The left should not gleefully champion the firing of unvaccinated workers

Watch as the culture wars destroy all we hold dear.

I have a very class-based view of politics: I believe that the powerful elites—wealthy corporate leaders, politicians, etc.—are doing everything they can to keep working class people down, middle class people in a haze, and Americans at each other’s throats. Jeff Bezos doesn’t want you to care about the conditions his warehouse workers and drivers face, he wants you to think about two-day shipping and what a dickhead your neighbor with his MAGA sign is.

This happens on an institutional level mostly rather than as part of some nefarious plan. It’s all too often carried out by the media, many of whom are mouthpieces for the powerful.

If we’re always bickering and arguing about who voted for who, we won’t ask for too much—for decent wages, job security, universal healthcare, an end to foolish, bloody wars—and instead we’ll spend all of our time trying to dunk on our political and cultural enemies. The heady concoction of culture wars and social media has intensified this age-old phenomenon in recent years. Trump was more of a symptom than a cause, but the kind of symptom that creates new waves of other symptoms.

Instead of worrying about how our time and labor and money are being exploited by the powers that be, we spend our time “owning the libtards” or cancelling problematic people on Twitter. Or writing ridiculous headlines like this:

Here is Amanda Marcotte not merely cheering the firing of unvaccinated people but urging our corporate and political leaders to do more of the same. She wants this because the people being fired, she believes, are “Trumpers” who need to “start tasting real consequences for their behavior” or we’ll soon face “another dark winter, as the virus continues to wreak havoc on our economy and health care system.”

Putting up with staffing shortages, she argues, “is a small price to pay to make sure that Trumpers — a class of people clearly unused to the idea that actions have consequences — actually start feeling real pressure to get vaccinated.”

Liberals love to talk tough about how actions have consequences these days, but most of the time they simply mean that if you don’t think like them, act like them or believe the things they do, you should be cancelled or fired or worse. I’ve seen lots of gloating over the deaths of “Trumpers” who succumbed to the virus. Since when did we stop valuing human life—while at the same time pretending we care so much that we have to fire anyone who doesn’t get the vaccine?

Marcotte hand-waves away the racial disparities in vaccination rates so that she can continue to push the narrative that all unvaccinated people—who must be threatened with termination post-haste—are “right-wingers who have made refusal to get vaccinated a culture war and identity politics issue” blissfully ignoring the fact that she is making the vaccine a culture war and identity politics issue. Sure, I find some of the crazy shit right-wingers say about the vaccine and masks pretty damn ridiculous, but I don’t think you change hearts and minds by beating people over the head with a stick.

You don’t create a better world by engaging wholesale in the culture wars to the point that you gleefully cheer on the firing of workers whose politics are different than your own, ignoring the fact that many of these people are minorities and that many of the people being fired will not receive unemployment and that the consequences she’s so eager for them to face could include no longer being able to pay rent, put food on the table for the kids or have access to healthcare.

Marcotte may be correct that the New York mandate has led to many more people getting vaccinated. But I would like to also point out that those people who didn’t, and who lost their jobs because of it, were working in a state where the 7-day average death toll for COVID-19 is currently 15.

15 people in a state with a population of over 19 million.

There’s a 7-day average of 1,620 new cases of the disease in New York State. This is hardly “wreaking havoc” territory. New York was not facing a “dark winter” with over 80% of healthcare workers vaccinated (and who knows how many more with natural immunity from having had the disease already). Other places—much of the South, for instance, where laid-off healthcare workers may want to consider relocating to—are facing a much more dire winter, of course. Which is why everyone should get vaccinated!

Meanwhile, the powers-that-be grow more powerful. Workers get the shaft. And the professional scolds of the world write haughty hot-takes while smugly patting themselves on the back for a job well done.

P.S. The 7-day-average for vaccine doses currently in the US is hovering around 624,000. People are getting the vaccine en masse to this day. Some of these are people who have come around after previous skepticism. Some are required to by their employers. This is all great news. I simply do not see the need for broad, sweeping actions from governments or punitive measures like firing unvaccinated workers via governor or presidential edict (some businesses are taking a gentler approach by putting workers on leave until they get vaccinated).

---

I’ll leave you with two pictures. The first is the key art from the Salon piece. The second is of Lisabeth Johnson, a nurse at Hebrew Home at Riverdale in New York receiving the vaccine. Square these two images in your mind.

What the scolds picture when they think “unvaccinated American.”

An actual IRL unvaccinated American finally getting the jab.

Thanks for reading.