Don’t Tread on Me
Conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru coined a phrase — that was later popularized by fellow National Review alum Jonah Goldberg — saying (paraphrasing because I can’t find the particular quote) “Libertarianism would be the ideal political philosophy except for two glaring weaknesses: children and foreign policy.”
As someone who identifies generally as a libertarian, the criticism is well-received. I think both strains of libertarian foreign policy, such as they are — isolationism on one end, and “trade with everyone while making no value judgements on their conduct” on the other — are garbage. And I appreciate that we must first raise responsible children before we can trust them to keep society functioning while they exercise their God-given freedom.
And it’s that last part that makes me think we might need to add a third except to Ponnuru’s maxim: pandemics.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been quite trying for libertarianism as an ideology — or at least the bastardized versions that have enjoyed a resurgence since, say, 2010.
I’m still on board with the tenets of libertarianism — the government that governs least governs best; political decisions should be made at the lowest possible level, starting with the individual; etc. But I’m also on board with John Adams when he said “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In the days since the COVID pandemic started, does anyone want to argue that we’ve been killing it on that “moral” front?
Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been two chief problems in the general public’s response. The first, I think, is a failure to differentiate between normal times and abnormal times; and the second is a failure to behave virtuously.
As for the first point, many people never seemed to grasp — and many still haven’t grasped — that this is different. More than 600,000 Americans have died of a disease that didn’t exist two years ago, and until six months ago had no effective preventative. So when governments were instituting public health measures such as capacity limits or mask requirements on private entities, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth because, supposedly, the government can’t do this. Well, yes they can. In times of emergency. This is an emergency. (And at this point, it’s a totally needless and preventable emergency.)
As an example, I’m a big supporter of the fire department. It’s one of the few functions I believe the government should perform. And yet, if the fire department kicked in my door and started spraying a hose in my living room when there wasn’t a fire, it would be an outrage and a gross abuse of government authority. But when there is a fire, by all means kick in my door and spray the hose. It shouldn’t be this complicated.
As for the second point, ideally such government mandates wouldn’t be necessary because a virtuous people would decide to implement pandemic mitigation measures on their own. As of this moment, there is one thing we can all do to end this pandemic. Apart from all the avoidance of crowds, apart from the most proper and compulsive mask-wearing, the one thing we can all do to help end this pandemic is get vaccinated. Getting vaccinated is the virtuous thing to do. If everyone had decided, of their own accord, to get vaccinated, this pandemic would be over and there would be no reason to mandate it. And yet a significant minority in this country has decided to make it part of their identity to performatively oppose such measures. So what is there to do? When a small but intransigent minority of the country is insisting on perpetuating a public health crisis, what tools do we have at our disposal?
Enter President Biden’s vaccine mandates.
There has been a renewed fervor against government overstepping the bounds of its authority, and maybe there’s a point to be made there. But many people who usually agree with me have begun saying things like “I support vaccines, but I oppose vaccine mandates.” Fair enough I guess, but that seems to be pretty selective. I don’t recall any of these people opposing vaccine requirements for public school attendance or foreign travel. They only started waiving the Gadsden flag when Joe Biden wanted to vaccinate as many people as possible against COVID. Forgive me if I’m not persuaded.
The least-convincing argument is the one that state vaccinate mandates are permissible, but federal vaccine mandates aren’t. That is certainly a process argument that may have rhetorical merit, but practically it’s pretty weak tea. It reminds me a lot of the arguments surrounding the end of segregation in the early 1960s. One of the many reasons I will never hold elected office is because I believe the Civil Rights Act was the improper vehicle for ending segregation; a procedural objection that is easily taken out of context. Now, I would have preferred that every state government and every business owner in the South would have had a change of heart and decide on their own to end the practice without the need for federal legislation. That would have been the most proper means of ending segregation. But given that was a wholly unrealistic process to hope for, our black brethren weren’t obligated to wait around for people like Lester Maddox to realize the error of their ways. And thus, the federal government stepped in where states were utterly failing.
To me, this doesn’t seem all that different from the federal government stepping in to mitigate a public health crisis in which certain individual states are utterly failing. Heart patients in Florida are under no obligation to suffer or die because hospital beds are full of COVID patients because their governor does bullshit like this:
I’m not a constitutional expert, so I don’t know the relevant case law that applies here. But I do know that we’ve tried pretty much everything else. We’ve tried relying on people to do the right thing. That got us pretty far. We’ve tried incentivizing vaccination. That got us a little farther. We’ve tried light instruction. And at this point, I think we’ve squeezed all the juice we’re going to get out of those efforts. People have had six months to do this. The remaining people apparently need a kick in the ass, so here we are.
Once again, I am sympathetic to the arguments about government overreach and abuse of power. I don’t like government mandates either, much less federal mandates; but anyone who doesn’t recognize that this is an acute and ongoing public health crisis is not to be taken seriously. I’ve just lost all patience with these people. Get vaccinated, for God’s sake. If you’re not vaccinated at this point (unless you’re part of the tiny fraction of people who can’t for various reasons), you’re an asshole. And if you’re not vaccinated because you believe bullshit conspiracy theories about the safety or efficacy of the vaccines, you’re an asshole and an idiot. And if it takes an executive order to get you to do what you should’ve done months ago if not for your own obstinance, I guess I’m not particularly concerned that it didn’t go through the preferred process. I said what I said, sorry not sorry.
Must See TV
FX has started airing their American Crime Story series about the impeachment of Bill Clinton. It’s basically what they did for the O.J. Simpson trial, where it’s an, uh, artistic recreation of real events. And if there was ever a television product that was micro-targeted to my interests, this would be it. My wife and I watched the first episode, and she may have been getting annoyed at my running commentary about the people being portrayed and nitpicking things about their portrayal.
But so far I’m really enjoying it. The most notable thing thus far for me is that Cobie Smulders — best known as Robin from How I Met Your Mother — does a dead on Ann Coulter.
Also, I was a little young to understand the actual PR strategy at the time, but if this is a reasonably realistic portrayal of how the Paula Jones story was handled, she was completely failed by everyone around her. That poor woman.
Speaking of poor women, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart of Linda Tripp. Near as I can tell, she’s just a civil servant who got caught up in something that wasn’t her idea, and people were just gratuitously mean to her. I remember John Goodman portraying her on SNL and that just seemed really gross to me, even at the time, for someone who never sought public office.
And not for nothin’, but given how, uh, social mores have changed over the last several years, it’s absolutely bananas to me how people at the time were dismissing a 49-year-old man preying on his 22-year-old intern. What a weird time that was.
Trient-Weekly Trivia
Friday’s answer:
Category: Science
Clue: This American seismologist devised a scale for measuring earthquake intensity in the 1930s.
Charles Richter
Today’s clue:
Category: U.S. State Capitols
Clue: This capital city lies just east of Lake Tahoe.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My daughter has been paying closer attention to the sporting events on television lately, and will often have questions or comments. We were watching a baseball game that wasn’t especially exciting at the moment, but the crowd in the stadium was doing the wave. My daughter watched it for several seconds with an inquisitive look on her face, and then turned to us and said, matter of factly, “everybody’s saying ‘yay.’” As if to say she understood what they were doing, if not why.