Public health measures that you disdain aren't popular where they are because your neighbors want to step on your neck they are popular because people who know more than you do know they on net save lives.
When there is nothing to be gained by such measure support will blow away like dust in the wind. There is no battle for you to fight.
If anything, politicians have vastly under-managed the situation, timidly afraid of offending constituents' offense at any inconvenience, and only partially at best following sound science.
In states that did issue orders for masks and stay-at-home, the orders were weak, late, and lifted early, resulting in multiple waves that only abate now because of the rapid deployment of vaccines.
Most importantly, there was very little and late funding to cover the costs of those who should most have been shut down, group travel, entertainment, dining, etc. - should have been fully shut down immediately, and everyone's costs covered.
6-10 weeks of hard shutdown, while standing up a full masking, test/trace/isolate protocol would have handled it, yet few countries did it.
A few countries did implement early, strong, and effective measures, such as New Zealand. They also then opened up many months earlier than the rest of the world with near-normal life.
Where are the politicians "drunk with power" who are restarting lockdowns for their own gratification?
Where is the advantage for such a "drunk on power" politician? What could they possible gain by unnecessarily implementing measures that are seen at best by the smart ones who understand it as a necessary inconvenience, and by the rest as an assault on them?
Even flat-out authoritarians do no such thing. E.g., China, who is unashamed to run literal concentration camps for Uyghur minorities, and who did hard lockdowns at the start, is not opening up as soon as scientifically feasible.
Unless you can show some citations of evidence, this looks a lot less like a real phenomenon, and more like a pseudo-libertarian teenager's trope.