I wanted to call this Vaccine Death Drive
Right-wing activists keep dying of COVID. Has the far right turned the Republican party into a suicide club?
(TW: Suicide)
To the extent there’s any widespread awareness of Sigmund Freud these days, the detail that lingers in collective memory is that he centered sexual concerns in his analysis of mental ailments. When he pops up in, say, an episode of Animaniacs, our cartoon version of Freud diagnoses everyone with an Oedipus complex, the classic familial triangle of love and hate. The Oedipus complex, in Freud’s formal taxonomy, is just one manifestation of a much deeper force known as the pleasure principle.
But this one thing that we think we sort of know about Freud is incorrect. Particularly later in his career, Freud saw the limits of the sexual or generative motive in human designs. The motives that flow from sexual desire can account for a lot: creation, accumulation, domination, even, in the form of a war for love or homeland, destruction.
Yet there was something even beyond that edge where lust became war. In his patients, and in the broader social studies undertaken in his later career, Freud saw far too much behavior that troubled or outright contradicted the pleasure principle. People frustrate their own desire constantly, or ignore it, particularly under the compulsion of trauma.
At times Freud – always acknowledging that this was speculative work – suggested there was an outright masochistic instinct in life and society, a drive to frustrate or harm the self. Later in life, he more clearly equated the death drive to mere outward aggression.
I find neither of these versions of the death drive interesting. Aggression, after all, even masochism, are still activities of the living.
Freud at another point in his speculations, though, described the death drive not as masochism, but as something akin to a desire for rest. In man, it may be the desire to abdicate the will, to abandon the burden and responsibility of action.
Freud speculated still further. Not just man, but all things living might have some secret thread that, at the same time as their genes pushed them towards survival and fecundity and all the struggle that comes with them, was pulling them back towards the dirt. This hidden instinct is “an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”: to return to the inert matter from whence we came.
I find this version of the death drive more compelling as theory, and more relateable as an embodied being. Who, amidst all the struggle of life, has not felt the urge to simply stop?
Dead Mics
On July 30th, Marc Bernier compared the U.S. government and promoters of coronavirus vaccines to Nazis.
On August 28th, Bernier – a conservative radio host who often referred to himself as “Mr. Anti-Vaxx,” died of COVID-19.
Bernier’s death was the third this month among anti-vaxx talk radio hosts, according to the New York Daily News. Prominent anti-vaxx activist Caleb Wallace also died Saturday.
They can be added to a much longer list of outspoken right-wing figures who have given their lives for the cause of vaccine opposition (Or, more accurately, the cause of vaccine education). The list of right-wing voters who have died of COVID is obviously much longer, and states with the highest death rates are almost uniformly politically conservative: Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas, Nevada, South Carolina, Wyoming, Kentucky, Texas, and Missouri top the list, with only purple-ish Florida a slight odd one out (these states of course have large populations of non-conservative and non-white people, who are really the biggest victims here). The vast apparatus of grassroots conservative media and activism is overwhelmingly anti-vaxx now.
This increasingly triggers an incredulous demand: Why the fuck would you set about killing your own voters?
Because as much as the rank and file truly believe the scaremongering around the vaccines, it’s clear that the top leaders of the Republican Party are vaxxed up, often while hiding it and badmouthing vaccines as Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Green (“That question violates my HIPAA Rights!”) appear to be.
The Sickness Unto Death
The politics certainly don’t make any sense from a long-run numbers perspective. One of the better realpolitik answers to the conundrum I’ve seen came a month ago in Dan Pfeiffer’s Message Box newsletter, and it includes the decent points that the GOP likes anti-vaxx messaging because it hurts Joe Biden, and that Facebook and other algorithms reward the messaging.
But Pfeiffer’s most interesting point is that anti-vaxx messaging is appealing to far-right leaders because it’s useful in furthering the much broader thesis that passes for ‘conservatism’ these days: that all government is fundamentally inept, if not outright evil. Reactionary political thought since Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France has returned frequently to what’s known as the perversity thesis, exemplified by the ideas that gun control will increase gun crime or that welfare programs actually increase poverty. In the absence of any positive program to speak of, the perversity thesis has become the load-bearing center pole of the American right.
Of course, this is a long-term losing strategy in itself, because eventually someone will come along and offer a positive program that actually resonates with people (when that superhero will arrive, who can say). People like Carlson are at a clear crossroads: They’re either going to sway a lot of people very far to the right within about five years, or they’re going to suck the last bit of juice out of a dying set of political institutions and what comes after is not their concern. It’s a political-industry parallel to the short-term and self-interested corporate leadership style that blew up Enron.
I don’t actually think this is any kind of planned strategy, though – it’s an improvised pivot in response to another phenomenon Pfieffer notes, which is that the Republican party is increasingly dependent on extremists because their base is shrinking. The Bush II attempt to more overtly court Latinos is now in flames, white evangelical bedfellows, demographic change, etc etc you know the tape. Just as Facebook technologically amplifies extremism, the growing political clout of Qanon and adjacent thought on the right seems to have hit an inflection point and created a feedback loop where leaders feel more pressure to pander to them, and in doing so increase their legitimacy and strength.
Figures like Mitch McConnell see no upside to all this, but they’re trapped (and it couldn’t have happened to nicer folks). Even Trump, mind-bendingly, was recently booed by supporters in Alabama for saying they should take the vaccines. The vaccines, remember, were developed on Trump’s watch, and really should have been a ticket back to the White House if he hadn’t first spent six months playing to the cheap seats about masks and tyranny. As with most things, Trump played out to a fault the right-wing algorithm he sensed his audience wanted: The unavoidable endgame of reactionary politics is to sow distrust in the government even while you are the one in charge of it.
Self-Made Victims
I’m very sympathetic to the idea that in some sense, far-right anti-vaxxers are victims. Certainly, the financial self-interest of innumerable disinformation merchants and grifters has nurtured a storm of confusion and anxiety. And more broadly, decades of rightward drift have transmuted conservatism into a game of chicken to see who can go farthest in attacking the very idea of a social contract.
But anti-vaxx ideas specifically are basically grassroots. Certainly a few kooky doctors have profited from the ideas, but their broader uptake was only possible because of a state of mind prevalent among those hearing them.
Freud found that trauma was the most common root cause of spectacular displays of the death drive. Trauma annihilates reason, in all the ways that can make dealing with a traumatized person infuriating. They often, as Freud would jokingly put it, return to the scene of the crime, re-enacting past disasters as if they were perpetually present, strikingly blind to the reality around them. Freud’s clinical term for this was repetition automatism.
Kierkegaard, not long before Freud, wrote of the only real sickness unto death – the spiritual death brought on by despair. In Kierkegaard’s terms, despair is the abandonment of the human tension between the infinite and the finite, the possible and the necessary, and ultimately, between some form of God and the limited frailty of the self.
Despair, then, is intimately tied to a loss of humility, because to accept one’s limitations in the face of the Infinite is to feel fully human, and that grounding is what shakes off true despair. But it comes with a lower-grade discontent and anxiety, a constant awareness that to be human is to be finite, weak, and small – at least some of the time.
A man who mistakes himself for God, on the other hand, is bound to become first neurotic, when his Godhood brings him no joy, and then morose, even nihilistic, when that Godhood is revealed to be a fraud.
Post-Bush America has, by and large, been an era of reconciliation with the decline of American empire - the loss of our only unifying godhead. Far from the lumpenproletariat, the backbone of the anti-Vaxx and Qanon movements has been the petit bourgeoisie, business owners and landlords. Many of these are people well acquainted with the conveniences and pleasures of a modern, high-tech economy - of medicine, of science. They might have hoped to some day lord over it the way their fathers and grandfathers did. Yet the humiliations of Iraq and Afghanistan, no less than in the relentless march of minority rights at home, meant they were set to rule (vicariously) over a diminished kingdom. Punishment and humiliation being the coin of their realm, they sense lean times ahead.
And the pleasures of mere comfort and security are not enough to recover this terrible trauma of a supremacy lost. Instead, the securities of modernity – perhaps even the vaccines themselves, but certainly the alienation of a vast and mysterious state – come to embody how impotent power can be. We could live longer than ever, but instead some of us are driven towards the ultimate despair of not-doing, acquiescing to the gravitational pull of dust towards dust. We have so much, yet somehow so little.
Even if you have managed to transubstantiate modern professional life into something approximating enjoyment and satisfaction – even you can’t deny the dark thread running through it all. The pandemic is at once the exclamation point at the end of a sentence, and a preview of more to come.
You say you are shocked that your countrymen are drawn like moths to the prospect of an infinite dreamless sleep. You stand agog as their behavior seems manifestly guided, against any possible logic of love or preservation, by this principle that is secret most of all to them. Their compulsive wailing and gnashing of teeth strikes your ears as the wild braying of animals.
But if you are honest with yourself, you know this death drive well – you’re just lucky enough to be able to hold it at bay. Does not your own consciousness secretly wish that it could return to monkeh? That it could exist in the infinite now, or the infinite never?
Even if that meant not existing at all?