Charles Lipson offers rich insights into the current controversy over proposed federal vaccine mandates.  Kudos for providing historical context and perspective in this confusing time.  His article at Real Politics is The Deep Politics of Vaccine Mandates.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The debate over President Biden’s vaccine mandates has focused, understandably, on the tradeoff between individual rights to make medical choices and the potential harm the unvaccinated pose to others. That tradeoff is unavoidable. It is simply wrong for Biden to say, “It’s not about freedom.” It is. It is equally wrong for some Republican governors to say it is all about freedom. It’s also about the external effects of each person’s choice. To pretend that tradeoff doesn’t exist is demagoguery. But then, so is most American politics these days.

What’s missing or underappreciated in this debate?

The most important thing is that the Biden administration’s “mandate approach” is standard-issue progressivism. The pushback is equally standard. The mandates exemplify a dispute that has been at the heart of American politics for over a century, ever since Woodrow Wilson formulated it as a professor and then president. That agenda emphasizes deference to

• • Experts, not elected politicians,
  • Rational bureaucratic procedures,
  • Centralized power in the nation’s capital, not in the federal states, and
  • A modern, “living constitution,” which replaces the “old” Constitution of 1787 and severs the restraints it imposed on government power.

Implemented over several decades, this progressive agenda has gradually become a fait accompli, without ever formally amending the Constitution. The bureaucracies began their massive growth after World War II and especially after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the mid-1960s (continued, with equal vigor, by Richard Nixon).

The judicial shackles were broken earlier, when Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. Although FDR never followed through, his threat did the trick. The justices yielded to his pressure and began rubber-stamping New Deal programs that, until then, they had rejected as unconstitutional. Gradually, the older judges retired and Roosevelt picked friendly replacements. These judicial issues have reemerged now that progressives no longer dominate the Supreme Court. They are again threatening to pack the court and demanding that today’s justices stick with precedents set by their progressive predecessors (“stare decisis”).

The pushback against vaccine mandates is partly a debate about these progressive issues concerning the president’s authority and constitutional strictures. Mandate opponents say the federal government lacks the constitutional authority to impose these requirements, at least beyond its own workforce. They add that, if the president does wish to impose new rules, he and his executive agencies must go through the normal regulatory process. That process is slow — indeed, too slow to cope with an emergency.

Biden himself seemed to recognize these constitutional limitations before deciding to ignore them — the second time he’s done so in his brief presidency.

That’s a very troubling development, even if the courts overrule his decisions. The first time was his fiat decision to extend the moratorium on rent payments, which had been imposed during the worst days of the pandemic. Biden explicitly stated his unconstitutional rationale: It would take the courts time to rule against him and, until then, he could implement the policy. Of course, he also had a political rationale: to placate his party’s far left, which had mobilized over this issue.

Biden’s extension on the rent moratorium had a second, troubling dimension. It was promulgated by the Centers for Disease Control as a “public health issue.” That was a transparently false rationale in summer 2021 and dealt with housing issues far beyond the CDC’s expertise. The unintended consequence of the moratorium extension, beyond bankrupting small landlords, is to undermine the basic rationale for all progressive rulemaking: that the rules are being made by experts who know much more about their specialized area than do ordinary citizens or their elected representatives. What, pray tell, do experts on infectious disease know about the complexities of the U.S. housing market? Zero.

Progressive politics depends on public acceptance that experts really know what’s best and that their decisions will produce good outcomes. But trust in experts has collapsed alongside trust in all American institutions over the past half-century. The turning point was the disastrous war in Vietnam, advocated by LBJ’s Harvard advisers and the Whiz Kids in Robert McNamara’s Pentagon. Their failure was captured in the title of David Halberstam’s 1973 bestseller, “The Best and the Brightest.” The calamitous Afghan withdrawal underscored Halberstam’s sarcastic point.

So did the failure of so many Great Society programs, begun with such hope and fanfare.

The most painful experience was “urban renewal,” especially the massive program of building high-rise towers for welfare recipients. Before those towers were torn down, they had destroyed two or three generations of families. Part of the tragedy was that, like so many federal programs, the towers were built everywhere at once. If they had been tried out in a few cities, the problems would have been obvious, the failures remedied or the program abandoned. But Washington almost never does that. Congress funds and the bureaucracies implement mammoth, nationwide programs with no opportunity for feedback or mid-course corrections.

As public mistrust of institutions grew, a few institutions initially escaped the scorn. The military, for instance, was highly regarded until recently. It will take a heavy blow from the Afghan failure and the new, high-priority program of ideological training for troops. Government health officials were also highly regarded, at least until the botched rollout of Obamacare and the scandals at Veterans’ Affairs hospitals. Still, the public trusted the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci at the beginning of the pandemic. They trust them far less today, thanks to false and misleading statements, secrecy about funding the Wuhan virology lab, the absence of clear guidance on many issues, and blunt regulations that ignore important variations, such as natural immunity.

The effect of this growing mistrust was painfully apparent in President Biden’s mandate announcement. He didn’t rely on persuasion or trust in federal experts. He hectored, demonized, shamed, politicized, and threatened. That has become his routine, along with his refusal to answer the public’s pressing questions.

Biden’s political problem is that he faces real resistance from voters if he can’t solve the COVID problem, both because it is so serious and because he ran on being able to handle it better than Trump. Since Biden’s speech last week spent a lot of time attacking Republican governors, it was also an exercise in preemptive blame-shifting, in case the mandates fail.

His approach makes political sense, but it has at least two problems beyond the constitutional questions. One is that it politicizes vaccinations, which could have unintended consequences. Among the most obvious, it shifts the issue away from doctors and public health professionals and into the contentious political arena. Another is that it raises questions about the administration’s hypocrisy. Why do all federal employees, including those with natural immunity, need to get vaccinations but not the illegal immigrants arriving from Central America? That’s clearly a political decision, not a medical one, and it undermines the legitimacy of Biden’s whole approach, which stresses public health and medical experts.

The president’s speech had another major feature: It relied on vitriolic “wedge politics.” But Biden was elected partly because he promised to end the vitriol and divisiveness of the Trump years. He hasn’t done that. The poster child for his tendentious governing strategy is the second, $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” bill. Not only does it have no Republican support, it has met serious resistance from centrist Democrats.

On his signature spending bills, like his vaccine mandates, Biden is pursuing a unilateral, aggressively partisan approach.

There’s no question the delta variant poses serious health risks and that, in general, vaccinations help both the individuals who get the jab and everyone around them. But there are serious questions about whether sticks or carrots are the best way to increase vaccination rates; how to convince people to get the vaccine now that trust in public-health experts has eroded; whether politicizing the issue is self-defeating; and what authority Washington has to impose mandates beyond its own workforce. The questions about the federal government’s authority — its effectiveness, its constitutionality, and its potential overreach — are among the most important in American politics. They have been for a century, and they won’t be resolved anytime soon.

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.

Jack Butler writes an article The Myth of the Red Pill in the National Review.  I won’t go into all the nuances and various meanings attached to being redpilled, blue- or blackpilled, but want to reblog his discussion about how cyberspace is now awash with tweets from people, left and right, who believe they and they alone are “woke” in either the progressive, post-modern sense, or the opposite. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Adherents believe that their apparent online numbers, purportedly sophisticated ideas, and supposed influence in real-world politics point both to their being correct and the emerging conservative paradigm. All of these things are hard to measure, not just because of the amorphous quality of online interaction, but also because of the many layers of irony and memery in which believers conceal themselves. Still, it is undoubtedly true that none of this would have happened at all without the Internet. This fact is often interpreted favorably: The nature of physical reality, it is claimed, makes the kind of conversation they want to have ever harder, so anything worth saying is now being said digitally.

But the Internet is at least as much of a constrictor of thought for the redpilled as it is a facilitator, if not more so.

Many of the redpilled think of themselves as possessing a kind of unique energy, unavailable to the rest of the Right. It is quite easy to convince yourself of that if you spend all day marinating in carefully curated digital environments, associating mostly with people who agree with you, and letting your real-world interactions, such as they are, be flavored either actively or passively by your experiences online. Insularity is an ancient human temptation, one the Internet has, surprisingly, exacerbated.

The Internet may have begun with the promise of freewheeling sharing of information and interaction, but in the realm of the redpilled, Twitter is a place for collectivized, digital mass action. Believing that tweets are a serious and desirable form of political activism, they glory in the dopamine rush of likes and retweets, call for ratios of opinions they deem unacceptable, and take all of these things as signs that they are advancing their cause instead of adding tiny bits of ember to a fiery digital hellscape.

There are some things worth remembering about Twitter.

According to a 2019 Pew Research survey, 22 percent of Americans use Twitter daily. In 2021, Twitter itself measured 199 million daily active users on the site. This sounds like a lot, but only 38 million of those users are in the U.S. (11 percent of our population). By this measure, Twitter’s total active user base is about 2.5 percent of the world’s population. Pew’s 2019 estimate also says that 80 percent of tweets come from 10 percent of users. One study estimates that anywhere from 9 to 15 percent of Twitter users are bots; 66 percent of all links on Twitter come from bots. All of this speaks to a world that is not merely self-referential but also self-reinforcing. It sucks people in, convinces them that it is normal, and then brings out the worst in them as they engage in futile conversations that are hopelessly skewed by unrepresentative samples of human beings and disguised machines.

Like much of modern media, Twitter shrinks our attention spans while bombarding us with things we might not otherwise have ever known or cared about and on which we have no influence. This is to say nothing of the political slant of Twitter. As Brian Riedl put it (in a tweet; Twitter has its uses), “Twitter users are D+15 — which would tie HI & VT for the most liberal state . . . the 10% of Twitter users who post 92% of all tweets are D+43 — which would make it America’s 2nd most liberal House district.”

This skew can breed, in those who believe it to be representative, a highly agitated and combative posture.

It can make them think that America is already lost; this is called a “black pill” (the pill boxes of the redpilled are overflowing). It can make them believe that persuasion and workaday politics are inadequate to the moment, that only desperate action, often involving a departure from the constitutional order necessitated by the one already undertaken by opposing political forces, can bring any hope of salvation. It can make them believe that the political sphere is or should be a source of salvation — if only their enemies can be crushed. And so it can make them believe that only a countervailing force, similarly drawing strength from the online world and sharing many of its opponents’ attributes, can possibly contest it. In this way, the hyperpolarization and acute antagonisms of Twitter feed off each other, require each other, and may in fact reflect each other. Some of what happens on Twitter may be somewhat indicative of the real world. But there’s also the fact that Tay, Microsoft’s AI Twitter account whose personality was formed from Twitter interactions, within a day became a suicidal, sex-crazed, Nazi teenage girl. So much for reflecting reality.

The point of the original red pill in The Matrix was to escape an artificially created digital world. But now, redpilling is a phenomenon that depends on digital interactions. It also deceives its adherents about reality itself, discoloring or even discouraging their existence in the physical world. It is from this key inconsistency that so many of their fallacies flow — not least of which is their compulsive use of online platforms that they deem so pernicious they need to be regulated differently, broken up, or destroyed. Many of us nowadays struggle to restrain our use of technology. But that problem will not be solved by pretending that digital oversaturation is a virtue rather than a vice. Those who have trouble regulating themselves in this sphere make a curious authority for how to regulate it in society.

There is nothing magical about the online world. Like tools throughout mankind’s history, it can be used for good or evil ends. Facilitating communication, simplifying access to information — such things have their uses. But the test of something’s verity is not whether it goes viral. And as a digital form of gnosticism, redpilling has plenty of other defects that have weakened its utility. For one thing, as Shullenberger notes, it now exists in a kind of knowing game with its opponents: “The bluepilled regard the redpilled as deluded by misinformation, while the redpilled regard the bluepilled as dupes of the establishment.” Clearly, viewing the world as trapped in a digital binary is a dead end.

Whatever usefulness the red pill may once have had as a metaphor, it has now become a cliché at the same time that it has become a kind of twisted faith. It does not liberate its believers but rather constrains them, trapping them in digital worlds of their own creation. There are superior forms of conservatism, ones that appeal to reason and to more reliable forms of knowledge and authority. Curious minds would be better served letting the redpilled send themselves down endless rabbit holes, and instead pursue forms of learning and action that have a bit more to do with the world above the ground.