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.
They're white, well-off middle aged men. They are used to be on the top of the pecking order and be treated with respect. Politicians suck up to them to get their votes, corporations suck up to them to get their money.
And then suddenly the government, the big bag government that they have been told to hate by capitalist propaganda all their lives, comes and tells them what to do. It doesn't even do it in the way they're used to with tax credits and incentives, they threaten to take their jobs if they don't comply. And to add insult to injury the government tells them they're fucking morons for not having been vaccinated already.
It just isn't right. They are not the people being told what to do, they're the ones telling others what to do! The government punishing and forcing you? That's for lesser people, that's for [slur]s!
Never have their inflated sense of self-importance been so violated! This is an outrage! This is exactly how it must be to live under the oppressive communist dictatorship of Soviet 1984 Venezuela!