards Among Us—A Clear and Present Danger

Years ago I attended an acting class in Hollywood taught by a sadist who loved to insult and demean his students. After class one day, I got into an argument with some of my fellow students. “There is no excuse for his abuse,” I argued. Instead of backing me up, they defended the teacher. “He is doing us a favor,” they insisted. “He is preparing us for the abuse we will encounter in the real world of Hollywood.” I was appalled at how easily they not only accepted but attempted to justify our teacher’s abusive behavior.

Unfortunately, people who have the guts to defy abusive authority figures are few and far between. A substantial portion of the human race is eager to accept and even justify government encroachment on individual rights. It happened in Germany as Hitler rose to power and it was repeated in the US during the McCarthy scare of the 1950s. It is happening again thanks to the coronavirus.

We see evidence of this as Democratic incumbents, including the mayors of New York and Los Angeles, request citizens to snitch on their neighbors who disregard sheltering rules. Spineless people are coming out of the woodwork to support the government’s encroachment on individual rights and liberties. The late Christopher Hitchens knew what he was talking about when he said, "It is depressingly easy to get people who are born into a country that is governed by a Constitution with all the rights and privileges of a free society to give up or devalue it or to panic and abandon the values of that Constitution."

Political commentator Dennis Prager understands the dynamic. “People will argue that a temporary police state has been justified because of the allegedly unique threat to life posed by the new coronavirus,” Prager writes in Townhall.com. He vehemently disagrees, comparing government’s response to the virus with the East German Stasi secret police. “The ease with which police state tactics have been employed,” Prager says, “and the equal ease with which most Americans have accepted them have been breathtaking.” He lists four key hallmarks of a police state: (1) draconian laws depriving citizens of civil rights; (2) mass media support of those laws; (3) police enforcement of the laws; and (4) the use of informers. The coronavirus situation satisfies all four criteria. Prager’s conclusions: (1) too many Americans appear untroubled by it, and (2) the Democratic Party supports it. “If you love liberty,” Prager says, “you must see that it is jeopardized more than at any time since America's founding. And that means, among other things, that at this time, a vote for any Democrat is a vote to end liberty.”

Commenting on the virus, redstate.com had this to say: "The numerous forces who oppose free people as a matter of principle have been successful in largely making those liberties not only illegal but getting a large number of Americans and most law enforcement agencies to go along with the proposition." The question is why? Why are so many pusillanimous citizens selling the rest of us out by defending government overreach. Here are three compelling reasons: (1) many adults are victims of toxic child-rearing practices that render them susceptible to government abuse; (2) liberal Democrats prefer big government at the expense of individual rights; and (3) uninformed voters are being brainwashed by a compliant mainstream media.

To explain the first reason, I defer to Swiss psychologist Alice Miller. In The Drama of the Gifted Child and other works, Miller describes the abuse that children typically receive due to outdated methods of child-rearing. Children will defend their abusive parents because they are taught that the abuse is for their own good. “We live in a culture that encourages us not to take our own suffering seriously,” Miller says, “but rather to make light of it or even to laugh about it.” When they attain adulthood, many of these children will similarly regard abusive government policies as something they deserve. “Going along with those in power,” agrees redstate.com, “is something they have been bred to do.”

Second, abusive government policies are in accord with the aim of the Democratic Party to solidify its control over the masses. The intention of the Founding Fathers was to limit the powers of the federal government. Largely due to the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, Washington has grown into a behemoth run by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats—the Deep State. Under Obama, the federal government attempted to insinuate itself into every facet of our lives. “Every single one of [Obama’s] initiatives,” says American Thinker, was “directed at increasing government control in every area, with a corresponding decrease in individual liberty.” Many voters have been seduced into lending their support to the Democratic Party’s love affair with big government and state socialism.

The third reason so many Americans approve of totalitarian policies is that the mainstream media have become an arm of the Democratic Party. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post no longer provide objective coverage of news. They are busy indoctrinating voters that government overreach is eminently desirable. The average American, who is woefully uninformed about political matters, has become an easy target for left-wing reporting.

American citizens have been conditioned to praise the government when it takes our rights away. If you object to lockdown orders issued by unelected bureaucrats, you run the risk of alienation from the group on grounds that you are showing contempt for the public good. "Our individual freedoms are under assault from the virus,” says former Fox star Bill O’Reilly. “Do you like being told how to live and where you can go? Are you embracing the restrictions we are facing? They are a vivid message—this is what can happen all the time when big government rules." If restrictions are placed on our constitutionally protected freedoms, there had better be a damn good reason, e.g., a declaration of war. Hysteria over a virus doesn’t qualify.

“Throughout history,” writes Judge Andrew Napolitano in the Washington Times, “free people have been willing to accept the devil’s bargain of trading liberty for safety when they are

fearful. We supinely accept the shallow and hollow offers of government that somehow less liberty equals more safety.” Don’t be one of the cowards who falls for the trap.