The late Sage of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken, once wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Polling suggests that America’s governors and mayors have done the terrified, beaten-down people’s bidding after saturation media coverage of panic-inducing epidemiological modeling made Americans strangely docile.

If a poll released by Zogby Analytics on April 10 is to be believed, a supermajority of likely voters are fine with the lockdowns -- and perhaps the harsh un-American tactics -- used by states and localities to secure compliance with their emergency fiats aimed at the Chinese novel coronavirus that causes the occasionally deadly disease COVID-19.

Sixth Avenue near Rockefeller Center almost deserted last week (YouTube screen grab, cropped)

According to the polling firm, social distancing policies enjoy bipartisan support, while 84 percent of “likely voters at least somewhat support federal, state and local governments telling Americans that they can’t go to work to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.” The older you are, the more likely you are to support the lockdowns. Only 889 likely voters were polled.

Even if we assume the poll results reflect reality, they are almost three weeks old; the survey ran from March 24 through 26.

Death forecasts since then have been drastically revised downward and the public mood seems a little less bleak.

Peak Fear is probably behind us.

Three weeks ago, re-opening the country was barely on the radar as the nation attempted a partial trial run of the Green New Deal and do-gooder snitches started turning America into East Germany. Back then Americans, shocked and awed into becoming couch potatoes, were still struggling to figure out how to wear face masks to the grocery store, if only they could find them.

Most of us hadn’t figured out yet that the method of counting COVID-19 deaths adopted during this pandemic had been corrupted by politics, designed to maximize the COVID-19 body count. Nor did many know about the relative arbitrariness of the death certification process itself that predates the virus by many years. (See my April 9 American Thinker column, “The CDC Confesses to Lying About COVID-19 Death Numbers”)

But today, searching for a way out of the lockdown and reopening America is being widely discussed, in part because President Donald Trump and other public figures, including governors and local leaders, have begun talking about it in earnest. Even law-and-order conservatives have been appalled at reports of heavy-handed actions by overzealous police officers who have been saddled in many jurisdictions with poorly drafted enforcement instructions.

My guess is support for our collective national suicide attempt and the sick coercive egalitarianism behind locking up everyone for the benefit of a vulnerable sliver of the population has been steadily falling off since the Zogby poll was conducted. Since then, joblessness has been shooting up, businesses large and small have been collapsing, and people have started thinking long and hard about what the future holds. (See my March 27 American Thinker column, “Dictatorship of the Immunocompromised?”)

Now it is time to take the country back.

Don’t accept the silly argument I keep hearing that it is too difficult to determine who “the vulnerable” are in order to isolate them and let Americans get back to work. Politicians wrote their emergency edicts, some of which are incredibly detailed, quickly, not wanting to be blamed if mass death followed. Figuring out who the people are who still need to be shielded from the Chinese contagion and balancing competing interests in society while making a plan for the liberation of the country has to be easier than policing an America that has been turned into a minimum-security prison.

It is time to turn the pain for despotic politicians up to 11, to borrow a phrase from This Is Spinal Tap (1984). Send emails, melt down telephone switchboards at all levels of government, visit lawmakers, write letters to the editor, make videos on social media, and in general make your views known. Put pressure on politicians, including, yes, President Trump, who despite his strong leadership has inexplicably surrendered so much of his bully pulpit to unelected bullies like Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The politicians are listening and they’re beginning to get worried. They took draconian steps because it’s what they thought you wanted.

Now you need to correct that impression if you want your God-given freedoms back.

Matthew Vadum is an independent investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. and author of Team Jihad: How Sharia-Supremacists Collaborate with Leftists to Destroy the United States and Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.