The New Parasitic Leviathan

 In March 2020, Britain embarked on a novel and experimental policy in order to respond to a pandemic respiratory virus

• dubbed lockdown
• This was the policy that was dubbed lockdown, a collection of measures consisting of unprecedented interventions to radically reduce the number of daily contacts that people had.
• The government effectively suspended Parliament and governed by emergency rule.

The Lockdown

• The message changed dramatically on March 23rd and the public was ordered to ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives.'
• To support this unprecedented policy, the British government launched a number of hard-hitting advertising campaigns stressing that Covid-19 posed a significant threat to all and the importance of individual behavior.
• Policy choices were presented as a science lead and incontrovertible set of policies to which there was no alternative.

The Changing State

• The post-war consensus state, which had been premised on the management of (limited) conflict of interests between social classes mediated through different political parties, social institutions such as unions and the provision of certain social goods, began to be wound down and a new relationship between the state and citizens initiated.
• Over the course of the last three decades successive British governments have increasingly sought to normalize a mode of governing in which legitimacy is derived from supposedly neutral objectives, arrived at technocratically, 'what works.'

The Parasitic Leviathan

• The British state has used Covid to consolidate a new form of governing, a post-demos state.
• One in which authority and legitimacy are derived not from the citizens but from sources that are external to the body politic, in this case that of scientific authority presented as an irrefutable source.

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-new-parasitic-leviathan/