NOTHING IS WORKING TO GET THE PEOPLE TO OBEY.

I alluded to popular discontent with the overweening governors and their ineffective and arbitrary executive orders last week; and my documentation of popular discontent with those policies has been a regular feature.

In case anyone has forgotten, elected officials are agents of the voters, and serve at the consent of the voters.  Rob Crisell offers the reminder.

As C. S. Lewis once wrote, “A tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive…. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Californians who are sick and tired of their governor’s torment are starting to ignore or flout his orders. Newsom would be wise to heed their criticism. If he doesn’t, two things will happen. One, his future in politics at the state and national level will grow ever dimmer. Two, even voters in deep-blue California will consider taking out their anger on Newsom’s fellow Democrats up and down the ballot in the next election.

All in all, both prospects would be very good for the country.

It's still on the opposition, whether as Republicans, Libertarians, or generic members of the leave-us-alone coalition, to run good candidates in those elections.  More importantly, the patience of the voters might be exhausted long before those by-elections.  Ben Shapiro recently moved to Tennessee, but there are still people stuck in California.

You and your family are capable of making the same decisions Cuomo, Garcetti, Newsom, Lightfoot and Adler do. You should be careful; you should engage in social distancing, mask up when in close proximity with others and generally avoid social gatherings involving those with preexisting conditions. But you can do all of these things and still live in a free society. Our politicians don't believe that, because our politicians have seen how easily so many Americans were willing to indefinitely suspend their freedoms out of trust in our authorities. Until the incentive structures change, our freedoms will continue to be throttled by people who have no problem exercising their own.

One need not be a COVID-19 skeptic in order to question whether the enthusiastic authoritarian streak revealed by those politicians can be curbed. The longer we tolerate it, the more our politicians will normalize their power grabs.

That toleration is at an end, according to Rick Moran.

So the governors, mayors, and other wannabe dictators post their edicts, tell people to obey, and they don’t. Now what? You depend on the army of social media squawkers to “tsk-tsk” and wag their fingers at the rebels. “Shame on you. Are you trying to kill your neighbor?” That may work with some people. It probably worked on a few citizens in 1776. Otherwise, not so much.

If you’re concerned about getting sick, wear a mask, keep your distance, and stay at home as much as possible. Those who aren’t worried about falling ill won’t. That’s how it is now and how it’s going to be until this cursed pandemic is over.

Long live the rebels.

Ethan Yang makes a similar point, although with a salient warning to the tyrants.

From a practical perspective, adhering to the rule of law is important because it is entirely possible and certainly preferable to uphold public health without undermining public trust in our institutions. Philosophically, the rule of law is important because governments that undermine or violate this principle will not exist for long.

Politicians across the country are slowly, in some cases aggressively, unraveling the rule of law through unwarranted exercise of power and poorly justified actions. From the exercise of power prohibited by state and federal constitutions, to blatant hypocrisy, to confusing and arbitrary laws, our system of good government is ailing. Lockdowns are the disease.

The solution is quite simple; end the lockdowns and adopt a strategy that does not encourage tyranny. If that’s too much, then at the very least follow the law and be consistent, especially if you were the one who advocated for it.

It's not the torment, necessarily, that makes the people restive. It's the combination of torment for the ruled but not from the rulers, that will go wrong.

As Jason Riley recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, many Americans are simply done with all of it.

“What’s going on is not simply hypocrisy but an infantilization of the American public,” Riley wrote. “There’s a widespread assumption among liberal elites that the rest of us are incapable of calculating risks and taking necessary precautions to ride out the pandemic, and it’s insulting.”

Plus:

“This is a form of mass civil disobedience like nothing the country has seen since the 1960s," Riley notes. “Some of it is born of Covid fatigue, to be sure. But the endless parade of politicians flouting their own rules surely has also played a role. It began shortly after the spring lockdowns and if anything has become more commonplace, even farcical.”

The paradox of civil disobedience, which Thoreau called the “true foundation of liberty,” is that it empowers those who lack power through peaceful non-compliance. Throughout history, it has proven an effective tool against injustice and the use of capricious and arbitrary power.

It starts with local law enforcement command reimagining their authority.

Pennsylvania Sheriff James Custer said Monday that he’s done with the Democratic Party because of its “unconstitutional” lockdowns and “socialist agenda.”

“It’s the shift in ideals of the current Democrat Party at the national level — the socialist agenda — and this is something that I had been considering for several months. It probably started back when the pandemic started,” the Fayette County sheriff told “Fox & Friends” when asked why he was abandoning the Democrats for the Republicans.

Custer also pointed to “the [lockdown] mandates coming down by the Democratic governors and of which we have one here in Pennsylvania that I feel are unconstitutional.”

“As the sheriff, it is my duty as a constitutional sheriff, to protect and serve, uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and [to oppose] these unconstitutional mandates being brought down on our citizens and being able to protect their rights and freedoms under the Constitution,” Custer continued.

When asked if he was also motivated to embrace the Republicans because of the prevalence of the defund the police movement in the Democratic Party, Custer said it was “a definite factor” and after being in law enforcement for 30 years he felt betrayed.

“Hey, this is not the what [c.q.] I signed up for,” he said.

That's a bit much for one package: it's true that the Democrats' bundle of lockdowns and wilding is probably not a good look in much of the country, but the challenge of lockdown refugees from the big cities bringing some of their woke politics with them is for another day. It's the reluctance of law enforcement officials to be the governors' muscle that matters today.

San Mateo County, California, was one of the first jurisdictions in the United States to fight the COVID-19 epidemic with sweeping restrictions on social and economic activity. It joined five other San Francisco Bay Area counties in issuing "shelter in place" orders on March 16, three days before Gov. Gavin Newsom made California the first state to impose a COVID-19 lockdown. San Mateo County Health Officer Scott Morrow's misgivings about reviving that policy are therefore especially striking. "I'm not sure we know what we're doing," Morrow confesses in a remarkable statement he posted on the San Mateo County health department's website this week.

"During the first Shelter in Place order, which I wholeheartedly endorsed, the virus was brand new and had the capability of spreading exponentially due to zero immunity and people's complete lack of awareness," Morrow says. The order "was very much consistent with my long-held views about the judicious use of power.…However, I very quickly rescinded my initial orders shuttering society and focused my new orders on the personal behaviors that are driving the pandemic, mainly limiting gatherings, using masks, social distancing, and adopting the State's framework on business capacity restrictions. Just because one has the legal authority to do something, doesn't mean one has to use it, or that using it is the best course of action. What I believed back in May, and what I believe now, is the power and authority to control this pandemic lies primarily in your hands, not mine."

When you see evidence that makes you reconsider your beliefs, you revise your beliefs.  Anthony Fauci might be too old to revise his beliefs, but I digress.

An increasing number of public health experts are questioning the wisdom of some of Newsom's new restrictions.

"Some of the things they're telling you not to do are incredibly low-risk," Emily Oster, a health economist at Brown University, told the Los Angeles Times. "When you are so strict about what people can do, they stop listening."

The arbitrary nature of the new stay-at-home rules has prompted other California sheriffs to say they won't be enforcing the governor's order.

"Compliance with public health orders is a matter of personal responsibility and not a matter of law enforcement," said Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes in a Saturday press releasing, stating that deputies under his command won't be dispatched to calls that only involve people violating stay-at-home orders.

Barnes said complying with public health recommendations like masks and social distancing is important, but that "policy makers must not penalize residents for earning a livelihood, safeguarding their mental health, or enjoying our most cherished freedoms."

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco offered even more colorful criticism of Newsom's order.

"These closures and stay-at-home orders are flat out ridiculous. The metrics used for closures are unbelievably faulty, are not representative of true numbers, and are disastrous for Riverside County," he said in a video criticizing the governor's "dictatorial" approach to the coronavirus, which has included threats to withhold state funds from non-compliant counties.

That's California. Law enforcement officials are looking the other way in other states as well. The sheriffs might not be saying it, but the punditry is. "The leftist elitists are continuously proving themselves to be tyrants who want to tell other people how to live but don’t live by those same rules."

That's where things could get ... interesting.

You'd expect Tomi Lahren to be a provocateur, and she is.

"I don’t think we are gonna put up with being treated like common criminals and deviants for opening businesses or heaven forbid, inviting nine people over to our homes," she said.

"I don’t think we are gonna put up with our tax dollars going to fund schools that aren’t in session or police departments whose officers are sent out to issue mask and gathering citations.

Meanwhile, actual crime and actual criminals run amok in the streets."Lahren added, "Enough having law enforcement agencies go do the bidding and dirty work for these tyrant mayors and governors while they dine in luxury and poo-poo all of us little people dumb enough to follow the rules, their rules, they don’t follow themselves."

"None of this seems right," she concluded. "None of it seems American, and none of it makes sense."

Federalist editor J. D. Davidson is thinking along similar lines.

A terrible injustice is being perpetrated against ordinary working people by elected officials who believe they can shutter entire industries and destroy people’s livelihoods with the stroke of a pen.

These often are the same leaders who don’t follow their own pandemic rules and guidelines, who believe that lockdowns and curfews and restrictions are for poor people and the working class, not elites like them. These are the same leaders who tacitly or openly approved of massive Black Lives Matter protests over the summer and fall, in some cases participating themselves in violation of Centers for Disease Control guidelines about gathering sizes. Such protests were okay, in their view, because they agreed with the politics at issue. But we all know what would happen if crowds gathered to protest, say, draconian lockdown orders.

Fortunately for us, because we are Americans and we live in a free country—a place governed by laws and not by men—we have a constructive way to express our rage and outrage: we can simply stop obeying these lawless edicts.

We can safely open our businesses and places of worship, and in so doing dare the tiny despots in the local health department or the mayor’s office to stop us. If enough of us take a stand, as a free people should do, the Garcettis and Newsoms and Cuomos will back down—and if they don’t, they can face mass protests, public outrage, and eventually the rebuke of the Supreme Court.

If ever there were a time for mass civil disobedience, it’s now.

Roger L. Simon concurs in the call for action.

[I]f these same patriotic people, known as the “deplorables,” are violently opposed, all bets are off. Civil disobedience will morph into civil war.

At first, however, my guess is this new (and more genuine) “resistance” will take three forms: 1. Mass and growing demonstrations; 2. Non-payment of taxes, threatening to bankrupt the national treasury since most of these people are hard-working and employed; 3. A general movement of what we might call John Galt-ism, after the character in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Vast numbers of our citizens will simply check out and return to their own farms, or versions thereof, like the Roman emperor Cincinnatus was said to have done.

This last has the capacity to simply grind the country to a halt since many of these same “deplorables” are the plumbers, electricians, firemen, farmers, heating and cooling repairmen, construction workers, assembly line workers, police, pilots, engineers, cable guys and girls and so forth, also the businessmen and women, that make society function.

The giant corporations, even Big Tech, can’t exist without them.

Nothing happens.

He, again, is bundling discontent with the election and the urban unrest with the rebellion against the ineffective shutdowns. To the extent that law enforcement doesn't cooperate with the shutdown orders, though, the other insurgency has a better chance of succeeding peaceably.  I wonder, for instance, what would happen if transportation workers, who rely on truck stops and eateries near the tracks to go for beans and hit the head, start marking off jobs in states where indoor dining isn't available.