Speaking for millions of the perplexed or just plain fed up, Bill Kristol tweeted on Saturday that "many of the views, attitudes, prejudices, and pathologies of today's Right seem to have pretty obvious intellectual, cultural, sociological or psychological sources. But I'm kind of bewildered by the source of the fanatical and fevered reaction to masks and vaccines."
To Kristol's list I would add "religious" and "geographic" (more on these in a moment), which, combined with the aforementioned sources of extreme partisan petulance, together establish the "pathological" foundations of "today's Right." With these additions, Kristol's multisided musing about the Trump Party's fevered fanaticism over masks and vaccines assumes the singular form of a Möbius strip: one source (one side) loops ineluctably to the next, which flips to the next, and so on, all of which leads the diagnostician to both the starting and end point of — political pathology, or, pathological politics.
Bewilderment begone, though we are still left with an intensely petulant, immeasurably dangerous Right. (Which reminds me of another writer's tweeted quasi-bewilderment, that of Andrew Sullivan's on Friday: "It’s paradoxical for Biden to say that a) the vaccines work and b) the vaccinated should fear the unvaccinated. The second argument is largely untrue, and deeply divisive." The second argument is, in fact, profoundly correct, since the primary danger from the unvaccinated is the amplified chance of a Covid mutant impervious to vaccines' lifesaving effect.)
Disconcerting as it is, bewilderment eradication may be the best we can do. Notwithstanding its unhinged warnings and psychotic tics over the Biden administration's Gestapo-like tactics and other jackbooted tyrannies hellbent on enforcing a national vaccination campaign, the Right will succeed in averting official efforts to persuade. It will go right on behaving like the truculent, reckless, unpatriotic body it is; it will persist in threatening America.
For, as noted, in its politically pathological veins runs the immutable DNA of religious and geographic determinism — the mot virulent of all its noxious afflictions.
The modern American Right was born and swaddled in the antebellum, deeply "Christian" South, and there too was hatched American demagoguery on a vast scale — an elite core of politicians and propagandists at the top, bamboozling the rabble about Lincoln's tyrannical designs against the South's God-given, God-justified right to abuse and kill others while pissing on national unity and the furtherance of an enlightened, civilized society.
The madness took strong root, thus effectuating the sprawling Southernization of American politics — the long, sequential and painful history of which we need not review, given its universal familiarity. Now, here we are. In all its essence, the modern American Right writ large, but still of the antebellum, Christian South, still raging insanely against a president's tyrannical designs against its God-given right to abuse and kill others.
Having retained its regional concentration, the Right finds its malevolent voice most distinctly in Mississippi's Tate Reeves, Georgia's Brian Kemp, Florida's Ron DeSantis, Alabama's Kay Ivey, Texas' Greg Abbott and South Carolina's Henry McMaster. Together they have "declared war" on President Biden, his "blatantly unlawful overreach," his "outrageous" vaccine mandates, his "terrifying" "power grab"; they'll battle him, they say, "to the gates of hell." At least they won't have to go far.
Reinforcing their and the zealous rabble's malevolence toward all Americans is their Christian love. It's bad enough we must subsidize the Right's religious institutions of atavistic ignorance and petty prejudices through tax exemptions; we must also permit them to bodily assault conscientious Americans with claims of Godly fidelity. This, as is widely reported, shall be the Right's miraculous loophole to any national vaccination campaign. And they can play it in just about any manner they like.
As the Times relates: "The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has specified that religious objections do not have to be recognized by an organized religion and can be beliefs that are new, uncommon or 'seem illogical or unreasonable to others.'" I'll let that slide. Such objections "cannot, however, be based only on social or political beliefs." But good luck trying to separate the religious from the political among the artful dodgers of the Right. A cottage industry of snake-oiling, right-winging preachers will boom like the Oklahoma oil business in the 1920s. "An independent evangelist in Texas," for instance, "is offering letters [of religious objection] online in exchange for a donation."
Take them together — the Right's demagoguery of Southern yore against anything Bidenesque and its masses' professed obeisance to Christ's opposition to whatever may help others; a counterfeit, manipulative notion we and government must nevertheless "respect" merely because it is deemed religious — and what you get is a concerted, perfectly legal and above all successful resistance to the president's vaccination initiative.
America is reliving the sectional crisis of the 1800s: a national calamity geographically born of political grandstanding and sick theology. Once given these two essential sparks, anti-vaccination madness — an many other insanities — became inevitable. We should have seen it coming.