We Know What You Did Last Summer
Alex Berenson & Yours Truly on 2021’s Mass Apostasy from Rights-Based Democracy
Do you celebrate anniversaries of your most shameful moments?
It’s the one-year anniversary of the turn to mandate/passport policy, that is, of the period I labelled as so “vile,” that if you closed your eyes, you could practically feel the enemy advancing into our lives.
In terms more suited to my political scientist mode, it was the period of a mass apostasy from rights-based democracy, a renunciation of several of its key principles. (In my book, “rights-based” democracy means basically the same thing as liberal democracy or American democracy.)
The odd thing, however, is that this apostasy was so often a slinking one. Its leaders did not openly and proudly announce, like a Vladimir Lenin or Carl Schmitt would have, their breaking with rights-based democracy in favor of something new. And nowadays, although a few progressivists like Washington governor Jay Inslee and New York City mayor Eric Adams are still issuing new mandate rules or are insisting, like our vindictive commander-in-chief, on the full enforcement of ones still on the books, most are silent about the set of policies they were so insistent upon last summer, fall, and winter, seeking to pretend that what happened was no big-deal, that everyone-that-counts knew that that was what had to be done, even though that same special “everyone” now agrees that it is past time to move on from them, and especially, from talking about them.
Hence the recent skullduggery and horror-movie evoking headline by a top vax-harm writer, Alex Berenson, published this last week:
I know what you did last summer (and fall). You tried to take away my rights and segregate me. And no, you don't get to pretend you didn't.
Indeed. But there are a few shades of detail to add here. A picture of higher definition reveals that the apostate “you” in this scene should be analytically seen as several distinct groups, guilty of differing degrees of democracy-renouncing sin.
So let’s clarify a few terms used in, and assumptions embedded in, my own headline.
We: those of us who, regardless of our opinions at the time about the safety and effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaxxes, openly opposed mandating them, or attaching “passports” to them, understanding that such edicts would violate several fundamental principles of rights-based democracy.
The most important of these principles: a single class of citizenship (see Justice Harlan’s full dissent against Plessy v. Ferguson), and the medical autonomy and informed consent of the individual.
You: one who 1) knew mandate policy would ditch these principles, but judged that that was fine even if you didn’t intend to admit it, or 2) one who did not understand this, because you got so caught up in the Narrative about Covid-19 safety, perhaps presuming the “top experts” would not be calling for this were it really contrary to our political tradition, or 3) one who did suspect or know mandates contradicted rights-based democracy, but did not voice or manifest your opposition in any serious manner, out of fear of what the majority, or your boss, would do to you.
In other words, you were either a slinking, an unwitting, or a de facto apostate.
And I remind the unwitting apostate: you are an adult citizen of democracy. You are rightly expected to maintain the kind of civics-knowledge that will keep you from endorsing panicky acts of rules-chucking hatred. You are not expected to be expert in everything, but you are responsible for not allowing egregious ignorance to develop about certain topics, especially when this deafness involves your closing your ears to whole classes of your fellow citizens. I.e., you are expected to avoid what R.J. Snell describes as “dishonorable stupidity,” as C.J. Wolfe sketches in his post below.
Berenson describes last summer’s shift into anti-democracy evil this way:
Governments and media outlets dropped their efforts to persuade unvaccinated people to take the shots voluntarily. Instead they began a coordinated worldwide effort to demonize the unvaccinated and press or flat-out force them to take the shots.
(Most apostate persons, it is important to stress, never went over the Rubicon of calling for a program of “flat-out” forcible vaccination. Yes, backing the unvaxxed into a corner where they could not work most jobs, and were additionally threatened in some places (e.g., Austria) with impoverishment via fines, was pretty close to calling for forcible vaccination. But it remained a distinction, and thus, it is important to remember that a few public figures did go over that line: Berenson has a screen-shot of a since-deleted tweet by the supposedly political-science-y and concerned-about-democracy pundit Matthew Yglesias saying that, absent the likely political disadvantages to the progressivist brand, he would advocate for forcible vaccinations of the unwilling, and I remind you that longtime market-commentator Jim Cramer even less-qualifiedly called for this [11/30/21-see youtube])1
More happy Berenson memories of what began last July:
Mandates requiring Covid vaccination for employment - even for people who worked from home.
Travel restrictions or bans, including border restrictions and the use of local public transportation.
Bans on shopping, going to restaurants or bars, watching live sporting events or movies or other recreation.
Requiring vaccination as a condition of college attendance - again, even for students who were only online.
…Health “ethicists” even seriously debated whether people who had chosen not to be vaccinated should be denied routine medical care or even sent to the back of the line for emergency treatment.
I agree with Berenson’s basic judgment of all of this:
The hatred - no other word will do, really - that underlay this effort cannot be ignored.
There are various kinds of hatred, and I would be among the first to agree that a racist hatred of a bogeyman-version of blacks was, and would be, a worse kind of hatred than an ideological hatred of a bogeyman-version of vax-skeptics. That said, I hold that for America, the embrace of mandate-policy was the greatest mass apostasy from rights-based democracy since the days of legal segregation, and that it did involve a serious form of hatred.
Historians with a sense of proportion might prefer us to compare the apostasy of 2021 with similarly shorter-lived episodes of injustice, such as the WWII-era persecutions of Japanese-Americans and Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’d agree, but it should be noted that in both of those episodes, the number of persons persecuted was much smaller.
All in all, I say you should face what President Clinton did when apologizing for the WWII internments,
In retrospect, we understand that the nation’s actions were rooted deeply in racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a lack of political leadership. We must learn from the past and dedicate ourselves as a nation to renewing the spirit of equality and our love of freedom. [emphasis added]
Replace “wartime” with “pandemic-time,” and “racial prejudice” with “ideological prejudice,” and these words might be used in your apology today. For yes, you really stood against the “spirit of equality” and a common “love of freedom” in 2021.
Or, do you intend to endorse, by a continued silence, and perhaps also by a continued quibbling,2 the significant steps taken last summer away from rights-based democracy?
You justified those steps in the name of safety, in the name of an even-then rather questionable theory about the virus and “vaxxes” that has since proven quite mistaken. (And you didn’t call for public debates about that theory, did you?) But I say that even if that theory had proven correct—such that vaccinated status was not at present a greater predictor of susceptibility to Covid-19 infection than unvaccinated status is—, you still would have been guilty of betraying democracy’s core principles.
For regardless of the medical science, that is the correct political science about the matter, and I am duty-bound to profess it.3 Good democrats greatly hesitate to suspend liberal democracy’s basic principles, and do all they can to oppose hasty and undeliberative decision-making about such suspensions, even when up against the threat of the Japanese military, or of a novel virus.4
And I look you in the eye and add this: you also betrayed the Golden Rule, and even the simple self-interested understanding of justice that thinkers like Hobbes and Locke sought to express with the idea of a social contract. At the core of that understanding are promises like: “you don’t endanger my life and liberty, and I won’t endanger yours, okay?” But you, you looked your fellow-citizen in the eye, and said, “you must comply, or become a second-class citizen, banned from many jobs, places, and platforms.”
Or rather, you charged your government agents and their corporate toadies with such dirty work, and averted your gaze.
Some of those you coerced have been maimed by the experimental injections, even killed.5 Do you not understand then, how you, with your clinging to the “correct” opinions and “correct” silences, can be seen as a basic threat to the life and liberty of those who declined vaccination, or of those who wanted to decline, but bowed under your pressure? You broke the most-basic aspect of the social contract. You should not be surprised if these persons begin to think of you as their enemy, which makes your continuing to act as if you were their mere “political opponent” in the pre-2020 sense, largely irrelevant to them. They are done with that charade. Their jobs are on the line. Basic dignities. Lives. And the survival of democracy, too.
Yes, the Jesus who charged his followers to obey the Golden Rule also charged them to love their enemies, but nowhere can we find a verse that justifies what you did, the making of yourselves into enemies of others. Nowhere does He say, “Go, and do like the Roman soldier who abuses the people, and the tax collector who cheats them.”
It looks like the shameful episode is winding down and won’t become a ninety-year stain the way segregation did. Despite the continuance of several mandate policies by (D) despots Inslee, Adams, and Biden, the Great Mandate Experiment of ‘21 has for months been dribbling away amid embarrassed and tactical silences.
But given this quietness, we’re not sure that the passing of this particular manifestation of democracy-betrayal signifies any return or repentance. That is, we do not know what the many guilty parties are now going to do, but we do know of a danger that comes when crimes against democracy remain unconfessed: the leaders’ temptation will be to elude public judgment by getting new crimes underway, ones that will again stain much of the populace with a kind of complicity. I’d bet that some of these leaders are presently coordinating their new talking points, and their new crisis-narrative, that they intend to try out on you soon, perhaps before the midterms.
But as for last summer, we know what you did.
Do you?
Cramer and Yglesias are thus perfect examples of the person I have categorized as the slinking apostate. Try as they might to obscure the matter now, they revealed that at the moment when despotism was making the most headway against rights-based democracy, that they would lend it their aide. They apparently want a quasi-democracy characterized by regular fits of tyranny-of-the-majority and by constant administrative command. Of course, neither of them have the forthrightness to admit this. Instead, they will feign outrage at anyone who spells out what they plainly revealed themselves to be. And were they to apologize and offer repentance, at this point that could only be accepted by their agreeing to largely drop out of public life—no more airtime, employment, or publications from respectable institutions. We should not hesitate to label their position on forcible vaccinations circa 2021 to have been a near-Nazi one, and the institutions who continue to elevate them as the employers of democracy-enemies. We might also note that while Cramer’s fig-leaf in this matter—some unworkable scheme of courts issuing a religious exemption for a select few—was less rhetorically clever than Yglesias’s (which was “I would only advocate this if knew public opinion were not to have any say about it”), the latter’s being a front-line opinion journalist for progressivism, and someone who helped start Vox, makes his failure here all the more damnable. Nor is this the first time Yglesias has been guilty of pushing for, at key moments of uncertainty, the injection of raw hatred into the progressivist line. One or two such sins could be warily forgiven, but no more. I once did a take-down of his contemptibly irresponsible “constitutionalism” he offered in his piece that purported to fret about the death of liberal democracy, back in 2015, which documented his penchant for “no enemies to the left” deployment of hate. And this--make no mistake: this really was near-Nazism, and a “give-up-on-democracy” moment. Yglesias has now permanently excluded himself from the conversation of the decent and democratic.
“No vax-resisters were interned like the Japanese-Americans were, and their property was not scooped up when they had to sell in a hurry.” True, quibbler. True, person-who-desires-to-avoid-confronting-the-main-subject. Do you wish to continue in this ? If so, I will ask you about confinements that did happen in ’21 that did not quite amount to internment in certain parts of Australia or Europe; and then, I will ask you this: “How many Japanese-Americans died or were sickened-to-disablement within a few years because of what was done to them?” The answer is not zero, but the numbers are nowhere near the tens-of-thousands of those coerced into taking the vax who wound up killed or maimed by it.
Have you taught U.S. Constitutional Law, as I have? Have you worked at academic institutions like UVA’s Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy, as I have? Do you know books like The Federalist Papers, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Aristotle’s Politics backwards and forwards, as I do? “Political science” is often used as punchline by lockdown-opponents, as in “‘6ft is safe, 5ft is dangerous,’ is not confirmed by any scientific study, but is a truth of political science!” But I insist that the real thing exists, despite all the corruption that shapes many a political science department, and that it condemns the mandate policies of ‘21.
I agree with the prominent biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein that while we can imagine pandemic situations so dire as to make quick decisions by the appointed representative bodies to temporarily require something like a vaccine passport constitutionally legitimate and the right thing to do, the Covid-19 one never came close to rising to this level. So correct (and thus liberal-democracy supportive) political science can posit in theory a situation in which temporary passports and perhaps even certain highly-tailored (say, for medical personnel) mandates would not constitute a violation of liberal democracy’s core principles, but clearly, what was done in 2021 was such a violation. The lack of concern displayed by many supposedly liberal governments to carefully explain the constitutional justification for the extraordinary 2021 measures must also be noted here.
Here is one of the latest comprehensive reviews of evidence by Steve Kirsch, which will give you some sense of how large the true numbers may be. My essay here, by contrast, is a distinct discussion of the greatest political sin of the overall Covid/Vax Disaster. It is not the only political sin of that Disaster. Moreover, the two very greatest sins of it all, the Development of a Dangerous Vaccine and the Refusal to Investigate the Vax Harms are primarily medical sins, not strictly political ones. Especially with the first of those two, they do not involve the participation of the masses in the commission of the injustice in question—which the Mandate-Policy Apostasy against Democracy has. But because they will eventually be understood to have taken the lives of millions, they will be regarded as the greatest of the sins. Eventually, I’ll have a full essay here on the Seven Deadly Sins of the Covid/Vax Disaster, where I will venture beyond what political-science alone can pronounce. But do not underestimate the weightiness of what it does say even about this one sin considered apart from the others.
Bravo!