Every Catastrophe Is Paid For in Liberties, and the System Is Glad to Collect

Catastrophes will happen. That is not a prediction about any particular one; it is a statement about a long enough timeline. Wars, pandemics, financial collapses, and whatever the climate has in store are not risks to be ruled out but events to be scheduled. The question I want to ask is not how to prevent them, which is a different post, but what they do to us politically when they come.

The answer, consistently, is that they cost us liberties, and the liberties do not come back.

The Pattern

Look at what happened to the rights of citizens in almost any country after a war, an attack, or an emergency of any kind. Surveillance that was unthinkable becomes routine. Detention without trial gets a legal basis. Speech that was protected becomes incitement. Emergency powers are granted for the duration and the duration turns out to be indefinite. Some of the rights are restored afterwards, partially, decades later, after a long struggle. Many are not.

This is not a peculiarity of bad governments. It is what good governments do too, under pressure, with public support, for reasons that sound compelling at the time. The rights we hold were won over hundreds of years of argument, revolt, and litigation. They are lost in an afternoon, by a vote nobody dares oppose.

Now Scale It Up

Run the thought experiment with the catastrophes actually available to us.

A limited nuclear exchange somewhere in the world. Not the end of civilisation; a few cities. What happens to democratic rights in your country, which was not even hit? Every state on earth declares an emergency. Movement is restricted, communications are monitored, dissent about the response becomes treason. And this time the emergency has no end date, because the weapons still exist.

Or take climate change on the scale that the pessimistic projections describe. Regions become uninhabitable, tens of millions move, food systems fail in places, and states that were open close their borders and their politics at the same time. Then the states begin to behave toward one another as autarkies do: hoarding, blocking, treating every neighbour as a threat. That is a world in which representative democracy has no time for representation, and says so.

I have written about how the climate emergency specifically will be used against democracy. The point here is broader: it does not matter which catastrophe arrives. The political system will respond to any of them by taking the same things away.

Why the System Is Glad to Collect

This is the uncomfortable part. Governments are not reluctant about this. They are relieved.

An organisation with power wants more of it and fewer constraints on its use. That is not cynicism about individuals; it is what organisations are. In ordinary times the constraints hold, because removing them is visible and unpopular. A catastrophe is the one moment when removing them is popular, and the system takes the opportunity every time. Read the record of any emergency and you will find the wish list that had been sitting in a drawer for years, suddenly enacted in a week.

So the representative system is not a neutral party to be steered through the crisis. It is a participant with an interest, and its interest is in the outcome that costs us the most.

The Boost We Would Need

If the catastrophes are coming and the system will use each one to contract our rights, the only defence is to enter the catastrophe with democratic foundations strong enough to survive it. Not a few extra safeguards; a substantial boost in how much the public actually controls, so that the emergency powers have to be asked for from the people who will live under them, rather than granted by the people who will wield them.

How you achieve such a boost from inside the current system I genuinely do not know. The system is not going to vote itself weaker. Every existing mechanism for expanding public control runs through the legislature, and the legislature is the body that benefits from the crisis. We are asking the fox to reinforce the henhouse before the winter.

What I do know is the shape of the answer. A regime whose foundations are far more democratic than ours, in which the large decisions are made directly by the people who bear their consequences, does not have the same incentive to trade rights for power during an emergency, because the people voting are the people who would lose the rights. That is not a guarantee. Publics panic too. But a public that panics can recover its judgement and reverse the decision, while an institution that has acquired a power almost never gives it up.

The Timing Problem

Everything above is an argument for moving before the catastrophe, and that is exactly when nobody wants to move. Emergencies are when systems change, and emergencies are when the change goes the wrong way. Calm periods are when the change could go the right way, and calm periods are when nobody sees the need.

I do not have a solution to that. I have only the observation that the rights we are most proud of were won in the aftermath of disasters, by people who had just watched what a disaster does to a free society, and were determined not to watch it again. We are due another lesson of that kind. It would be better to learn it in advance.