America is not ready for a backlash on vaccine missions

The Omicron variant of COVID-19 has had an exponential spike in case rates across the US, and although hospitalizations and deaths do not follow the same pattern, the sheer size of the caseload means that These numbers are also growing. The difference between the two steps is partly due to to Omicron’s relatively mild effect, but broad immunity from a combination of primary vaccination, booster and recover from previous COVID cases were a obvious element, too.

That second point has many calls for escalation for widespread vaccine missions, perhaps as a condition of commercial air travel (like mine Ryan Cooper’s colleague argued) or could be copied from somewhere like France, where there is a law Sunday is over would ban unvaccinated people – including those who have tested negative or have recent evidence of recovery – from restaurants, sports venues, theatres, all travel domestic flights and some trains.

I doubt that such a mandate would have effect in the United States. I predict, as Freddie deBoer did, put it, that “there will be a huge amount of litigation the moment any universal mandate is formalized into policy, and it will be years before anyone is forced to be vaccinated.” Moreover, as passion as I to be About Vaccine, I can’t go behind injecting things into other people’s bodies with the tip of a sword.

But the pro-liberal crowd clearly has no qualms with that prospect – or more reliably, believes that the government’s interest in public health here outweighs the individual’s interest in it. freedom and that even a slow, litigation-filled mandate is better than no mandate at all. . But if both pragmatics and principles aren’t enough to create a fiduciary’s urge, let me cite one more reason: counterproductivity.

Probably the first contemporary political book I read was by Chalmers Johnson Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of the American Empire. Published in early 2000, Blowback before 18 months after the 9/11 attacks and subsequent foreign policy disasters made its orthodox terminology mainstream. I came into my career as a political science major in 2007 or 2008, driven by a growing interest in foreign policy (and then I-Not-boyfriend, now-husband can be seen holding it in a Facebook photo).

Blowback felt a bit scandalous when I first read it because of my upbringing conservative. Anything that could be construed as “blame America first” at the time is still vehemently dismissed on the right, a clear violation of what I now call “true patriotism“There was nothing among mainstream Republicans in 2007 like former President Donald Trump observe a decade later that the US government, like its Russian counterpart, killing. We are good people, stop it completely, and about the motives of those who attacked us – Good, “they hate our freedoms.”

Johnson’s thesis, as he writes in his first chapter, is actually a little bit more about it: that Americans “have created an empire;” that there are “consequences of our imperialist stance on the rest of the world and on ourselves;” that “there is a sort of balance sheet” of U.S. actions abroad “built over time;” and that – because not all of those actions are positive for those who experience them – they “have the potential to build up resentment against all Americans … which could lead to results Deadly.”

“Blowback” is the CIA term for those outcomes, for the unintended negative consequences of U.S. foreign policies, especially those that are hidden from the American people (such as Coups orchestrated by the United States) or which we do not seriously consider as a legitimate reminder of foreign anger (such as the existence of about 800 US military bases in dozens of countries worldwide). The word is not a term of moral judgment but an observation about the world – and human nature – as it is, the recognition that people in other countries love family, friends. , their homes, cities, and holy places, just like us, and will tend to react with anger to their transgressions, the same way we do.

Admittedly the reality of blowing back is Not to say that the specific retaliatory measures those people choose are just or justifiable. Usually, they don’t. But they are easy to understand and to some extent, predictable. If US drones were aimed at a terrorist instead of killing an innocent farmer’s wife and his children, we should hardly surprising if he becomes hostile to America, maybe even becoming a terrorist himself.

Liberals and leftists understand this before most conservatives do. When the response was controversial during the Aughts, when I first came across the idea, that was the line of division. Now, when the mandate for a COVID vaccine is being debated and mostly advocated on the left, blowback seems to be a trendy concept once again.

If our government were to carry out vaccine mandates for so many ordinary lives – banning unvaccinated adults from restaurants, airplanes, etc. – would we imagine being there will not blown back? Can we imagine there would be no unintended consequences of shutting off much of the country from public recreation and transit? Of course, some small businesses will quietly refuse to comply, continuing to deal with unvaccinated patrons. But for large companies, and especially highly regulated ones like airlines, enforcement can be consistent and higher vaccination rates won’t be the only impact.

Western European regions provide a partial preview of the enormous resentment and alienation this will generate among those who are adamantly unvaccinated. “Those who don’t have [vaccination] like me, we’re not part of society anymore,” a critic of the Swiss vaccine authority Nicolas Rimoldi told CNN about a report published Sunday. “We are excluded. We are like less valuable human beings.”

Rimoldi and others like him are “falling out of society,” CNN’s headline sums it up, and insofar as the impact of a mission here differs from that in Europe, I see them only to a degree. worse: We have a culture of stronger individualism and defiance of centralized power. We are a larger country where domestic air travel demand is greater. As progressives often note, we have more guns. And even if, say, only 10% of US adults persisted despite the mission, that would still be about 26 million people, three times the entire population of Switzerland.

Do we want to tell the 26 million people that they are no longer part of our society? Isn’t the risk of that route obvious?

Sure, we might only get a response from a fraction of that fraction, and I rather skeptical declared that we were on the verge of a new civil war. But what if the federal government pushes millions out of normal life? What if it sends all those people “falling out of society”? Give them a reason to believe they can never live as they did c. 2019 according to our current governance system? Never flew home to visit parents or their grandchildren, never ate at a chain restaurant, never watched a live soccer game, never watched a movie in theaters?

Well, then my expectations of civil strife might start to change. This is just the kind of thing that can push a significant number from “acting[ing] extremism“online to become extremists in real life.

In a word, pro-authorization advocates oppose their argument for safety – but then so do many supporters of American imperialism. Good intentions don’t change the reality of backlash in foreign policy, nor do I think they will change the reality of backlash from the domestic vaccine mandate. In either case, we must consider whether a naive plan to save lives could lead to more tragedy.