Actually, I wouldn't have guessed at the eviction moratorium, so it was interesting that that was the chosen example. If that's the kind of thing in question then clearly this is a fundamental difference in perspective on
where things started and have been, so differences in opinion on
where they're going will probably be impossible to bridge without addressing that, in much the same way that if someone's sailing South from the US and tells me they're going to keep on going that way in order to visit the Arctic, we're going to need to sort some things out before understand what's going on—did they mean Antarctic? Do they know something I don't? Are they just very confused? Hard to say.
And yes, of course I suspected that was the case. But now I know. And this wasn't some kind of ploy—given my understanding of American history I genuinely do not know what someone (you) might have meant by "abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms". The pandemic response measures seems basically normal to me, in the context of how the US usually operates, in practice. Mild and tame, even. Progress we gain in fits and starts, regressions here and there, often pretty terrible for long stretches of time. Liberty-limiting measures during emergencies, including other pandemics, are typical. We evidently didn't abandon the project of liberal democracy any of those dozens of other, often worse, times when liberty's been more restricted and even heading toward, in the moment, being further restricted, if that project remains as something that can yet be abandoned, so what should I think is meant by that claim? It's either that the writer has a different understanding of the lay of the land, so believes all the above context is incorrect (why? Perhaps we've read entirely different history books? Who knows), or knows something about what's going on, that I don't. It looks like it's the former—unless the eviction moratorium was a bad example of the kind of thing you meant.