Give Me Liberty or I'll Kill You
The price of freedom is death.
-Malcolm X
What makes a society good?
I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately, and after many hours of research I can confidently say I have no idea. As far as I can tell, there are as many theories about society as there are actual societies. Mankind has been grappling with this question since ancient Greece and nobody else seems to have figured it out either, so in a way, you could say there’s no difference between me and Plato. (I would never say that, but you could.)
Very broadly speaking, cultures can generally be divided into one of two categories: individualist and collectivist. Individualist cultures prioritize the individual over the collective, while collectivist cultures prioritize the group over its individual members. And cultures in each overarching category (individualist or collectivist) can be further divided into one of two sub-categories: horizontal and vertical.
I don’t want to lose you so early on, so here’s a chart.
America is a vertical individualist culture. Not only is the individual prioritized over the collective, but each individual is also competing against every other individual for an elevated place in the hierarchy, which means everyone acts solely in their own self-interest at all times. It’s not a good culture by any stretch, but it works because everyone knows where they stand: nobody is expected to help anyone else, nor should they expect anyone else to help them. We have no real sense of obligation to the larger collective, but there is one basic tenet that applies to everyone: you can be as selfish as you want, as long as your selfishness does not directly harm or endanger others.1
If that’s the bare minimum one can expect from a functional society, then the past 18 months have made one thing crystal clear: we do not qualify. And I’m pretty sure I know who’s responsible.
Vaccine distribution in the U.S. began on December 14th, 2020 and gave us a desperately-needed way to further protect ourselves and others from a virus that has so far claimed more lives worldwide than the Vietnam War. Yet despite this additional layer of protection, more people have died from COVID since vaccine distribution began eight months ago than in all of 2020, which is so completely fucking insane that I am compelled to restate it and change the font to catch your eye:
COVID-19 death toll, pre-vaccine: 317,119
COVID-19 death toll since vaccine distribution began: 323,149
When I see those numbers, all the usual emotions are there — despair, exasperation, disgust, unbridled fury — but there are some unexpected ones too. Like apathy: I’m not actually indifferent, but it’s like I’m watching my house burn down and my brain is a fireman, and it’s wrapping me in a blanket and going Let’s get you out of here. It’s a defense mechanism.
I also feel an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. My wife spent all of 2020 working in a clinic at one of the homeless shelters in NYC, and hers was the only clinic that not only continued seeing existing patients, but also accepted new patients and walk-ins. She had to source most of her own PPE; she lost patients she’d known for years; she had to give her colleagues a crash course in infectious disease prevention; she handed out masks and anything else she could scrounge up to patients, FDNY paramedics, anyone who didn’t have adequate protection.
One of my best friends got COVID earlier in 2020, and my wife told him not to stop taking his Humira because she figured out (about six months before everyone else) that stopping Humira while dealing with COVID could potentially kill him. While the rest of us bitched about having to wait in line to enter a store, she was existing on a knife’s edge, constantly fearing for her patients’ health, my health, her parents’ health, my parents’ health. When the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were authorized, we both felt tremendous relief: finally, the worst was over.
Except it wasn’t, because as it turns out, my wife is one of the 0.00025% of people who have an allergic reaction to mRNA vaccines. She got the Moderna vaccine and almost went into anaphylactic shock, but wouldn’t let the hospital staff use an EpiPen because it’d throw off her vitals and she wanted to make sure that Moderna wouldn’t disregard the report of her adverse reaction due to abnormal vital signs. Instead they pumped her full of steroids, which worked and kept her vitals from going haywire, but also wiped out the first dose. Back to square zero.
Even though she couldn’t get vaccinated, day after day my wife waded back into the shit and tried to help as many people as she could. That’s what she does. Finally, the opportunity arose for her to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine…but the day she was supposed to get it, the CDC recommended a halt on J&J vaccines because of adverse reactions in women under the age of 50.
It was like “Groundhog Day,” but a fucked-up, David Cronenberg version where everybody else gets to move on except for Bill Murray. Even after they lifted the halt, the fact that she’d already had an adverse reaction to the Moderna vaccine meant nobody was comfortable giving her the J&J vaccine. She had to wait until July, when everybody who wanted a vaccine had gotten theirs and they started doing in-home vaccinations for invalids and the elderly.
If that sounds terrible, imagine how I felt. (Just kidding. Kinda.)
I may not have spent the last 18 months keeping a weather eye out for NVA lurking in the trees, but I was still waiting at the edge of the jungle. Obviously things were infinitely more difficult for my wife than for me: I could avoid being around sick people, she had to take care of them. The only possible upsides to facing the beast head-on, day in and day out are that it normalizes things to an extent, and being in the thick of it probably offers some feeling of control over the situation. My wife was literally fighting back, while all I could do was think up worst-case scenarios, offer emotional support and...not get COVID. Oh, and make this Playskool-ass, Baby’s First Doffing Station outside of our apartment so she could change clothes when she got home from work:
None of these things made a difference in terms of the pandemic itself, but they made it a little easier for her to keep going, and that’s all she asked of me. Even after I got my second shot, I didn’t change my routine: I still wore a mask indoors, avoided crowds, continued my hermit-like existence, because until my wife got vaccinated, nothing had changed.
The only real relief I felt from getting the vaccine was that it meant one less thing for my wife to worry about. Which is essentially what healthcare workers have been asking the public for all along: one less thing to worry about. “Try not to get COVID. If you do, we’ll deal with it, but if you can avoid it then that’s one less straw on our collective backs and it could make all the difference. Just…try.”
All that’s required to honor this request is a modicum of concern for other people and maybe a willingness to temporarily press pause on Endless Appetizers at Olive Garden. But this country is a toilet, so instead it was I want my stuffed ziti fritta and by GOD I’m gonna get it! “Care about other people” YOU care about other people, cuck!, while politicians applaud and breathe a quiet sigh of relief that they can keep feeding bodies to the meat grinder and never be held accountable for it.
We “reopened the economy,” which is a bizarrely sunny way to describe the Lord of the Flies-style pulmonary battle royale that ensued. We cut off unemployment and forced people to go back to work without adequate PPE. Not only have we failed to consistently require or enforce masking & social distancing, we decry the very existence of those rules. We make fake doctor’s exemption notes to try to get around mask mandates; we insist that masks make it hard(er than a respiratory virus?) to breathe; we staged protests at state houses; we try to kidnap governors.
By “we,” I mean conservatives. (And libertarians, who are just conservatives with very strong opinions about age of consent laws). Of course, not all conservatives engage in the behavior noted above, but almost without exception, everyone who did is a conservative. I would love to say “they” instead of “we,” because why should those of us who have done and continue to do the right thing be lumped in with these assholes? But I can’t, because when it comes to infectious diseases, there is no “they.”
It is jarring to watch conservatives treat an appeal to their basic humanity like an edict handed down from Stalin himself. But it only feels that way because the pandemic makes it easier to connect the dots between their disinclination to consider other people and the corresponding rise in new COVID cases. Refusing to do the right thing in the name of “freedom,” going to absurd lengths to do the wrong thing just to stick it to everyone else: that’s what conservatism is all about. That’s what it demands.
Most people don’t think of themselves as self-involved or indifferent to the needs of others; who would? Everyone likes to think they’re a good person, and conservatives are no exception. On the face of it, it seems ludicrous that a conservative could refuse to wear a mask or get vaccinated, willfully threaten the health and safety of everyone around them, and still think of themselves as a decent person, but it’s all a matter of perspective. With the proper framing, anything is possible — even, say, squaring one’s belief in one’s own inherent goodness with their objectively harmful actions.
The main draw of modern conservatism is that it encourages people to indulge their natural inclination toward selfishness. Under conservatism, it is not just right but necessary to place your own interests above all else, even if your interests (e.g., stuffed ziti fritta) are less important than those of others (e.g., not dying from COVID). A plate of oversalted quasi-Italian fare is objectively not worth the possibility, however slight, of getting someone sick or even killing them. But through the lens of conservatism, it’s not a plate of stuffed ziti; it’s a heaping helping of individual liberty, lightly dusted with the spirit of the Founding Fathers. (Say when.)
Under conservatism, you don’t have to feel badly about refusing to help the less fortunate. They obviously don’t care enough to do something about their own struggles, so why should you? This attitude doesn’t just manifest itself in interpersonal relationships, either; it’s a bedrock principle of conservative politics. Better to let millions struggle than to help even one person who doesn’t deserve it. Even a conservative who has nothing will still reject policies or proposals that would help them. They’re convinced that they’re not like those people, sitting around and waiting for a handout. Their situation is only temporary.
It’s a zero-sum game: they can only win if everyone else loses.
This crabs-in-a-barrel mentality often leads conservatives to reflexively oppose anything that could benefit others — including, as it turns out, public health measures. Conservatives have been taught that if the government says it wants to help, it must be because there is some sinister ulterior motive. Even in a pandemic, a fairly anodyne request from the government — Please don’t engage in passive manslaughter — is met with suspicion and belligerent resistance.
Conservatives can usually dress up their lack of concern for the greater good as Making Tough Choices and Being Responsible, and they get away with it because there’s a difference, however slight and however pedantic, between actively harming people and simply declining to help them. There is no such distinction to be drawn when it comes to infectious diseases: you’re either helping others or you’re harming them, and conservatives are overwhelmingly opting for the latter. Last year, they went along with masking and social distancing for all of three weeks before *poof* conservatism appeared on their shoulder: “You could wear a mask in the grocery store, but you don’t have to, because you have Freedom™, and that means you can do whatever you want whenever you want. If people get upset, well, that’s too damn bad: you don’t tell them how to live their lives2, so they can’t tell you how to live yours!” And just like that, we had ourselves a brand-new battleground in the culture wars.
Because of this, until the vaccines were distributed, we were at the mercy of the guy walking around without a mask, coughing and sneezing. He could have COVID, or he could have the common cold, or he could have allergies, or he could just have something caught in his throat: nobody really knew. Meanwhile, he’s coming in contact with ten people who have masks but not face shields, because they shouldn’t need face shields if not for pieces of shit like this guy. So he’s standing in line at the grocery store, shouting We can’t live in fear and spraying droplets all over the place while everyone else tries to get out of there as fast as they can, praying this dickhead just has a cold because if it is COVID then everyone else’s efforts to protect themselves and others have been rendered meaningless by some asshole who thinks refusing to cover his dumb fucking face while he buys a can of Monster makes him Patrick Henry.
The vaccines gave conservatives the freedom they hold so dear, offering them a choice between A) getting vaccinated and B) wearing a mask. I assumed that once people started getting vaccinated, the only ones still at risk would be the people who refused to wear a mask and/or get a vaccine (i.e., conservatives), and at that point they’d fall in line. Conservatives love quoting Nathan Hale; they don’t actually want to end up like him.
Then again, maybe they do, because they’ve largely gone with option C, which includes (but is not limited to):
Not getting vaccinated;
Not wearing a mask;
Reaping the benefits of relaxed social-distancing restrictions because most places aren’t requiring proof of vaccination yet;
Losing their fucking minds whenever a place does start requiring proof of vaccination, as though going to SeaWorld is a constitutional right;
Comparing vaccine requirements to the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust;
Arguing that asking someone about their vaccination status is a HIPAA violation;
Relying on everyone else being vaccinated instead of getting the shot themselves (you know, like a freeloader would do);
Claiming they won’t get vaccinated until the vaccine receives FDA approval (because if conservatism is known for anything, it’s an unwavering trust in government agencies);
Hearing the FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine and posting “What are they hiding???????” on Facebook;
“Doing their own research” (watching a YouTube video on the dangers of vaccines, presented by a chiropractor who’s legally prohibited from practicing in 18 states because they tore an elderly woman’s head clean off during a spinal adjustment), and;
Mainlining Vitamin C because “someone they trust” (the person who shared that YouTube video with them and/or my former college roommate, who is impossibly stupid) told them it would prevent COVID.
Conservatives have spent the entire pandemic ricocheting from one incomprehensible stance to the next. The hills they choose to die on seem to change as frequently and with as little warning as the weather, but all those disparate responses are connected by a single unifying thread that is central to conservatism: an enduring refusal to do whatever it is they’re asked to do.
Ivermectin is the latest COVID cure du jour, even though it’s mainly used in humans as a treatment for dermatological parasites like scabies and is useless against COVID except in doses that are toxic to humans. None of that matters to conservatives, though — toxicity as a concept tends to lose all meaning once you start drinking bleach — so they’re on the hunt for high-dose ivermectin. Which, given how dangerous it is for humans, is primarily only found in hospitals and in livestock deworming pills. And are they gobbling down those pills and crowing (in a Facebook post) about how they successfully evaded Big Brother, followed almost immediately by their profile name changing to “Remembering [Laura FreeThinker Jones]”? You bet your ass they are.
We could come up with a thousand different strategies to prevent COVID and end the pandemic and it wouldn’t make a difference. We could tell conservatives Do whatever you want, just don’t drink gasoline in a wheat field on the first night of a waxing gibbous moon and by the end of the week there’d be a national gas shortage and “Question the Science” rallies with people chugging hi-test by the gallon.
Frankly, I wouldn’t give a shit if the risk of a slow and agonizing death was limited to these people. Another round of guzzoline on me, here’s to your freedom. But alas, that’s not what’s happening. Instead, these people are turning into living (for now) incubators for newer, stronger, more contagious COVID variants. It took nothing less than a miracle of modern medicine to create the vaccines we have, but each new variant is a sign that the virus is adapting to the vaccine and figuring out ways around it.
Last year, children were largely spared the worst effects of COVID-19, but it’s adapted since then. Now the virus is far more dangerous to children, and we still don’t have a pediatric version of the vaccine. Adults are probably going to need booster shots to shore up our defenses, but conservatives have ensured that most of us will get COVID at some point.
We’ve had multiple opportunities to minimize the spread of the pandemic or get it under control, and we’ve blown them all. Conservatives have played a large part in that, but non-conservatives who perpetuate the myth of conservatism as a valid ideology deserve their share of the blame too. The active disregard for human life displayed by conservatives over the past 20 or so months would not be possible without the 50-plus years of passive disregard for human life that preceded them. Anyone who argues with a straight face that this ideology deserves to play a key role in shaping the next 50 years is either a moron or a sympathizer.
For almost two years, we’ve asked conservatives to do the right thing, and for almost two years, an overwhelming majority of them have refused. Nothing we’ve tried has worked, and every effort to get them to join the rest of us just makes them dig in deeper. Most of the people who have died so far weren’t selfish pieces of garbage, they just had the bad luck of running into one. So while COVID might get the credit, the real killer is a plague of an altogether different stripe — and the 625,000 lives it’s claimed during the pandemic are just a drop in the bucket.
Not applicable to the extremely wealthy. Thank you for your service.
Unless they’re gay, or trans, or they want an abortion, or they kneel for the national anthem, or they don’t support the Troops, or…