By Philip Bump / The Washington Post
I got an email early Friday morning in response to an article I had written about the uptake of vaccines in response to employer requirements.
“Wonderful observations about vaccine resistance wilting in the face of brutal and unrelenting pressure,” the author wrote, saying that he could “almost feel the joy” that the subject brought to me.
“My mind cuts to a fictional movie scene where a couple of thugs have civilians tied down, faces on the concrete and their boots on their necks,” the writer continued. “The one thus screams in sociopathic delight to his partner in crime, also with boot on victim’s face, about how the one he has pinned down and taking a beating said he would never do (fill in blank disgusting act here), but he just agreed to do it.” Then came the inevitable comparison to Nazism.
That this was focused on an interpretation of something I’d written made this little melodrama that much more sharply bizarre. I’m a Nazi because I wrote about how polling seems to have overestimated unwavering resistance to vaccination; a process apparently describable as a “disgusting act”?
“[G]o ahead and observe and celebrate the fact that with enough government abuse and tyranny, good people can be forced to abandon everything they hold dear,” he wrote in response to an article that examined the response to requirements from employers at health-care providers and a law enforcement organization that staff get a dose of a vaccine aimed at stopping the spread of a virus that has killed 700,000 people.
This isn’t just losing the plot. It’s generating a new plot out of whole cloth based on another lost plot, the idea that President Biden and his allies — including, in the eyes of people such as the emailer, the media — are authoritarians bent on destroying members of the political right. And this is an absolutely rampant belief in the moment, stoked by the opportunism of conservative media and planted in the fertile soil of years of similar allegations.
If you’ll indulge my continuing to use this one anecdote as a proxy for the broader trend, consider the assumptions that the emailer made. I was demonstrably joyous about the increase in vaccinations (in his estimation) not because being vaccinated bears obvious public health rewards but because I lust for the exercise of dominance over the noncompliant. It’s not that I have elderly parents and unvaccinated children and hope to see the pandemic again wane to the point where the threat to both is lessened — not to mention myself — it’s that I’m part of this cabal of authoritarians. It is, to understate things a bit, an ungenerous assumption about my motives and, I assure you, an incorrect one.
But we hear this all the time. It’s a staple of Fox News’s prime-time coverage, watched by literally millions of people. It’s at the center of the vocal frustrations expressed about mandates to wear masks or other efforts to contain the virus; efforts that have certainly been a mishmash of changing recommendations over the past 20 months but which are also cast as heavy-handed efforts to control the public.
It’s worth remembering what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about employers making requirements on employees, something they do in a thousand ways every day. If you’re reading this at work right now, why are you at work? Is it … because that’s what they pay you for and you want to earn money? Well, isn’t this a constraint on your freedom? It is, of course, but it’s a trade-off, and if you don’t like it you can quit; as a small percentage of employees have done in response to being asked to be vaccinated.
That ask is obviously different from simply going to work, but it’s not an abnormal sort of thing to request. Many employers and schools have requirements related to public health that predate the pandemic. The military, which mandates a coronavirus vaccine, mandates a bunch of other vaccines as well. There’s even a little quiz you can take to figure out which ones you might need. Why? Because it’s useful to have soldiers who aren’t actively ill and making others actively ill in the event of an armed conflict, something George Washington knew a little something about.
Going a step further, we should also remember that there is no federal mandate for coronavirus vaccinations that applies to private companies. Instead, President Biden announced that employers with 100 or more employees implement a process either to encourage vaccination or be tested weekly. The testing is onerous, which is the stick being applied here, but it’s also useful, helping to catch potential cases earlier than they’d otherwise be detected. But it’s not that the government makes you get a vaccine; unless the government is actively paying your salary, in which case the example above applies.
It’s also bizarrely ungenerous to assume that the reason the government or employers don’t want a deadly virus to spread is because they like to step on people’s necks. Is it possible that maybe Biden or your boss would rather have you not die or not have you infect someone else who is then debilitated or killed? Reader, I offer that this is indeed a possible motivation at play.
Again, though, this idea that Biden wants to bend the right to submission stems from long-standing assumptions about the political left fostered over the course of decades by right-wing politicians and media personalities. The idea is that many on the left embrace not only economic socialism but left-wing authoritarianism; that they are not only Marxists but Stalinists. Calling the left communists, as people such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., enjoy doing, is meant not to evoke concern about government spending but also about the sorts of KGB-esque tactics that the emailer was able to conjure so descriptively. A political left that’s been cast as the inheritors of a political-economic tradition leading back to the murderous Soviet era is now demanding you get a vaccine. But for what possible reason?
Over and over, these hyperventilating threats don’t pan out. Remember when Greene encouraged people to greet government vaccinators at their door with firearms? Remember that this was the thing Fox News was all agitated about, the idea that people were going to show up at your door and vaccinate you (a deranged misrepresentation of a proposal aimed at making it easier to get vaccinated)? Well, where did that happen? Is it possible that this was a bit misrepresented for effect?
Again, this isn’t new. In August 2009, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal opined that Barack Obama was deploying an “authoritarian style” because his White House was trying to stamp out misinformation about health insurers. This was a regular refrain when Obama was in office, that his embrace of government power — which he did, in fact, embrace, being both a member of a party that believes in government and being president — was a mark of his lust for control and desire to crush American freedom. That, too, seems to have not manifested.
The danger here is what the backlash allows. An audience that believes that the fundamental tenets of American freedom are under threat because authorities want to curtail a deadly virus is a public that’s willing to take up arms and march into a statehouse or that’s more willing to say that an election was stolen and then assault police officers to prevent that election from being finalized. An audience that believes its enemies will stop at nothing to destroy what they love will see nothing wrong with stopping at nothing in its defense.
There have obviously been rules imposed since the pandemic began that were misguided or overly heavy-handed, generally out of ignorance about what we’re dealing with. There have been a lot of moments of hypocrisy where elected officials, usually Democrats, ignore those same rules. But using this as evidence of an effort to intentionally and giddily eviscerate how people live their lives is deranged and dangerous, even if it does help Tucker Carlson’s ratings.
It is, obviously, immediately tangible to me when I get emails such as the one I did Friday morning and, of course, my sense of the threat is colored by it being directed at me (frequently). But it provides an insight that hopefully demonstrates the emotion out there. If I’m a proto-Nazi for writing about vaccination polling, what’s the bound on this sort of rationalization, if any?
Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Washington Post based in New York. Before joining The Post in 2014, he led politics coverage for the Atlantic Wire.
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