As time and Trump go on, I’m almost nostalgic for the namby-pamby maneuvers our (former) right-wing friends used to employ to defend assorted right-wing status quo in a way that let them think they were remaining above the fray.
“Civility!”
“Can’t we all just get along?”
“Uniter, not a divider …”
Later, when the right’s minority grip on power started to slip, this would give way to less subtle coded complaints about “shrill” and tan suits and such things. The GOP center began to fail (Mr. Yeats, white courtesy phone). But for a while, our right-wing friends enjoyed a happy era of deluding themselves into thinking everything was pretty much fine and they were pretty much middle of the road.
Now, those same friends and relations are staying silent or rationalizing their refusal to wake up from their ongoing Fox News fever dream.
Once upon a time, they would have welcomed hundreds of Health & Human Services employees from across the political spectrum coming together to support good public science. They would never have imagined it would be in an effort to compel the resignation of a worm-brained former heroin addict running the department and costing lives present and future as he undoes decades of progress.
But that letter got written, and where is their support?
Recently, nine former CDC directors (again spanning both major parties) have also spoken out publicly in a way previously unimaginable. Not seeing any of my Republican friends passing along that petition.
This defense of good basic policy is the stuff of which “can’t we all just get along” and “let’s not rush into anything” is made, or should have been made. But the rhetorical cowardice of whatever non-MAGA conservatism remains in this country shows that those well-worn cliches were never really their concerns. They were just people who enjoyed the benefits of a culture tilted in their favor, and who did not want to get their hands dirty by arguing for their actual beliefs.
In 2025, modern vaccine policy is just one brick in the public health wall currently being dismantled in the United States. We watch as the photo of the smallpox-exposed brothers — one vaccinated, one not — regains a horrifying degree of relevance more than a century after it was taken.
Those who lived through earlier eras of mass illness and death knew better, but we’ve lost their collective firsthand memory and voice. Many of the rest of us have not lost our minds, but we don’t have much pull at the moment.
As for smallpox and polio themselves (and more recently, COVID), science made the vaccine. But on a public policy life-saving level, maintaining a minimum public level of scientific literacy and of history was our vaccine against all sorts of now-needless suffering.
America was once the boy on the left. Then, through rational thought and perseverance, we became the boy on the right. We bought into the idea that progress is linear, ever moving forward. Why wouldn’t we?
Because as it turns out, you’re almost always a generation or two from becoming the boy on the left again. And if you’re not, it’s because you’re already the boy on the left again.