America has never recovered from the shocks of 2020. It’s making us less free.

Muriel Bowser, the Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., had a problem. Dozens of students at the city’s downtown campus of George Washington University had been camping out for days, urging their school to divest from Israel to protest the killing of Palestinian civilians during the war in Gaza. Although Bowser had accurately labeled the protest as “peaceful,” Republicans on Capitol Hill, who’ve forged a modern brand of McCarthyism around campus unrest, summoned the mayor to a hearing to explain why D.C. wasn’t moving against a protest they consider antisemitic.

At 3 a.m. Wednesday, on the morning Bowser was scheduled to testify, dozens of helmeted D.C. riot cops rousted sleeping students from their tents, and those who didn’t comply quickly enough were pepper-sprayed — just the latest mockery of the notion that breaking up encampments is all about protecting student safety. By the time the sun rose, 33 demonstrators had been arrested, and the House GOP — having yet again proved the effectiveness of bullying in modern American politics — canceled Bowser’s hearing, their mission of stifling dissent already accomplished.

But Wednesday was kind of a landmark day for big-city Democratic mayors and the new zeitgeist of police-first tough love on streets that just four years ago were flooded with marchers demanding social justice instead of warrior cops. Here in Philadelphia, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s new administration closed off a section of the Kensington neighborhood plagued by drug abuse and homelessness and shooed reporters away from witnessing a sweep of the area. The press restrictions weren’t the only similarity to campus crackdowns; critics of Parker’s Kensington moves said outreach workers found police had already moved people out before they arrived to help.

America is changing, and if you take a step back, you can start to see when it started, and why. The convulsions we all experienced in 2020 — the lockdowns, layoffs, and other shocks triggered by COVID-19, the police murder of George Floyd that sent millions into the streets, and an attempted coup and Capitol Hill insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 — have created the zeitgeist for President Joe Biden to channel his inner Nixon and declare “dissent must never lead to disorder.”

Four years ago, Americans saw their established social orders teetering on collapse. Although school shutdowns and mask mandates roiled a society in which trust in government has been steadily declining since the 1960s, I’d argue that the major earthquake was the mass protests against Floyd’s murder and police brutality — and the backlash they sparked. The immediate reaction from conservatives terrified that their discredited hierarchies like white privilege or the patriarchy were under assault has been well-documented. It’s been channeled into shutting down anti-racism education in schools and banning LGBTQ books from schools.

On Wednesday, the same day as the sweeps of campus protesters and the homeless, a school board in rural Shenandoah County, Va., voted to undo some of that regressive right-wing’s psychic scars from 2020 by renaming two of its schools for racist Confederate heroes, Gen. Stonewall Jackson and a combo of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby. It felt like a dramatic exclamation point on a modern rebel movement that has a 50-50 chance of returning its own stonewall general and bearer of all its grievances, Donald Trump, to the White House in January.

But a less obvious aftershock is what’s now rattling America in the spring of 2024. Across an elite class of liberals, from the majority of elected Democrats to the presidents of our top universities, there has been virtually no defense of the values of a more fair and equal America for which an estimated 15 million to 26 million citizens marched four years ago this month. Instead, there is an almost universal desire to preserve their six-figure salaries, to make the messiness of the First Amendment go away, to cower in the face of right-wing bullying instead of fighting back.

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It wasn’t in some reactionary red state where troopers slammed a peaceful 65-year-old history professor and expert on Jewish studies expert to the ground and arrested her but at Dartmouth College in Biden-voting New Hampshire. It was in the Democratic bastion of Philadelphia, birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, that a student journalist was ordered by police to leave their own campus to not report on their encampment raid.

In New York City, voters still reeling from the convulsions of the COVID year, including a temporary spike in crime, in 2021 elected a conservative ex-cop mayor in Eric Adams. His latest budget found dollars for 2,400 new cops while keeping in the red city libraries, many of which now must close on the weekend. Adams’ new recruits will join a New York Police Department that increasingly acts like a rogue paramilitary force, ignoring routine city oversight, producing bizarre propaganda films, and shunning mainstream journalists to spout off on extreme-right channels like Newsmax.

This is the most liberal big city in America? Maybe it’s time to redefine liberal.

Many of us are in denial about our new authoritarianism. Sometimes it helps to hear from others who’ve lived in more repressive states. Journalist Zeynep Tufekci came here from Turkey in the 2000s and used to scoff at U.S. protesters who complained of a police state, but she’s not scoffing now. Writing this weekend in the New York Times, Tufekci said that “the harsh countermeasures of the last couple of weeks are counterproductive. But more than that, they are dangerous. Overreactions like this can lead to social breakdown — on both sides of the barricade.”

Tufekci’s piece rightly notes that this didn’t start yesterday. The jolts of Sept. 11, 2001, led not only to a new lingo in which those with differing political views are now branded as “terrorists,” but it sparked an unprecedented $7 billion spending spree on combat-grade gear for American police from Upper Manhattan to bucolic New Hampshire. Like the parable of Chekhov’s gun, the U.S. audience is watching these weapons deployed in Act Three, on our own citizens.

But 2020 seems the trigger for the current moment when law and order mean everything and constitutional rights mean nothing. The last four years have seen book banning go from the 20th-century history tomes to a daily newspaper headline, in a Handmaid’s Tale America where crossing state lines to get an abortion might be a felony. But for Democrats, the other key event of 2020 was that November’s election, when a mediocre showing by the party’s congressional candidates convinced its elite leaders the police reforms sought by millions of marchers were a political loser.

As even a scaled-back police reform bill failed in Congress, Democrats began electing candidates like Adams, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who responded to a couple of high-profile subway crimes heavily covered by Fox News by sending National Guard troops (initially with long guns) into stations, or like Philly’s Parker, who brought a return to stop-and-frisk policing and is hostile to so-called harm reduction methods for dealing with drug addiction.

Even as both the right and the so-called left in American politics keep moving right, liberal elites have shown they can be easily cowed. When awkward congressional testimony led to the ouster of presidents at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, both academic leaders like Columbia University’s Minouche Shafik and big-city mayors like D.C.’s Bowser were quick to call in riot cops to satisfy their McCarthyite inquisitors. Young voters being told — and rightfully so ― to fear a 21st-century dictatorship in Trump must wonder why the only real alternative is often these Neville Chamberlain-esque appeasers.

In this environment, liberty becomes a slippery slope. Earlier this month, on the global Press Freedom Day, the United States saw its ranking continue to fall. It’s now down to just 55th in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders, which criticized laws aimed at curbing U.S. journalists’ “access to public spaces, including barring them from legislative meetings and preventing them from recording the police.” As this summer’s political conventions, Republicans are fighting to keep any protesters as far from its Milwaukee delegates as possible, but now Democrats are trying to make key events virtual in order to silence dissent in Chicago. One can only guess how much further our press freedom ranking can sink in 2025. We’re already below Chile, Ivory Coast, and Belize.

We’ve been told again and again that U.S. democracy is on the line in 2024, and that’s turned out to be more true than we could have possibly imagined. The complicated and messy things at the heart of the fundamentally American Bill of Rights — free speech, press freedom, the right to assemble and voice dissent against the government — are vanishing before our very eyes, when they’re not dragged away by cops with riot helmets and clubs. But part of the problem, it turns out, is a November election where too many races will be choices between candidates with a too-narrow view of our civil and human rights and those who would crush them completely.

That is why there is still simply no choice but to elect Biden over Trump. There are two piles of issues in this election — the one where Trump is terrible and Biden is pretty good (climate change, abortion, labor rights) and the one that includes the Middle East, where Biden has been a rank hypocrite but Trump would be an even bigger disaster. And even in this low moment, there’s an argument for Biden that his presidency would offer a tiny, if shrinking, bubble of air to start working for a freer world to come. Four years after George Floyd, America itself is still fighting to breathe.

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