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.

  • Dingdangdog [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I think it's just the butterfly effect of the red scare reverberating still.

    The fear of "government overreach" and the merits of rugged individualism has been instilled into the heart of every single middle class person from boomers and onwards through embellished tales of the evil Soviets and Cubans and how hard working Americans can overcome anything.

    This was solely to increase profits at the expense of regulation and solidarity.

    Now this same system NEEDS a government to step in and actually do something and for people to work together, but the populous has been trained to lash out against any sort of governmental plan and has been brainwashed into thinking they're near immortal so long as they dig in deep and tug on those bootstraps.

    It's living proof that the ideology of capitalism is completely incoherent and useless whenever faced against a single societal problem.

      • Dingdangdog [he/him,comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Turns out calling any leaders who stood for a cohesive society a commie, then throwing them in jail or outright shooting them for 60 (more like 120 actually) years may have had a negative effect eventually.

        :cap-think: