Vaccine Politics and American Decadence
RFK, vaccines, and what we're learning about American society.
Heads up: I did a Secret pod with Bill Kristol.
Level of darkness: Black Hole.
Not gonna lie: The dark bled into today’s newsletter where I posit that RFK’s appointment to head HHS—and his coming confirmation by Senate Republicans—reveals more about American society than any moment in the last four years.
You’ve been warned. Read at your own risk.
1. You’re on your own, kid
A coda to yesterday’s item about Tulsi Gabbard: In addition to the problems she will cause American intelligence, her appointment will also send shockwaves through allied intelligence groups.
Because absolutely no one is going to share intel with us once she’s at the top of the org chart.
Instead our allies will cobble together alternative working relationships that do not include America. Without a seat at those tables, decisions will start to be made without consideration of America’s interests.
Eventually those informal working relationships will be codified. And America will be on the outside looking in. Hostage to events with a diminished ability to shape them.
The logical endpoint is that Europe will have to fend for itself. Not just on intelligence, but everything.
If that is not already clear in Berlin, Paris, London, and Brussels, then it will be shortly. This will mean increased defense spending, rearmament on a massive scale, and nuclear buildup. Every European country will need its own deterrent.
It will also mean that the Pacific nations will have to come to their own arrangements with China. Because if the American public was not willing to shoulder the burden of merely shipping arms to Ukraine, then there is zero chance that we will be willing to go kinetic in the defense of Taiwan.
The era of strategic ambiguity is over.
Maybe there’s a silver lining?
Yes, the sunsetting of the Pax Americana is bad for the world.
But it’s better to understand this fact before the next war starts. At least Tulsi Gabbard’s appointment gives our erstwhile allies time to plan for the post-American world.
It would be much worse to have our allies still believe there was a chance America would continue its role as guarantor of the global order—only to find that they were mistaken when Putin and Xi finally rolled the dice.
Donald Trump has revealed the true character of the American people to our enemies, yes. But he has also revealed it to our allies. That is useful information for them to have.
Let’s hope they’re hard-headed enough to assimilate it and act.
2. Full Joker
One of the downstream consequences of Robert Kennedy’s appointment to head the Department of Health and Human Services is that vaccination rates in America will plummet.
Please understand that Kennedy is not a vaccine “skeptic.” He is opposed to all vaccines and claims that no vaccine is “safe.”
RFK’s formal merger with Trumpism will have the effect of making his view of vaccines a de rigueur tenet of MAGA politics. People who pledge fealty to Trumpism will discover that in addition to being required to believe that Trump won the 2020 election they are also required to oppose vaccinations of all types.
That’s coming. There’s no avoiding it.
And as sure as day follows night we will see the large-scale reappearance of preventable diseases such as measles and polio. Children will die.
But just like the alliance question above, there’s a silver lining here. Because the politicization of vaccines removes any ambiguity about the current character of American society.
Human history is not an unbroken line of progress. From time to time societies choose to disfigure themselves. A kind of civilizational self-mutilation.
The First World War is the most obvious example. The Iranian revolution is a more recent one; the French Revolution is probably the most famous.
When these paroxysms of self-hatred manifest they are usually the result of hardship or repression. Here was Dickens trying to explain both the horror and the inevitability of the French Revolution:
Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
The French aristocracy was so decadent and the state of les miserable so pitiable, that Dickens believed the Revolution could not have been avoided. French society mutilated itself because French society had already become disfigured and vile.
In America today we have quite the opposite proposition.
The mainstream opposition to vaccines has arisen not because of some medical catastrophe or failure, but in response to a scientific miracle.