WASHINGTON—In Lansing, Michigan late last week, a band of protesters gathered on the steps of the state capital building brandishing assault rifles, Trump banners and signs saying “End the Lockdown.”

Similar scenes played out across the country over the weekend, from Austin, Texas to Richmond, Virginia. In Denver, Colorado, two health-care professionals in scrubs and respirator masks stood silently in an intersection during red lights, trying to remind protesters what they were inviting by demanding an end to the coronavirus isolation measures. “This is a free country,” a woman leaning out of a pickup truck shouted at one of the counterprotestors. “You go to work, why can’t I go to work too?” she demanded.

The short answer to her question is that those who wear scrubs to the office are saving people’s lives during a pandemic. For most others, whose jobs have been disrupted by the lockdown, they are endangering people’s lives by leaving the house.

That apparently is a distinction not worth making to the protesters, who under the banner of “freedom” want a quick end to social-distancing measures. The small but vocal right-wing protest movement in the United States can sometimes seem indifferent to what their demands will cost in human lives — opposing gun control in the face of shooting deaths or fighting public health coverage in the face of millions uninsured. But it’s never so baldly resembled a death cult as it does fighting for the freedom to contract a deadly virus, and to spread it.

“Live Free or Die” was a popular slogan on signs at the recent protests. In this context, the familiar rallying cry might better be phrased as “live free to die, and to kill.” Give me liberty so I can spread death.

A series of recent polls show these protesters are a minority. According to a Pew Research Center survey last week, a strong majority of Americans were worried that social distancing restrictions would be lifted too soon. Less than a third were concerned they would be left in place too long.

But among the minority voicing support for the protestors is President Donald Trump. “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA,” Trump tweeted Friday as protests in those states were underway. “Some governors have gone too far,” Trump said Sunday at his press briefing. Of the protestors, he said, “I’m with everybody.”

Wanting a quick end to social distancing is nothing new for Trump, but blaming governors for prolonging lockdowns was a change from last week, when he’d suggested they were bystanders in the process because the president has “total authority.” The constitution of the United States differed with him on that point, and so did the guidelines to reopen the country his administration released by the end of last week. “You’re going to call your own shots,” he told governors on a conference call outlining the guidelines.

That appears now to have opened the door for Trump to attack governors for not opening their states immediately.

Virtually everyone here would like to see society, and the economy, reopened. But the virus is still rampaging — New York City, hit worst and earliest, may have just seen the peak of its death curve; bodies are piling up in emergency rooms in Detroit; Washington, D.C. is converting a convention centre into a makeshift hospital in anticipation of an infection peak not projected to come until summer.

Trump’s guidelines, alongside the recommendations of experts at Harvard and the Centers for Disease Control, suggest two conditions for reopening: a falling case load for at least two weeks, and widespread testing to track and trace the presence and possible re-emergence of the virus.

Trump is insisting there are enough tests to begin reopening, and has said repeatedly that states have access to enough tests. Many governors have insisted that’s not the case. Larry Hogan, the Republican Maryland governor who is chair of the National Governor’s Association, says Trump’s contention is “absolutely false.”

The U.S. has ramped up testing since last month: now, about 150,000 people per day are being tested nationwide. That’s still fewer, per capita, than are tested in Canada, and well short of the 500,000 tests per day Harvard researchers suggest would be needed for an early-May reopening. Those researchers also suggest the rate of positives showing up in tests (now about 20 per cent in the U.S.) would need to be roughly halved before meeting international guidelines for lifting lockdowns.

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Most governors and local authorities are pushing back against calls for an early reopening — since such a move is likely to kill more people and backfire by hurting the economy even more in the long term.

The protestors, for their part, either don’t believe the risks exist or don’t care — there has been a strain of right-wing thought since the beginning of this crisis that suggests mass death is worth it to resist any restrictions on ordinary life.

Perhaps this is also about another kind of test — a test of American democracy. Will it resist the impulse to risk mass death in the name of a conception of liberty that places the desire to buy garden seed on demand above the protection of life and health? So far, the vast majority of Americans side with continuing the lockdown. President Trump, joining the protestors, wants to put their resolve to the test.

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