Throwing Down With the Anger Police

Hey,

I’ll be blunt, I’m pretty angry.

Let’s recap the last few days. Over the weekend a video emerged of a man confronting Tucker Carlson and saying some ungenerous things to him. Vast numbers of Tucker fans—as well as Tucker imitators and remoras eager to attach themselves to him—got very upset by this. They filled Twitter with outrage over a grown-up saying unpleasant things to another grown-up. 

Now, I don’t like these kinds of viral trolling operations, and I think confronting public figures this way is, at minimum, obnoxious. (I’ve had some experience with this sort of thing myself.) But it’s not exactly something to get that worked up about either. Also, if you dislike such things as a matter of principle, you should dislike it when left-wingers are hounded by right-wingers, too. I’ll leave it to others to go spelunking for consistency on this point.

Anyway, a few days later, many of the same people who think tongue-lashing someone they like at a bait shop is a moral outrage were openly mocking four police officers who were not only verbally assaulted far worse than Carlson was, they were actually assaulted. They were sent to the hospital. They had surgeries. One officer’s heart stopped. And the reaction from the “How dare you annoy Tucker!?!” crowd was, “What crybabies!”

When a bunch of antifa goons went to Carlson’s house to harass him and his (lovely) family, that was legitimately outrageous. When a far larger mob attacked “the people’s house”—a phrase many rioters used, by the way—that was no big deal. The cops who were brutalized in the line of duty are making way too big a deal about this. Indeed, according to some frauds, the cops are “crisis actors,” and the people who beat cops with flagpoles are “political prisoners.”

Unvaccinated stupidity.

I keep getting reminded that I wrote a book about fascism as if it’s proof I should be angry at all of the things the reminders are angry at. And, in point of fact,  I share their anger at many things. But I’m also mad at people who can’t see that minimizing or even tacitly endorsing a Brownshirt-style assault on the Capitol in an effort to steal an election is about as emblematic of fascisti tactics as anything in recent American history.

More on that in a moment.

One thing I am furious about is that we’re sliding back into a regime of mask and vaccine mandates, but my anger is like a runaway lawn sprinkler, spraying in every direction. Yes, there’s something malodorously fascistic about the barely contained glee of certain public health officials as they once again get to boss everyone around. (If you want to read how public health was central to Nazi ideology and crimes, I highly recommend Robert Proctor’s brilliant book The Nazi War on Cancer.) But I got a similar whiff when Carlson suggested that people call child services on parents who make their kids wear masks outside (enlisting state power to mess with families strikes me as far worse than confronting someone at a bait shop, by the way).

Similarly, I’m furious at the mainstream media’s obsession with painting vaccine hesitancy solely as a troglodytic right-wing phenomenon, allegedly proving everything they believe about “deplorable” America. (By the way, the news side of Fox has been entirely pro-vaccine as far as I can tell.) And while it’s true that the average hardcore Trump voter is more likely to be vaccine-resistant than the average Democrat, the places where vaccine hesitancy poses the greatest problem aren’t in rural America. They’re in largely blue cities and counties across America, because that’s where the population density is (30 percent of a highly populated area has a lot more people in it than 70 percent of a sparsely populated one). And most of those people aren’t Trump voters. When urban and suburban minorities resist vaccination, it’s an indictment of American structural racism or some such nonsense—and it is mostly nonsense. When rural whites resist vaccination, it’s proof Republicans want to kill people. It’s all such partisan garbage.

But even if you disagree with that, it’s just idiotic to single out white Republicans for your scorn and condescension. As Jim Geraghty notes, 40 percent of New York City’s Department of Education employees aren’t vaccinated. Where was the media’s ridicule of that before this week? Indeed, according to elite liberal logic, the Fox-besotted flyover people don’t know any better. Well, what’s the excuse for metropolitan healthcare workers who have lagged in getting vaccinated? As much as anything it’s the failure of these people to get vaccinated that’s causing the new wave of mandates coming down the pike. Maybe if Democrats and Democrat-aligned media outlets had spent less time basking in the moral superiority of blue America over the last six months this wouldn’t be necessary.

For Democrats, a little more scolding of members of their own coalition would have had two obvious benefits. First, it might have improved the vaccination rate among their own ranks. Second, it would have signaled to their political “opponents” that battling a pandemic isn’t a partisan thing.

That’s what’s so infuriating about so much of this. Whether it’s masks or vaccines, people can’t see past their partisan blinders. We have these vaccines thanks in no small part to the efforts of a Republican administration—and when Trump was in office, the most prominent vaccine skeptics were Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Now that Biden is in office, it’s flipped the other way (though, in fairness, it’s flipped much farther than where the Democrats were). Operation Warp Speed was a world historic accomplishment according to Trump praetorians—and they were right. But now the vaccines it produced are dangerous according to many of the same people.

It’s all so incandescently stupid. 

Last week you might have seen this CBS interview with Scott Roe, a Louisiana man who nearly died from COVID, explaining that, if he had to do it all over again, he still wouldn’t get vaccinated.

“I would have gone through this, yes sir… Don’t shove it down my throat,” Roe said. “That’s what local, state, federal administration is trying to do—shove it down your throat.”

“What are they shoving,” the reporter asked, obnoxiously. “The science?”

“No, they’re shoving the fact that that’s their agenda,” Roe said. “Their agenda is to get you vaccinated.”

I just don’t get this. Of course it’s the state’s agenda.

And it’s Biden’s. When Alex Berenson got the CPAC crowd cheering that the Biden administration failed to “sucker” so many Americans into getting vaccinated, he made it sound like this was some partisan scheme. It’s not. It’s the president’s job. Saying it’s Joe Biden’s “agenda” to get people vaccinated doesn’t make it illegitimate. It was Donald Trump’s agenda to get people vaccinated, too. Imagine if FDR had lived to be defeated by a Republican in 1944. Presumably Thomas Dewey’s agenda would have also been to win the war with Germany and Japan. If there’s a planet-killing asteroid heading to earth, Biden should make it part of his agenda to stop it somehow. If, say, Ron DeSantis is elected president in 2024, I would like to think Republicans would demand some continuity in administration policy on this score.

Fighting pandemics is what government is for. This one has already killed twice as many Americans as World War II. What, for fornication’s sake, is complicated about this?

The F-word, again.

Which brings me back to a lot of this loose fascism talk from the right. If you actually read my book, you’d know that one of the more annoying progressive habits is to draw moral equivalency between superficially similar things. For instance, militarism is inherent to fascism. But that doesn’t make the military a fascist institution any more than the Autobahn makes the Interstate Highway System fascist. Our military, with righteous moral authority, helped crush Nazi militarism. To confuse the two is to confuse arsonists and firefighters.

As I’ve been saying for over a year now, pandemics are one of the few things that according to pretty much every non-anarchist theory of the state—conservative, progressive, classical liberal whatever—the government has a right to suspend normal rules to address. (That doesn’t mean it should suspend those rules, just that it has more leeway than normal.) Yes, fascists would see no problem in pulling out the stops to fight a pandemic. Mussolini went to extraordinary lengths to fight malaria. But you know who else went to extraordinary lengths to fight pandemics? The Founding Fathers, starting with George Washington.

In political science, there’s this idea of “delegates” versus “trustees.” Delegates are elected to do whatever the voters want. Trustees are elected to exercise their judgement. In a healthy democracy, elected officials are a little of both. On some matters, they follow the will of the people who elected them. But on other matters, they’re supposed to do right as they see it. Most of the time it’s a mix of the two. Think of it this way. You pay your doctor for certain services, but your doctor is also obligated to tell you things you don’t want to hear when it’s for your own good. I hate this Bloombergy attitude in politicians 90 percent of the time, precisely because it’s not the state’s business to ban sodas or mandate exercise. But pandemics are the state’s business. That doesn’t mean I think the state should be able to do whatever it wants, or that whatever it wants is justified. But a lot of the demagoguery from people outraged at the thought of vaccine requirements—who were all required to get vaccinated to go to school—is performative nonsense.

Trustee Republicans.

Speaking of performative nonsense, you know what else is the state’s business? Investigating efforts to steal an election and schemes to intimidate Congress out of doing its constitutional duties.

Yesterday, Kevin McCarthy (R-Trump’s Crotch) described Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger as “Pelosi Republicans” solely because they’re following the trustee model of representation. They think that when a president of any party foments a mob to attack the Capitol, it should be condemned and investigated. Literally every Republican righteously denouncing or smugly ridiculing the January 6 committee would take this position if mobs of Obama supporters—chanting “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!”—had behaved this way had he lost to Mitt Romney in 2012. And while it’s true that most Republicans have condemned the violence of that day, as a party, the GOP’s position is that any such investigation must be resisted because it’s part of the “Democratic agenda.” 

I’m not going to deny the partisan interest of Democrats. Nancy Pelosi has bungled many things since January 6 because of her partisan blinders. But according to Jim Jordan (R-House Gym) and Elise Stefanik (R-Whichever Way the Wind Blows), there are only two entities deserving of any blame for January 6: the rioters and … Nancy Pelosi. Last night on Fox News’ Special Report, Jordan condemned Pelosi for the poor security at the Capitol on January 6. And there’s probably some merit there. But his argument boiled down to the claim Pelosi failed to provide security against the rioters Donald Trump invited to Washington—rioters that Trump refused to call off hours into the assault on the Capitol. Paul Gosar (R-Deutschland) and other maroons want to turn Ashli Babbitt into some kind of patriotic Horst Wessel who was “executed” fighting for truth and justice. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon) and the gibbons of One America News routinely refer to the goons arrested for storming the Capitol as “political prisoners.”

This is probably the best illustration of the false equivalence running amok in the fever swamps. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Martin Niemöller were political prisoners (and so was Eugene V. Debs)—these jackasses are criminals. There’s no official definition of a political prisoner, but all reasonable people understand that the term involves being arrested for one’s beliefs and political activities and the state’s stated reasons for confinement are pretextual. That’s not why these pepper-spraying, cop-beating thugs are in jail. 

And if you truly don’t understand that—or any of this—please stop lecturing me about what fascism is, or what consistency requires.