Is This Teenage Rite of Passage Actually Incipient Fascism?
Right now, tens of millions of Americans are excluded from vital daily activities that make up the fabric of social belonging: gathering in bars, holding certain jobs, taking their children to school or an elderly relative to a doctor’s appointment, or even picking up groceries to feed their family.
The demographics of these Americans who have been ruthlessly shunted to the fringes by the power of the state are disproportionately among the most vulnerable – the young, the old, the poor and people of color. Worse still, this policy choice is enforced by police officers with an alarming tendency towards capricious violence.
I’m talking, of course, about driver’s licenses. Almost 100 million Americans don’t have them, according to the most recent federal data, or about 30% of the U.S. population.
The 70% of Americans who do have a driver’s license is a proportion that, it just so happens, is effectively identical to the number of people in the U.S. over 18 years old who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19.
The point here isn’t just to be a trollish smart-aleck – although that’s part of the fun of having a newsletter – it’s to put the recent wave of Covid-19 vaccine mandates in the context of other widespread regulations of daily life that exist in the U.S.
Considered in that context, it’s fairly obvious that Covid-19 vaccine mandates are well within the realm of ordinary government rules and regulations.
Indeed, if you think about Covid-19 vaccine mandates in the context of where the vast majority of people will actually encounter them – at work – they’re even more humdrum.
The modern workplace is filled with all sorts of impositions, ranging from the inane to the indefensible. Millions of mostly low-wage American workers have no idea when they will be required to work more than a few days in advance. Stories of workers peeing in bottles because of the unrelenting demands of their jobs – and their managers’ refusal to accommodate their employees’ most basic needs – are common. For years, Amazon has required warehouse workers to go through security screenings as they enter their workplace while refusing to pay them for the time they spend waiting in line, a practice the Supreme Court upheld.
It’s not just that vaccine mandates are a very tolerable addition to the litany of daily injustices faced by American workers. Vaccine mandates are good for workers, a form of work-place and personal safety during a pandemic. And they are not, predominantly, a form of exclusion. One of the reasons employer Covid-19 vaccine mandates are so worthwhile is that they are more effective at getting employees to get vaccinated than they are at throwing recalcitrant workers out of there jobs, because, in the end, there are simply a very small number of the latter group.
A North Carolina hospital system fired 175 employees for failing to comply with it’s mandate, a Washington Post headline blared. The rest of its 35,000 employees, the story noted, complied. Ahead of the vaccine mandate for federal contractors, several dozen Northrop Grumman employees protested. Several dozen! Northrop Grumman has 90,000 employees in the U.S. It’s incredibly important for reporters and readers to pay attention to the denominator.
Mandates will be rockier to implement in some places. New York City’s mandate is looking like a headache, but a manageable one, because some of its municipal workers belong to an entrenched culture of not wanting to do what people tell them or are effectively partisan Republicans, if not both.
For a political culture obsessed with convincing the opposition that you’re right and an economy that subjects workers to all sorts of indignities, vaccine mandates offer a unique hope.
Covid-19 vaccines cost workers as much (nothing) and are as widely available as good healthcare ought to be under other circumstances. In an era defined by elite failures, they offer a chance for mistrusted institutions to do something that will help people, even if they only recognize it as such after the fact.
And for those people who are so committed to their anti-vaxx persona that getting a shot is a sort of social death, mandates offer a peculiar kind of off-ramp. A Staten Island teacher who went as far as attending an anti-vaccine protest and talking to a reporter about her stance, conceded that she would comply with a city mandate rather than lose her job.
Or take ESPN’s Sage Steele. Her employer’s mandate paradoxically allowed her to preserve her opposition to mandates, while still getting vaccinated. “I didn't want to do it,” she said. “But I work for a company that mandates it, and I had until September 30 to get it done, or I'm out.”
Morally, her convictions are unblemished – she’s just blaming the whole thing on her shitty employer. That’s easy enough for anyone to empathize with. After all, who hasn’t done something they didn’t want to do because they needed to keep their job?