This is an Interesting Thesis

With Joe Biden instituting vaccine mandates, but we've seen the overwhelming majority of anti-vaxxers have capitulated without a whimper.

Over at the Editorial Board, John Stoehr has an interesting explanation for this, which is basically that authoritarians are hard wired to kowtow to authority, so coercive authority is the most effective way to deal with them.

Mr. Stoehr is a bit bombastic, but I thought that it merits sharing with my reader(s).

There is a part of me that sees this as a simplistic analysis which essentially demonizes the right, but the empirical data, which shows that less than 1% of the workforce is walking, not the ~20% the doomsayers predicted.

Certainly, there are a lot of people out there who do not want to be making their own decisions, but the exact number, and their distribution across the political spectrum is still largely a matter of conjecture:

Monday was the deadline here in Connecticut for state employees to get vaccinated, per order of the governor, Ned Lamont. The state press corps spent last week speculating about the number of workers who’d walk off the job before being forced to get the shot. Attention settled on school bus drivers. Around 500,000 children depend on them. Reporters asked the Lamont administration what it would do if thousands of kids were left stranded. But by Monday, it was clear that the vast majority of drivers complied with the law.

A similar pattern played out across the country. Deadlines were imposed. Blood oaths were taken. Anxieties grew. Americans of seemingly sound mind swore they’d never get vaccinated against their will. Then — obedience. The people who said they’d never do what they were told did what they were told. The people with so many “reasons” for being against vaccines forgot all about those “reasons.” The people whose identities were built on “beliefs” decided those “beliefs” weren’t as important as the consequences of keeping them.

What lessons can we draw from this? Most importantly, Americans with authoritarian tendencies are weak. They don’t know how to make decisions independent of authority figures in their lives (whoever they may be). Because of this, they fear making the wrong choice. They fear the humiliation and pain they believe comes with being wrong. Legally enforceable mandates make the choice easy by making the choice for them. Authoritarians are weak. Vaccine mandates helped save face.

Second, they don’t want freedom. Yes, I know. They say they want freedom. They say they will die for it. They won’t, though. They won’t do anything demanding sacrifice. What they want is the sense of community that comes with belonging to an authoritarian collective that does, in its own way, what mandates do — choose for them. So while they say they want freedom, what they desire is being told what to do. They don’t have the skills. Coercion and force come as a relief.

………

The appropriate response, therefore, is not what liberals normally think it should be. Liberals typically try to understand fear. We typically try to feel empathy. That’s why, after Donald Trump was elected, all those stories about “economic anxiety” made sense. We were trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. They were not domestic enemies. They were victims of unfettered capitalism. I hope all of us, but liberals especially, draw the right lesson from the fact that nearly all of these people caved under legal pressure. The political answer to authoritarian weakness isn’t compassion. It’s coercion and force.

As I noted the essay is a bit over the top, but the evidence supports this assertion.

Also, my (famously unreliable) gut agrees with him.  

To quote Natalie Manes, "I'm not ready to make nice," and to quote Andy Partridge, "People will always be tempted to wipe their feet on anything with 'welcome' written on it."