Russian roulette, American style

A certain portion of the people of the United States, a minority but not a small one, seems embarked on collective delusions that have devolved, among other things, into a national suicide mission. The actions and attitudes toward Covid-19 are a prime example.

A lot has been written about the government’s response to the pandemic without, in my mind, ever identifying the central cause of the disaster, the primary tumor: the ultra-capitalist model of society that has come to dominate and pervade America to a much greater extent than other capitalist nations, making us a perfect target. Solidarity is the first defense against a pandemic and ultra-capitalism is the opposite of solidarity. But that is a deep dive, as they say, and here I am going to concentrate on a single aspect, the psychology that corresponds to ultra-capitalism, specifically the response of that sector of the population that has decided to live as if Covid-19 did not exist.

This is the anti-masker and the anti-vaxxer crowd who considers refusing to wear a mask or take a vaccine a point of pride and a core freedom. Certain ideas don’t seem to occur to them. Do you really want to play American-style Russian roulette by declining vaccination? If so, why don’t you do the real thing and get it over with quickly instead of suffering a slow, agonizing death? And have you ever thought that your free exercise of a trivial choice like not wearing a mask could be the death of me, the end of my most basic freedom from which all the others derive?

For a long time, I have thought of the Republican Party as the party of organized selfishness, which would explain why Republicans are less worried about spreading a deadly disease than giving up a banal freedom.

It turns out there is a pattern that structures whether you belong to Universe A, in which science is generally the best route to truth, vaccines are essential to personal and national wellbeing, the media basically reports the truth as far as they know it, and American elections are mostly honest affairs; or Universe B, the inverse of Universe A. In Universe B, the road to truth is through revelation, religious revelation or revelation of the dark conspiracies and the deep, secret state that determines and defines everything, including elections and the contents of the media.

What possible logical connection could there be between vaccination and political affiliation, the woman from Mars might ask.

Yet there is. NPR has recently reported that:

• The top 22 states (including D.C.) with the highest adult vaccination rates all went to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
•  Some of the least vaccinated states are the most pro-Trump. Trump won 17 of the 18 states with the lowest adult vaccination rates.
• Trump supporters are the least likely to say they have been vaccinated or plan to be.
•  Many of these states have high proportions of whites without college degrees.
• Trump got vaccinated in private before leaving the White House, but that was reported months later.

What explains this pattern? A few decades ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified what he called “the paranoid style in American politics.” Think Joe McCarthy. That style has since grown and metastasized and we have now paranoid regions, paranoid subcultures, and a paranoid political party.

Paranoids often focus on imagined dangers while ignoring real ones. Covid-19 has killed around 610,000 Americans, perhaps substantially more given the tendency to undercount. We now have several vaccines that are available, free, safe, and effective in preventing death from the virus, and millions of people adamantly refuse or simply decline to take it, many claiming they don’t trust the shot, or the government, or anything at all.

This amounts to a perfect storm brewing for the continuation of a tragedy which at the start could have been minimized (assuming a socioeconomic system [including health care] that gives greater priority to life than to profit) and could now be virtually ended through vaccination. Today, about 99 percent of the people dying in the U.S. from Covid are unvaccinated. Avoidable deaths: What is the point of this American-style Russian roulette and the extent of irrational resistance to safeguarding one’s life and that of others?

Vaccine paranoia, or what is politely referred to as vaccine hesitancy, is not restricted to any one area but is most prevalent in rural areas. The attitudes that underlie it could not be closer to the traits that Karl Marx attributed to nineteenth century European peasants under the term ‘the idiocy of rural life:’ “Hidebound conservatism, parochialism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, ignorance, distrust, economic risk aversion and the inability to cooperate with others in collective endeavors.”

Today, the least educated are the least vaccinated. The most supportive of the BIG RED LIAR are the most averse to being vaccinated. The logic linking these tendencies is elementary.

Yet perhaps there is another reason why so many people are willing to dance with death for no gain except the satisfaction of being an anti-government contrarian. Some people may rather die than live in a country in which they are no longer the sole masters. They may also be ready to kill for the same reason. The January 6 insurrection and vaccine aversion may be two sides of the coin of white desperation.

The irony is that no one is interested in making whites ride in the back of the bus. But some people are so used to being in the driver’s seat that anything else feels like being relegated to the back of the bus.

One is always free to choose to die, barring an illness that disables you from pulling a trigger, jumping off a bridge, or swallowing an overdose of pills. To those who offend us by feeling that they have lost their country because of our mere presence here, I say, I do not root for your self-destruction. Learn to live with us and to thrive with us. But do not try to place your knee on our neck. That, we will never again allow.