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Dying? Once again I have to beat my usual drum. It's not dying. It was murdered in 2020 with the totalitarian response to covid.
I'm pretty onboard with the idea that most liberal democracies massively overreacted to Covid, but where I was in the United States was never as bad as the worst stories I was hearing in Europe and Canada. Like, at any time during the lock down I was legally allowed to drive wherever I wanted (when I heard that the UK was pulling people over and ticketing them for driving during the pandemic), and I was always legally allowed to walk my dog (when I heard that some places in Canada were preventing people from walking outdoors, even after we knew transmission outside wasn't very strong.)
I'm sure many parts of the United States had much worse responses, but I hardly feel like our reaction to Covid was "totalitarian" even if it was a massive overreaction. Maybe liberalism was killed in countries like the UK, but not here. Certainly, our reaction was less totalitarian than the WWI and WWII era war economy, and almost all of the power taken during Covid was ceded back. (Though of course, every crisis in the United States makes the government just that little bit more powerful and unaccountable. Whether it was 9/11 turning the country into a surveillance state, or a thousand other little things.)
The US was less bad than Europe or Canada in 2020. This is damning it with faint praise, because the US of 2020 was still something that'd have been unthinkable to the liberals of a decade ago. And much of why it was less bad is not because of liberalism, but because of approximately the political trend represented by the new Trump administration. When I say liberalism was murdered I don't just mean it's place in government but also it's place among the public, since "relatively centrist or centre-left but stridently anti-restriction" describes a tiny portion of the population (I should know, I'm stuck in it!). Centrists that were pro-restrictions are not, or ceased to be, liberals by the definition OP is using.
A concern for me is very much how political the whole situation was. I have no doubt that had a re-elected Trump been the one to institute those measures the left would have been screaming bloody murder about liberty (correctly). That they were willing to support the measures due in no small part to the fact that their political opponents (also correctly) objected was terrifying.
I subscribe to the ape theory of human politics, which indicates that the basic function of politics is to let coalitions define themselves as an ingroup, gain supremacy over the outgroup, and derive outsized resources at their expense. It's the only game our species knows how to play. That seems to have been on display here.
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