Against Covid Theater, for Vaccine Pressure

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

 

Come for the pancakes, stay for the Covid theater.

 

You probably have endured, and rolled your eyes at, the ridiculous experience of being made to wear a mask when walking into a restaurant, and then being permitted to remove it once you are seated. The silliness of this protocol intensifies in direct proportion to the crowdedness of the restaurant. Over the weekend, we went out for breakfast (we are traveling for a short vacation) at one of those very popular restaurants where patrons are seated very nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, and, because we are in a ski town, the waiters were obliged to step over and around all sorts of jackets and hats and sporting goods, with all the inevitable bumping into and brushing up against that goes along with that. Imagine boarding one of those insanely crowded Indian passenger trains but being required to wear a face mask while walking across the platform.

 

I tend toward the conservative and risk-averse side when it comes to anti-Covid measures, but this sort of thing is thoroughly asinine. I can buy a story in which at certain times public places have to be closed for reasons of public health, but it is very difficult to accept as convincing a story in which unmasked diners who are practically sitting in one another’s laps have to be defended from the threat of potential Covid carriers walking from the door to a table who are if anything farther away from the other diners when crossing the room than they are when seated. The same holds true of air travel: The mask-up/mask-down routine is largely ceremonial. I could accept the claim that it is too dangerous to fly at all or that it is too dangerous to allow passengers to be unmasked in the cabin, but I cannot take seriously the claim that it is too dangerous to allow passengers to be unmasked in the cabin unless there is a Bloody Mary involved, or one of those little Biscoff cookies.

 

On the other hand, I believe we should keep up the pressure on vaccination. The Biden administration was right to extend the vaccine requirement for air travelers to noncitizens arriving by land and by sea, a small but intelligent step. I believe that there is a reasonable case for requiring vaccination for domestic air and train travel; among other considerations, vaccinated people who suffer from breakthrough infections are less infectious than non-vaccinated people are. A highly vaccinated population is a textbook public good (non-rivalrous and non-excludable in consumption), and the creation of that public good is a legitimate use of federal power in air travel, which is subject to extensive federal oversight, and in train travel, which is mostly provided by Amtrak, a quasi-public corporation.

 

There are hotels and restaurants that require proof of vaccination for entry in jurisdictions where this is not required, acting on their own initiative. They are, in my view, within their rights to insist on this, and they are probably doing a public service in terms of contributing to norms and expectations. I do not like being asked to show my card, just as I do not like being asked for any other kind of personal information when engaged in an ordinary commercial exchange. (No, you may not have my telephone number, Cabela’s. I’m just not that into you.) But the epidemic has caused inconveniences for all of us, and has caused much worse than inconvenience for about 900,000 of us so far, a figure that continues to climb.

 

In the United States, there is talk of “discriminating against” unvaccinated people, and European cities — Athens, Helsinki, London, Paris, Stockholm — have seen rowdy protests against “vaccine passports,” which in some countries are required for access to many public spaces, from cafés to gyms. In both cases, the complaint is that the unvaccinated are being treated as “second-class citizens.”

 

To my mind, that is not really a complaint at all — it is a solution, or at least part of one. Vaccines are not magic, and they have proved more effective at preventing hospitalization and death than they have at preventing transmission of the virus per se. But relieving pressure on health systems and reducing transmission, even modestly, is a very great benefit. It is also the most that most of us can do to help to mitigate the effects of the epidemic short of becoming hermits. The anti-vaccine stuff is pure superstition, tribalism, and performative self-harm. Its place in our public life should be down there with astrology and Tarot readings.

 

It is not as though such modest measures would be unprecedented in the American experience. When I was in college, young men could not apply for financial aid if they had not met their Selective Service requirement, i.e., registering for the draft. The requirement was enforced in other similar ways, a combination of nagging and disadvantage. I have never fought in a war, but my veteran friends assure me it is much more disruptive and unpleasant than receiving a free, safe, effective vaccination against a potentially deadly infection.

 

Allowing life to return to something like normal for the vaccinated while continuing to pressure and inconvenience the unvaccinated is probably the best and most reasonable step toward normalcy we can take at this time.

 

Gestures toward Beijing

 

The so-called diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics is pretty weak tea, though Americans should be grateful that we are joined in this effort by a few stalwart allies — Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia — as well as by our friends in Lithuania, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia. A few other allies — the Kiwis, the Dutch, the Swedes — are staying home, too, but citing Covid restrictions rather than taking a political stand. NBC is not sending reporters to the Olympics but will cover the games remotely while adding “geopolitical context,” as the broadcaster put it.

 

The Olympics are, of course, the great globalist booby prize, a dog-and-pony show that almost always ends up being more trouble than it was worth. Xi Jinping et al. can afford to take a loss on the Olympics and have reserved the option of running tanks over any feisty critics, and so Beijing intends to use the games for propaganda purposes. The propaganda value of the Olympics is overrated — the 1936 summer games did not do much for Adolf Hitler’s reputation — but Xi will take any opportunity that comes his way.

 

What I wonder is: Why participate at all?

 

If trying to organize world opinion against Beijing’s abuses at home and ambitions abroad is a project worth keeping a few diplomats at home for — diplomats whose absence never would have been noticed if the White House hadn’t sent out a press release — then maybe it is worth keeping the ice-dancing squad at home, too. The usual argument one hears against this is that it would be unfair to the athletes, who have spent so much time and effort preparing for the games, and who have given up so much in the service of their sport. I think of this a little bit like the way I think of vaccinations: A lot of the boys who died at Normandy and Huế probably didn’t think it was fair that they were there while other young men were safe and comfortable elsewhere. We aren’t asking that much of Americans right now. But you don’t change the world with painless little gestures that don’t cost anybody anything.

 

Are we serious about China or aren’t we?

 

For years, the German attitude toward authoritarian powers such as China was expressed in the phrase “Wandel durch Handel,” “change through trade.” The American position since the end of the Cold War has been very similar. Assessing the failures of that policy is politically difficult, because so much of the American populist interest in China has nothing to do with Wandel and everything to do with Handel — Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and many other like-minded politicians saw our problems with Beijing in primarily economic terms, a matter of the balance of trade and much more urgently a matter of job-protection.

 

But our real problem with Beijing is not mainly economic. Our problem with China is that, like Russia and most other autocracies, its foreign policy is informed by the lessons it has learned from practicing tyranny and brutality at home. And our response has been incoherent because Americans know that they don’t like seeing “Made in China” on so much of the stuff they buy at Home Depot but aren’t really sure whether they care enough about the oppression of the Uyghurs to make the national bobsled team sit one out.

 

Until we figure out what we want out of our relationship with China, we aren’t going to get it.

 

Words About Words

 

In a recent radio conversation with Michael Medved (I do not have a link), I digressed a little on the subject of “red states,” a term — and a concept — that needs some scrutiny.

 

In most of the political world, especially in the West, the color blue is associated with conservative parties and the color red is associated — much more strongly, for obvious reasons — with parties of the Left. In the United States, we have that reversed, all because of one stupid television election map that became inescapable in the contested aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. (Donald Trump was not the first political failure to refuse to accept the outcome of the vote.) And so the “red states” are Republican states.

 

But, not so fast.

 

Mississippi is sometimes held up by progressive critics as the typical red state, for obviously cynical reasons: Mississippi is a relatively poor state (relative to other U.S. states, not relative to, say, France) and it has many of the social problems that go along with that poverty. I like Mississippi — it is an underrated state, I think — but it is not without its troubles. But the progressive argument — that Mississippi’s troubles are typical of the troubles of Republican states and the product of Republican governance — does not fly.

 

It is true that if you are a Republican presidential candidate, then you can be pretty confident in winning Mississippi’s votes in the Electoral College. The last Democrat to win Mississippi’s votes was Jimmy Carter — and the gentleman from Georgia’s performance in office was an excellent argument for never voting Democratic in a presidential election again.

 

But Mississippi remained a Democratic state, in terms of its own governance, until very recently. Mississippi had precisely one Republican governor in the course of the 20th century. The majority of its delegation to the U.S. House was Democratic as recently as 2010. Its state house was under Democratic control until only ten years ago. It seems to me very likely that Mississippi has been much more thoroughly shaped by its nearly 200 years of Democratic rule than by ten years of GOP control of the state government.

 

Democrats ran Mississippi from 1817 until 2012, effectively as a single-party state for much of that time. The term “red state” is used — intentionally, I think — to conflate how a state votes in presidential elections with how the state is governed, and by whom.

 

With all due consideration to my friends who have invested a great deal in the term “red state,” I think it is time to retire this misleading formulation.