Is the world's draconian response to the coronavirus a panicked leap backward into indiscriminate annihilation — not only of national economic health, but also of its prerequisite, individual liberty?  Does it prepare a future path, give sanction and precedent to eventual dictatorial control by government, which could be usurped by a left-wing administration to promote the globalist agenda that Obama and the radical Democrat Party endorse?

Black swan events that inflict a planetary cost will continue to occur.  Clearly, this one has overwhelmed national governments.  George Soros himself could not have fantasized, in his habitual delirium, a more enticing catastrophic scenario for the installation of his grand plan — if power could only be wrested away from President Trump.  It puts other threats — 9/11, immigration invasion, and the weaponization of the institutions of government by the Deep State — into the shade!  None of them has involved a nationwide lockdown on freedom of movement.

We already see evidence of the left's attempt to use the pandemic to nurture the leftist agenda in Nancy Pelosi's dry run to stuff the proposed recovery legislation with her ideological pork.  Here are just a few of her demands, as reported on TownHall March 24, 2020, which she has "put on hold."

• Publication of corporate pay statistics by race and race statistics for all corporate boards
• A bail out on all current debt at the Postal Service
• Required early voting
• Required same day voter registration
• Provisions on official time for union collective bargaining
• Full offset of airline emissions by 2025
• Publication and reporting of greenhouse gas statistics for individual flights
• Retirement plans for community newspaper employees
• Federal $15 minimum wage
• Permanent paid leave
• Study on climate change mitigation efforts.  The provisions will apply to the companies and business rescued by the bill.

The nightmare is that once the left occupies the White House again (God forbid), the Constitution, already weakened by Obama, will be given the kiss of death, and our individual liberty will be forfeit.  The Democrats may govern by "States of Emergency," which could facilitate the transfer of some national legislative power to global institutions and NGOs, in pursuit of "[t]he hope ... that we will live more intelligently, thinking more about our future on the planet rather than the blithe destruction we indulged in for 50 years," as one witless left-wing journalist opined in an article entitled "COVID-19 can teach us to live more intelligently."  And that would be the thin edge of the wedge.  Within the next twenty to thirty years, national governments may emerge as the stewards and handmaidens of the global elite.  Italy and Iran are already beholden to China, which has infiltrated many nations of the Third World through its "infrastructure racket" that holds those nations as virtual hostages to Beijing.

Do Republican conservatives today suffer the same unenviable position Cicero found himself in during a civil war, which led to Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE?  Cicero's entire career was devoted to attempting a restoration of Rome's broken republican constitution, which was so influential in the writing of ours.  Yet he was overwhelmed by the cataclysm of events, caused by the consuls' greed for power.  Despite his forestalling the forces of tyranny for a while, they ultimately vanquished him.  Caesar Augustus (great-nephew of Julius) became emperor in 27 BCE.  The Republic was dead!

One could ague that the Roman Empire that ensued at least brought civilization to the barbaric world.  That is not the case with left-wing globalism! What it carries and delivers is third-world sanitation and the consequent spread of disease, immigrants from undemocratic cultures, and the loss of jobs to cheap overseas labor.  How can we benefit from universal welfare dependency, dictatorship by a cabal of central banks, bureaucratic bungling on a planetary scale, and the other symptoms of globalism?

Let's hope the president hesitates before the abyss.  Even if he does, that will not eradicate the threat to our individual liberty.  In particular, there is the anaesthetized condition of those who have already been immunized by the presiding culture to believe that equality is far more important than freedom.  Ironically, where a conservative government is instituting the lockdown, the left is suddenly up in arms, as demonstrated by this article in the woke Guardian.  And perhaps we may hope the Millennials are so ticked off by their imposed seclusion that they wake up to government's chief function after safety: the protection of individual liberty.  I fear, once the Left is in power, that their former hesitations will disappear.

If worse comes to worst, we can take comfort in Cicero's fate.  Although Mark Antony's wife Fulvia took Cicero's severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin in a final act of revenge against Cicero's power of speech, she failed to destroy his legacy.  Future generations, until the advent of Marx, revered his wisdom!  Conservative values and the love of liberty may be re-discovered by future citizens tired of being wage slaves of the global economy.