Covid 19 brought a massive challenge to the world. It was a chance for western civilization to shine. Did it? Some believe the west led the way to pandemic recovery by creating a vaccine that saved millions of lives and enabled society to return to normalcy. Others see the west violate its foundational principles of freedoms which are not supposed to be suspended in times of crisis or emergency. They saw unprecedented authoritarian measures that shook citizens to the core: Emergency powers, mandates, suspensions of freedoms, censorship, and more. Both groups feel driven apart by polarising opinions that amped up blame, accusations, and tribalism.

Western nations are based on representative government. The US Constitution was a model for other new republics as they set up their own governing documents. It created a representative government with limited powers, three separate branches, and checks and balances among them, in order to reduce the possibility of tyranny and protect the rights of as many people as possible. Meanwhile, some have discovered ways to circumvent limitations on their power, use the wealth of the country to enrich themselves, or use the country's might against the people themselves. As a 1914 debater named John Basil Barnhill put it — the line is often misattributed to Jefferson — "Where the people fear the government you have tyranny; where the government fears the people you have liberty."

An imperative feature of representative government is accuracy in capturing citizens' votes. Some are concerned with making it easy for all voters to vote. Some believe non-citizens should be allowed to vote. Some are concerned with the vulnerability of voting systems' technology. Others see problems with out-of-date voter rolls, the pitfalls of mail-in ballots, or outright fraud. It is essential in representative governments for people to feel confident that the people are indeed legitimately making the choice of who represents them, but doing that is easier said than done.

Europe in 1648 signed the Peace of Westphalia, which in part established each country's own sovereignty. The Monroe Doctrine had a similar function. The World Wars were spurred by nations forming alliances with each other to protect their national interests from outside threats. Today we see supra-national, global bodies such as the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization, which some believe are attempting to place themselves over sovereign nations, usurping the power of citizens to make their own choices for their nation. Others support the efforts of these think tanks and NGOs, viewing them as benevolent coordinators charting a course for the future and preparing for the next pandemic. Who should hold the power a crisis creates, and what does the history of emergency powers teach?

In 2006, a team including D. A. Henderson — the epidemiologist who had led the campaign that eradicated smallpox — reviewed the evidence on how to control pandemic influenza. The paper advised against quarantining exposed people who were not sick, against closing borders, and against prolonged school closures, and it concluded that communities come through an epidemic best when the normal functioning of the community is disrupted least. In 2020, governments across the West did close to the opposite. Those who defended the 2020 measures answer that COVID-19 was not influenza: it spread from people with no symptoms, it was far more lethal to the old, and for a year there was no vaccine. Those who objected answer that the 2006 conclusions were set aside without public argument, and that the burden of proof belonged to those departing from the standing advice. When expert advice is reversed in an emergency, who should have to justify the change, and where should that argument happen?

In 2008 the American Civil Liberties Union published a report on pandemic preparedness which argued that coercion is the wrong tool: force breeds distrust, drives sick people away from the care that would identify them, and falls hardest on the poor and on minorities. The report urged that a pandemic be treated as a public-health problem rather than a policing problem. In September 2021 the ACLU argued the other way. Its legal director David Cole and Daniel Mach wrote that far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further them — because they protect the people most at risk, including those who cannot be vaccinated, and because no one has a right to endanger others. Both positions were set out in the organization's own words, thirteen years apart. Was this an organization revising its view as the facts changed, or abandoning a principle when holding it became costly? What evidence would tell those two apart?