Humans were not meant to live in bunkers, physical or metaphorical.
In Richard Adams’ classic book Watership Down, a story that masquerades as an adventure tale about rabbits but is actually about so much more, the protagonist rabbits become ensnared in a place called Efrefa. It is a place built with one idea in mind: keep rabbits safe from men and predators. The problem is that this totalizing search for safety creates a place that is a prison in all but name. Everything is regimented and everyone lives in fear of the warren’s leader, General Woundwort. There is no freedom, no joy, ever present anxiety, and worst of all, tyranny. Sentries are everywhere. Agency has been obliterated. One character aptly says, “you can’t call your life your own and in return you have safety, if it’s worth having at the price you pay.”
Though this is a fictional story about rabbits, it is not exactly fantasy. We’re doing this to ourselves now. To be sure, illiberalism is a huge problem on the political right (see LP #17 “The New Right Menace”) and the right has its own safety-related pathologies like being willing to shred the Bill of Rights in the face of terrorism and a general disposition towards a Fortress America mentality, but these will be addressed in a later essay in this series. Today’s essay is about how parts of the left are using the rhetoric of safety to justify their own rising illiberalism.
The left tells us that, to be safe from COVID, we have to tolerate school closures, mask mandates, and travel restrictions. Even now, with amazingly effective vaccines easily available, with the vaccinated overwhelmingly experiencing asymptomatic or mild cases, as long as there are non-zero risks, normalcy cannot come back.
In Watership Down, the Efrefan police state meant to ensure safety falls hardest on the does and smaller bucks. In our own world too safetyism quite predictably falls hardest on those who aren’t allowed to back talk: children and service workers. These ‘little people’ are the ones who have no choice but to suffer the consequences of others’ zero-risk mentality.
School closures have been a disaster for underprivileged children, and they’re still happening. Flint, Michigan’s schools even now are going to fully remote. Even with schools mostly open, being forced to quarantine for being a close contact continues to disrupt kids’ schooling. Meanwhile, children continue to be required to wear masks in school even though COVID poses only a very small risk to children and even though there is little evidence that cloth masks actually work. The leftists in local governments and teachers’ unions who have fought for these policies in the name of safety are responsible for this. Joe Biden is not the face of the Democratic Party right now. The face of the Democratic Party is a child behind a mask.
Meanwhile, when those local government and teachers’ union leaders go to dinner, they don’t need to wear masks but the waiters do. Across huge swathes of public life, we now have a two-tiered society with the paying customers getting to show their faces, but the help having to wear masks. As in Orwell’s Animal Farm, all are equal but some are more equal than others. The class politics of this masking regime are as obvious as they are offensive.
It is not just the masking though. COVID has shown that the political left has more of an authoritarian streak than they’d like to admit. In a recent poll, 59 percent of Democrats said they would support the government requiring unvaccinated people to stay confined their homes, 48 percent said they would support fining people for questioning the efficacy of vaccines on social media, and -scariest of all- 29 percent would even support taking people’s children away from them if they refuse to get vaccinated. The authoritarian malice in that last one in particular is astonishing.
Nor is the left’s safety-justified illiberalism confined to COVID. Many of the pathologies around speech, identity, and cancel culture are also built on safety-oriented rhetorical foundations. As John McWhorter has pointed out, this kind of talk is not just overgeneralizing, it’s also extremely patronizing. Moreover, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukanioff have written about extensively, this safetyism creates a certain kind of fragility that is actually quite harmful to young people. What’s more, once people perceive ‘safety’ to be rhetorical trump card, those who want to silence their opponents run to claims of jeopardized safety as their go-to weapon and so there’s another avenue by which safetyism promotes authoritarianism.
Perhaps the most stifling aspect of all of this is that, should one voice dissent to any of this, the denunciation can be swift and often merciless. This may not be state-sponsored censorship, but it is still deeply illiberal. If you have not read it yet, take the time to read Anne Applebaum’s The New Puritans. It is a chilling but spot-on accurate description of how institutions become Efrefas. There is a reason that a 2020 poll found that people who are very progressive were the group least afraid to share their political views; majorities of every other political persuasion feel like they cannot say what they think. People feel that there are ideological sentries everywhere. That’s an Efrefa of the mind.
The best way to understand all of this safetyism in these various realms is to see it not as an outgrowth of thinking rooted in tradeoffs but rather as rooted in the politics of vibes. Many of the most ideological leftists want the United States to have more solidarity vibes and so for them, school closures, masking, and other COVID precautions are not coming from a careful cost-benefit analysis but rather from an ironclad commitment to a maximalist understanding of solidarity. This is why they have such difficulty articulating an off-ramp from COVID mandates. Short of COVID zero (which won’t happen), any movement away from COVID precautions does imply some non-zero amount of movement away from solidarity vibes, but if you’ve made a god out of solidarity and safety-first is your Lord’s Prayer, that feels like blasphemy.
We should engage in that blasphemy though. We should think in tradeoffs rather than vibes and we should dissent from this idea that safety has to always come first at whatever expense to everything else. Safety is important but it is not a golden value that should override all other values. Rather, it is a value that exists in trade-offs with other values. Safety matters but so too does liberty. So too does education. So too do all the little joys that come with normalcy. Some amount of COVID precautions once made sense, especially before vaccines were widely available, and private businesses have the right to implement vaccine mandates if they so choose, and everyone should obviously get vaccinated. But, now that vaccines are widely available and have been for months, restraining people’s freedoms is not justifiable. At this point, people should be allowed to make their own risk assessments. Colorado Governor Jared Polis’ message of ‘once you’re vaccinated, you’re done’ should be the way Democrats talk about COVID. His message that, though we don’t want anything bad to happen to the unvaccinated, at this point, they’ve made their choices and they are on their own, is the message that many very normal, non-sociopathic people want to hear, but a lot of leftists reject out of hand any kind of ‘you’re on your own’ messaging because that’s anti-solidarity and so, unfortunately, very little of Blue America is following Polis’ lead.
As for the safetyism around speech and identity, many of the language shifts that have taken place are very good actually. Racial minorities and LGBT people are subject to a lot less verbal abuse than they used to be and that’s a good thing but, just to use one of many potential examples here, treating the term ‘pregnant women’ as some kind of bigotry is as ridiculous as it is censorious. Obviously, there are trans people who can get pregnant and obviously trans people deserve respect and equal treatment, but the language policing around something as inoffensive and quotidian as ‘pregnant women’ is overwrought, to put it mildly.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that all this safetyism isn’t actually progressive. Safetyism over the last two years has produced an educational outcome that is hyper-inequitable. How progressive is that? Safetyism has led to a masking regime where the little people have to remain masked while their ‘betters’ get to show their faces. How progressive is that? Safetyism stifles dissent, strengthens authority, hardens inequalities, and curtails individuals’ agency. How progressive is any of that?
Safety first is another way of saying that no risk is acceptable, but progress requires change and change implies risk. We can’t have an open, individualistic, freewheeling, genuinely progressive society and also have a safety-obsessed society. There is something precious about the open, liberal society. Giving that up for safety, creating an America-sized Efrefa, is not only stupid, it’s cruel.
Libertarians have opposed that from the beginning. Progressives should join them in that. At the beginning of COVID, it was fashionable to say that no one is a libertarian in a pandemic. Well, nearly two years later, with the right descending into anti-vaxxer nuttery and the left going in this draconian direction, it is not difficult to see why political independence and libertarianism are on the up and up.
It’s time for progressives to do an about-face and work with libertarians in ending mandates related to COVID and more generally in promoting liberty even at some non-zero cost to safety. It’s time to be done with school disruptions. It’s time to let businesses like airlines do whatever they want with masking. It’s time to relax cancel culture safetyism. It’s time to be done with travel restrictions. It’s time be done canceling events. It’s time to be done with mask mandates. It’s time to put safety in its place, as one of a mix of values but not the chief value.
It’s time to escape from Efrefa.