How many bright red lines does a putatively liberal-democratic government cross before you just say: it’s no longer Liberal, and it’s no longer a democracy?
Fully considered, that’s a complex question, of the sort the political scientists and others at Freedom House who put together the annual “Freedom in the World” report have to wrestle with, considering multiple factors. I somewhat mistrust their experts, given misjudgments they have made about Hungarian and Polish populist-conservative governments, and a number of cheap points they have made over the years against conservative administrations in the U.S., but they do have a methodology for their ratings that I assume they largely stick to, and their official statements on Covid policy debates suggest that they are not in deep denial—as most in legacy media truly are—about the threat that lockdown policies and vaccine mandates pose to the core principles of liberal democracy.
Some of the various factors they are trying to deal with can be glimpsed in their justification for demoting India, in last year’s report, from the ranks of the “free” to the “partly free,” joining nations like Indonesia, Morocco, the Philippines, Mexico, and the real hot-potato of controversy here, Hungary, but not the simply unfree ones like Russia, China, Iraq, and Venezuela. Their annual reports have only three categories—not free, partly free, and free—though numerical scoring is also provided. Here is their language on India’s demotion:
India, the world’s most populous democracy, dropped from Free to Partly Free status in Freedom in the World 2021. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its state-level allies continued to crack down on critics during the year, and their response to COVID-19 included a ham-fisted lockdown that resulted in the dangerous and unplanned displacement of millions of internal migrant workers. The ruling Hindu nationalist movement also encouraged the scapegoating of Muslims, who were disproportionately blamed for the spread of the virus and faced attacks by vigilante mobs.
Of course, Modi’s government has been democratically elected. I am no India expert, and in fact am not even moderately well-informed these days on its politics, so I am not sure if Freedom House got this call right—I welcome dissenters or explainers to chime in below. But obviously, the report’s experts attempted to weigh various factors against one another.
Any day now, I think, they will issue the “Freedom in the World 2022” report, which will make judgments regarding the state of play in 2021.
The first thing many of us will look at is this: do they still rate Australia as free?
Consider this shocking report from Megan Fox of PJMedia
… #AustraliaHasFallen is trending on Twitter. Australia’s “Health Officer” (is there a worse-sounding totalitarian title than that?) has determined that the unvaccinated in Australia’s Northern Territory can no longer leave their homes for the rest of the week in the case that they have to work or…get this—exercise.
That’s right, the “health” officials are prohibiting fresh air and exercise for unvaccinated Australians. For real. This is not The Onion.
Indeed not. See 2:00-3:30 here:
Oh, you might say, “it’s only an order for four days,” or “it’s only one province.”
But this is but one instance of quasi-despotic Australian action in response to Covid among hundreds of others in 2021, one more crossing of a bright red line. The overall pattern is now clear, and here’s how the Aussie columnist Nick Cater characterizes it, over at Spiked, saying that the nation has become “demoralized” and “illiberal”:
The vaccine rollout has also gone hand in hand with coercive measures. Rules vary from state to state, but everywhere vaccines are more or less mandatory – unless one is prepared to live a miserable life, barred from shops, restaurants, churches and, in some cases, employment. Like some benighted republic trapped behind the old Iron Curtain, Australia has become a country where one is required to produce one’s papers in the course of everyday life, albeit on the screen of a mobile phone. For much of the pandemic, citizens have required government approval to enter or leave the country, and even permits for internal travel from some states to others. Should you cross certain state borders without the relevant authority, you are liable to be arrested on arrival and detained in a quarantine hotel for 14 days at your own expense, with no remission granted for a negative Covid test. …
Cater reminds us of the horrible truth that in most parts of Australia the administrative despots who have implemented these rules, such as the Victoria premier Dan Andrews, and perhaps this Northern Territory (equivalent of premier) Chief Minister Michael Gunner also, would be easily win reelection if votes were held today. Tocqueville called this possible dynamic of democratic bullying and rights-trampling “tyranny of the majority,” and Madison, “majority faction.” How many victories for such tyranny within a liberal democracy, and for how long, before we begin to question whether it still is a liberal democracy? Tocqueville and Madison never provided decisive guidance for that question, and obviously, the worst of America’s tyrannies-of-the-majority, the system of segregation from the 1870s to the 1960s, went on for a very long time.
Cater says Australia has conducted a “two-year experiment in authoritarianism,” but at a couple of points in his piece, he calls it a “liberal democracy,” so apparently, he still thinks it is one at bottom. Still, one of these is a sentence where he’s saying Australia has been more “careless…in abandoning cherished principles of liberty and individual sovereignty in the pursuit of public health” than nearly any other liberal democracies.
One of those even-worse exceptions he might have in mind is Austria, which is on track to use impoverishment-via-repeat-fines (up to $15,000 per year) as a way of forcing vaccines on the unwilling, short of actually sending armed personnel to strap them down to a table, or Italy, which just mandated vaccines (unclear what the penalties will be for non-compliance) for all those over age 50, regardless of their employment or lack of it. So maybe we can look forward to a 2023 “Freedom in the World” report demoting both those nations to the “partly free” category as well.
I bet the Freedom House folks will only slightly dock points for Australia’s horrible 2021 pattern, and am certain they will not do so enough to bring it into their “partly free” category.
Some other time perhaps, we can talk about how useful their rubrics and scoring are. Complicated subject. But overall, I suspect they cannot capture the necessary relation between levels of liberal freedom and those of democratic say/participation, and that it cannot distinguish well between actual maintenance of on-the-books Liberal freedom, and the qualified, arbitrary, and constantly subject-to-adjustment maintenance of the same that characterizes the Covid era.