‘Freedom,’ Florida and the Delta Variant Disaster is a scales-drop-from-your-eyes translation of Right-speak by Paul Krugman. The New Right-speak of pro-COVID slave state governors like DeSantis Man, Abbott, et al, is virtually indistinguishable from aristocratic ideology, the idea that they are part of a privileged ruling class, or a form of government controlled by such an elite;  knowing, as a result of being a ruling elite that one can do and be anything one wishes to do or be.

How is it, I wondered last weekend, that Republicans can keep incommensurate ideas in their heads?

Pro-Trump and Never Trump Vaccines. 

"States Rights!" "Fifty little laboratories of innovation." No interference from the federal government! Order of preference: local government, state government, federal government. The bigger the badder. That's one cluster of traditional Right-thought. 

Pro-business is another. They made an exception to Bigger is Badder for Big Business. "What's good for General Motors is good for America." Cut corporate tax rates so that some big businesses actually pay nothing. Run America more like a business! Cut federal regulations! EPA--BAH! Oh, Private Business, you want to mandate masks on its shop floor? Now feel the long arm of Big Brother from the state house stopping you! I'll just sign this regulation prohibiting that. This is your guv'ner speaking!   "Don't soak the rich!" So 46-1 paid $750 in income tax. 

So you have those two strains of thought in traditional conservatism.New Right governors however sign executive orders stamping out local governments ability to act on mandating masks for schools, for example. And they use traditional Right-speak to do it! "The federal government has no power to dictate mask policy in Florida." DeSantis Man actually said that. He is correct! 46-1 thought he could impose lockdowns, "What the president says goes", until it was pointed out to him that for considerations of federalism he couldn't. Biden can't either. All the federal government can do is issue "guidance" and "recommendations". DeSantis Man, of course, knows this but raises the non sequitur of Big Brother invading States Rights while he acts as Big Brother in Tallahassee! 

…when people on the right talk about “freedom” what they actually mean is closer to “defense of privilege” — specifically the right of certain people (generally white male Christians) to do whatever they want.

Not incidentally, if you go back to the roots of modern conservatism, you find people like Barry Goldwater defending the right of businesses to discriminate against Black Americans. In the name of freedom, of course…

Once you understand that the rhetoric of freedom is actually about privilege, things that look on the surface like gross inconsistency and hypocrisy start to make sense.

Why, for example, are conservatives so insistent on the right of businesses to make their own decisions, free from regulation — but quick to stop them from denying service to customers who refuse to wear masks or show proof of vaccination? Why is the autonomy of local school districts a fundamental principle — unless they want to require masks… It’s all about whose privilege is being protected.

The reality of what the right means by freedom also, I think, explains the special rage induced by rules that impose some slight inconvenience in the name of the public interest…

Anyway, as you watch DeSantis invoke “freedom” to escape responsibility for his Covid catastrophe, remember, when he says it, that word does not mean what you think it means.