After the WWII Western elites more or less started promoting the idea that all society problems came from "authoritarianism" which became associated with both extreme left and right. Supposedly we moved beyond it to a neoliberal society where everybody has equal rights, including minorities, and the government rules only by consensus.
Well, corona virus has finally put this fairy tale to rest and various governments demonstrated that they are perfectly capable and willing of wielding hard power when soft power fails. All this for a relatively mild virus with a mortality rate only slightly higher than that of a bad flu season. You can be sure that if smallpox made a comeback, they'd patrol the streets with machine guns and forcibly vaccinate everyone.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. That's why libertarian ideology doesn't really make sense. The state always used coercion when necessary and it always will. That's not the real problem, the problem is in whose interests it's used, we the people or the financial elites.








