By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Ramesh Thakur's book, Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power.

The evidence for the effectiveness of lockdowns is underwhelming; for the harm they cause to lives, livelihoods, mental health, and civil liberties is overwhelming. Neither claim needs further substantiation for readers of this site.

Still the relentless march of lockdown folly continues, causing a growing sense of helplessness and despair. What has become clear over the course of the year is just how impervious the lockdownistas are to data, evidence, reason, and - yes - even science. Part of the explanation, I suspect, is that Western democracy has been captured by self-absorbed careerists who occupy all key positions in political parties.

They have no interest in using power to advance any particular vision or achieve lofty social purposes, which is why the Australian prime minister can reject calls to defend free speech with the dismissive comment that it never created a single job. Nor do many have any experience outside of politics, putting comprehension of the real-world consequences of their decisions beyond them.

Even so, the ease with which so many well-established democracies have succumbed to pandemic fear-mongering, and surrendered freedoms hard-won over centuries, is astonishing. The sickening video of a pregnant Mum handcuffed in the presence of her child for posting on Facebook about a peaceful, socially-distanced protest in a regional town in Victoria, produced victim-shaming by fellow-Victorians alongside condemnation by most other Australians.

The most eloquent defence of traditional liberties has come from Lord Jonathan Sumption - for example, in the Cambridge Freshfields Annual Law Lecture delivered on 27 October. But so far even his erudite voice and elegant reasoning are just cries in the wilderness.

The criminalisation of the right to protest, and the advance of the totalitarian state that intrudes into the most sacred and intimate personal spaces of individuals, families, and businesses, has been backed by the ruthless deployment of the coercive apparatus of the state. I did not expect to see such scenes of confrontation between police and ordinary citizens - not militants - in Australia or Britain in my lifetime.

The failure of institutional bulwarks against the assault on freedoms has been just as dispiriting. One after another, parliaments, political parties, media, and the judiciary have abdicated their duty to hold the executive to account. The net result of the grotesquely inept, bumbling, and deeply authoritarian response of Boris Johnson to Covid-19 is the biggest attack on the lives and liberties of the freeborn English in centuries.

What then is to be done? I suggest one option is to channel our inner Gandhi against policemen indulging their inner bully and politicians indulging their inner tyrant.

Born after India's independence, I grew up with the saying that the reason the sun never set on the British Empire was that even God wouldn't trust an Englishman in the dark. In The Government and Politics of India, I noted that the political legacies from the Raj include civil disobedience as a legitimate and results-oriented technique of political protest.

"Civil resistance" encompasses marches, demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, and collective non-cooperation to express opposition to policies and state authorities without inflicting physical violence. This is both principled and prudent.

Earlier this year, David Shor, a data analyst for the Democratic Party, was fired for tweeting a link to a scholarly paper showing that nonviolent protests have been more politically effective in redressing black minority grievances in the US than violent protests. The study, by Princeton University's Omar Wasow, looked at black-led protests from 1960-72.

Wasow showed that nonviolent activism against state and vigilante repressi...