It is simply breathtaking to consider what kind of limitations on our most cherished freedoms we came to accept during the last virus scare. More disturbing still is the fact that the consequences will not disappear merely because the emergency has passed. The institutional memory of what was done—and, perhaps more importantly, what people were prepared to tolerate—will remain with us for many years.
My focus here is less on the personalities currently generating the latest political hoopla. Personalities come and go. The more important question is what happened underneath them: the dynamics that made extraordinary restrictions possible across entire societies with remarkably little resistance from the institutions that were supposed to prevent precisely this kind of thing.
The United States was not some isolated aberration. The entire developed world, and quite a considerable part of the less developed world, reacted to the virus with measures that would have been almost unimaginable only a few years earlier. Some governments went further than others. But the underlying pattern was remarkably similar.
Austria was no exception.
In my home country, we reached the point of imposing a vaccination mandate backed by potentially severe consequences on people who did not want to serve as test subjects for a substance that, at the time, had not accumulated anything resembling the long-term evidentiary record we normally demand before making a medical intervention compulsory.
There were federal ministers appearing on live television to explain that the right to remain on Austrian territory was not absolute—and that conditions might therefore apply even to people who had been Austrian since birth.
Think about that for a moment.
There were also prominent professors of constitutional law appearing on television to argue that fundamental individual rights could effectively be set aside in the name of some undefined conception of public safety.
This is where the personalities become almost irrelevant.
The question is not whether one minister was foolish, whether one professor was wrong, or whether one particular government overreacted. The question is how an entire intellectual and institutional environment could arrive at the point where fundamental rights were treated not as boundaries on government power, but as permissions that government could suspend whenever circumstances were sufficiently alarming.
That distinction matters.
A constitution is not particularly useful if fundamental rights exist only until somebody declares an emergency. Rights that can simply be waived when the government believes public safety requires it are not really rights in the meaningful sense. They are temporary concessions.
And once a society becomes accustomed to that idea, the precedent does not conveniently disappear when the emergency does.
My grandfather had seen the Kaiser.
He had also seen the Nazis.
My father had seen the Nazis.
They belonged to generations that understood, from direct experience, where the gradual erosion of constitutional restraints can eventually lead. They knew that the destruction of freedom does not necessarily begin with somebody announcing that freedom is being abolished. It can begin with exceptions. With emergencies. With good intentions. With arguments that this particular restriction is necessary, temporary and different.
Then the exception becomes normal.
I cannot know what either of them would have said if they had witnessed what Austria became during those years.
But I know enough about the Austria they loved to understand that they would have been appalled.
And I am ashamed.