I'm looking at posts on a hobby forum I also post on and there's some serious furor being caused by the news of the vaccine mandate. Someone referred to Biden as a "Feckless Fuck of a leader" and another person advocated for balkanization for the 20% of the country that doesn't approve of vaccine mandates.

I get that some people have concerns about authoritarianism and expansion of state powers (I mean they kinda don't because if they really did we'd have been done with this government a long time ago) but I'm really, genuinely struggling to understand why this is making so many people irrationally mad. These aren't even open fascists either, it's like liberals and Hank Hill type conservatives. What is it about this sort of governance that so frustrates them? They won't be materially affected in any way, and a lot of them have expressed the desire to be "left alone".

I have to wonder if there is some sort of deeper meaning to "left alone", because throughout a lot of the pandemic it seems that most people have been trying to pretend it's not happening. Is it the fact that the USA is facing a humiliation on it's own soil that it can't shoot at or nuke? I'm really confused by thought process behind this sort of rage.

  • Chapo_Trap_Horse [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The people who bug me the most aren't MAGA-pilled and aren't middle class. It's poor-ish white-ish crystal daddy hippie types who think they are being super cool. They unconsciously think of it like they are staking a claim to their freedom, planting their flag on a new planet. My pet theory is that they indeed feel powerless and stupid and poor, and want some kind of creative dignity. So absent any real, material options, they have to lurch forward into spheres of social thought that are "alternative" to flex their creative freedom (in the stupidest possible fucking way). It's super embarrassing but I get it on some level. They just haven't been exposed to leftist thought - or selfless communal thought - because basically no one has. That's really the crux: people are dangling on the ends of strings in a hollowed-out, awful society, and without any connection to a materially significant social program, with no friends or leaders who say anything of import, they form their own kind of mysticism and lore to cope.

    Maybe this applies to MAGA hogs and normie middle class weirdos, too. It probably does.