In April, the New York Times ran a breathless article praising Michigan’s Democratic governor. “Gretchen Whitmer Isn’t Backing Down,” said the headline. The authors celebrated Whitmer for insisting on rigid COVID-19 lockdown measures despite passionate criticism from many residents of her state.
Whitmer told the Times something interesting. “Honestly every ounce of energy I have is being put into protecting people and saving lives in Michigan,” she said. “I’m not thinking about politics.”
It’s possible that Whitmer — whose state is in flames and whose lockdown policies likely contributed to the spike in suicides caused by unemployment — actually believes her own hype. She is a classic case of what C.S. Lewis might have called a benevolent tyrant: an oppressor who believes she is helping the oppressed. Whitmer might really think of herself as a saintly hero doing her part to save humanity.
This is the worst kind of tyranny. Near the end of his career, after World War II was done, Lewis wrote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”
This line has been circulated recently as Americans have chafed under ever-more burdensome regulations based on ever-more tenuous arguments about COVID-19. It never seems to occur to people like Gretchen Whitmer that if their orders are in violation of the Bill of Rights, then the argument that they are “for the public good” is actually a shameless irrelevancy.
Lewis understood this, which is why he wrote that “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Well-meaning tyranny is not simply a misapplication of good principles. To the contrary: self-righteous, benevolent tyranny is based on fundamentally mistaken principles which contradict the most basic beliefs of every free society.
Free nations — the kind of nation that both Britain and the U.S. are supposed to be — are governed by popular sovereignty. This is the idea that what the people consider good is what the state will do. Benevolent tyrannies, on the other hand, are based on the idea that what the state deems good is what the people must do.
This concept, which stood at the center of Lewis’s political philosophy, even shaped his beloved children’s literature. Narnia’s famous White Witch is the ultimate tyrant, because she would rather rule over a kingdom of lifeless statues than lose her own grip on control: “I was the Queen,” she insists in The Magician’s Nephew. “They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?”
COVID-19 tyranny has been a deadly disaster in terms of outcomes. Thousands are dead in New York nursing homes after Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration ordered them filled with COVID-positive patients. Suicide rates are mounting at an alarming pace, and we have yet to feel the full force of economic devastation that will surely result from the lockdown orders.
But horrific as the financial consequences and death toll have been, they are not the real problem with Coronavirus tyranny. The real problem, as Lewis knew, is the premise of the thing: the presumption that “leaders” (many of them unelected, like Dr. Fauci) may determine which outcomes are righteous without accountability to the people whose good they claim to be seeking.
Even if the lockdowns have saved lives, which experts insist they have, they have undermined the very foundations of our republic. They were based on an idea that is antithetical to liberty: the idea that politicians, and not citizens, have the last word on what is good.
As Lewis also knew, once that idea is accepted there is no end to how far our benevolent tyrants will go in the interest of our own “safety.” For the world is fallen, and the death from which we are hiding will find us in the end.
Lewis said in “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948): “It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.”
If we let them, our benevolent tyrants will use our fear of that certainty to make us into stone statues, frozen in a paralysis of self-preservation, forever.
More from Spencer Klavan: C.S. Lewis On Social Engineering: The Leftist Effort To Reprogram Your Mind
Spencer Klavan is host of the Young Heretics podcast and assistant editor of the Claremont Review ofBooks and The American Mind. He can be reached on Twitter at @SpencerKlavan.