The COVID epidemic is, in its own way, a test of good citizenship. And it is a test that many ‘patriots’ are failing.
The COVID epidemic is, in its own way, a test of good citizenship. And it is a test that many ‘patriots’ are failing.
O ne of the vexations of American political thinking is single-serving libertarianism, encountered regularly on both the left and the right.
Single-serving libertarianism is what you’re seeing when an abortion-rights advocate argues for “choice” on one issue and one issue only but is all too happy to advocate coercion on related issues, e.g., forcing Americans to fund abortions through tax subsidies or forcing employers to provide abortifacient coverage in their health-insurance packages. Single-serving libertarianism was part of the gay-marriage debate until it wasn’t: What goes on in the bedrooms of private citizens was their business until, by God, it was literally your business, at the command of the Supreme Court. Single-serving libertarianism is what you’re seeing when a motorcyclist argues that he should be permitted to ride without a helmet and also that any medical care for any head injuries resulting from that decision should be subsidized by his neighbors through their insurance premiums or Medicare.
I have described my politics as libertarian for as long as I have had a political vocabulary. Thanks to a broadminded librarian (or, more likely, a generous friend of this magazine), I had National Review available to read from a young age. I went to high school at a time when a semester of basic economics was mandatory, and the required reading at my school included Milton Friedman’s Free To Choose. Buckley led to Burke and Friedman to Hayek, and there was an attractive coherence to it, distinct from the point-by-point ideological rigidity of the hacks who emphasized “consistency.” This wasn’t the sophomoric libertarianism of Ayn Rand or the weed-and-sandals libertarianism of 1990s college campuses. It was a midcentury, coat-and-tie affair, very much informed by the Cold War and by the twin totalitarianisms that clashed in World War II. This libertarianism was distinct from the atomistic, largely rhetorical libertarianism that would later come to some prominence, and, because it was grounded in experience and in the conservative sensibility, it understood that there is a social context for liberty. Which is why, to take one illustrative example, Bill Buckley favored the legalization of drugs but did not believe that legalization would be dispositive as a social question or as a matter of public policy.
This is a long way of saying: Get vaccinated, you f***ing dopes.
To quibble slightly with the Editors’ formulation in The Week: It is true that “those who have not gotten the COVID vaccine are mainly risking their own health,” but the word mainly in that sentence is doing a great deal of work. As the CDC reports — and you may find this at odds with the content of your dentist’s Facebook page! — so-called breakthrough cases are exceedingly rare in fully vaccinated people, and fully vaccinated people are less likely to spread the virus to others. The scope of COVID transmission and the prevalence of serious disease are not exclusively private questions.
The willful stupidity surrounding this issue has been something to behold. Vaccine skeptics have pointed to the example of Iceland, which has very high vaccination rates but has, like many other countries, experienced a recent surge. “Harrumph!” goes the argument. “In Iceland, 80 percent of the new COVID cases are among vaccinated people!” But Iceland is a country with about 94 percent of its population vaccinated. The lesson there isn’t that vaccines don’t work — the lesson is that the tiny percentage of the population that is unvaccinated accounts for one in five new COVID cases.
Ronald Reagan once observed: “The very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” But libertarian-leaning conservatives have always understood that it’s not that simple. For example, you can make a very good libertarian case for abortion rights if you believe that there is one body involved — her body, her choice — but countenance invasive intervention on libertarian grounds if you believe that there are two bodies involved. Liberty-minded conservatives have countenanced intensely invasive measures, such as military conscription, in the face of emergencies. One of the funny little ironies of American history is that we owe the practice of income-tax withholding to none other than Milton Friedman himself, and, though he regretted the subsequent aggrandizement of the federal government as the emergency measure proved impossible to get rid of, he did not regret his role in income-tax history — that money was needed to beat the Nazis.
I do not favor a vaccine mandate enforced at the points of federal bayonets. But I do favor making life inconvenient and restricted for those who, out of misplaced political outrage and civic immaturity, refuse to do their part in what should be a reasonably straightforward national effort. Be as mulish about the vaccine as the spirit moves you to be, but be a good libertarian when restaurants and airlines decide not to serve you and businesses decline to employ you. You get to make your choices, and the rest of us get to make ours.
You have the right to forgo vaccination in the same sense that you should have the legal right, in my view, to use heroin — the fact that something is legal does not mean that it is respectable or that we are morally indifferent to it. The COVID epidemic is not the crusade against Adolf Hitler, but it is, in its own way, a test of good citizenship.
And it is a test that many “patriots” are failing.
Vaccine obstreperousness is not a problem of the ideological Right exclusively, but it is a problem of the ideological Right to a considerable degree. Conservatives are very fond of advertising themselves as patriots and lecturing progressives about patriotism. They are very fond of sneering at “snowflakes” who insist that their eccentric sensitivities be accommodated at any social cost. Some on the right even speak of themselves as “nationalists,” and, like Senator Marco Rubio, lecture us about the “common good” when it comes to protectionism for Florida sugar barons while ladling out a scoop of single-serving libertarianism when it comes to vaccines: “Everyone must make their own choice.” But those members of Senator Rubio’s family who came to the United States as immigrants and refugees were not asked to make their own choices. They were given a list of mandatory vaccines — as indeed are the parents of children entering kindergarten, and many other Americans in many other contexts.
Kindergarteners and refugees manage. The rest of the country can, too.