A Good Cause

I was part of a casual conversation about the social control measures that have been implemented in the fight against the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic as an alternative to a comprehensive testing infrastructure and regime. Well, as casual as this sort of conversation can reasonably be, anyway. To oversimplify, under discussion was the fact that support for things like mask mandates, enforced distancing and "shutting down the economy" tend to have greater support among Democratic politicians and voters than among their Republican counterparts.

The American Right more broadly has cultivated a distrust of and dislike (hatred?) for "Big Government," and often openly resists what they understand to be government "overreach" or impositions on their freedoms. And since nothing in life is free, this often comes at a cost. During the conversation, the point was made that there have been some high-profile deaths among Republican politicians, activists and the families thereof, generating a certain amount of schadenfreude among the group. This is, I suspect, only to be expected in an age of negative partisanship. But then the subject of regrets came up, and the schadenfreude went up a notch.

I pointed out that it was more likely that these people would be seen as heroes, people who gave their lives in order to live freely in the way that they would have wished to. Not the most popular thing that I could have said. Someone else responded that throwing one's (or someone else's) life away in the name of freedom was a fairly pointless exercise. While the whole thing was being debated, another thought came to me. Do people look at Canada, and decide that the American Revolution was a tragic, and senseless, waste of human lives? Okay, so Canada is still a part of the Commonwealth, and didn't formally adopt its own constitution until 1982 or thereabouts, but it's not like the descendants of the European settlers that founded the place found the British Crown to be this harsh overseas taskmaster for the entire time that the United Kingdom had more direct control over the place. With a population roughly the size of California, it ranks 17th in the world in terms of the size of its economy. Perhaps not amazing, but nothing to sneeze at, either. Would the United States really have been so poorly off had it followed Canada's trajectory? Sure, the United States would be different, were it more like Canada, but would it be so different?

The difference between someone who dies a hero in the cause of freedom and the person who is a fool or a chump is a very subjective thing. I don't pretend to understand how people make that distinction for themselves. But there does appear to be a distinction. And I suspect that part of it has a lot to do with whether or not someone agrees with (or has a use for) the freedoms being sacrificed for.

Generally speaking, the American Left has been more in favor of broad measures of social control than the Right, and this plays out in how people see those who have died of respiratory infections during the pandemic. Republicans view themselves (or at least claim to) as fighting for freedoms and liberties that Democrats generally have little use, and even less empathy, for. But I wonder how this same debate would have played out back in the 1700s. It's generally understood now that all of the American colonists were united in thinking that the Crown was tyrannical, but this conveniently glosses over the fact that there were large numbers of Loyalists around. Did they see the war differently than their Revolutionary neighbors? In some ways, they must have, but I wonder if conversations of the time had the same sense of schadenfreude at the other side's misfortunes.