The right opposed Covid programs for being public, not just for being Covid

Evidence

There may have been deeper ideological reasons for opposing the vaccines as well. If the U.S. efforts to control Covid through free vaccination and wage-replacement programs had been more successful, that would have demonstrated that the federal government, when it sets its mind to something, can still provide timely, universal, and humane care to the entire population. But that raises some questions: If they can do it for Covid-19, why stop there? Why not launch similarly ambitious public programs to tackle other human emergencies? Could the government tackle hunger, soaring housing costs, and the need for universal health care? A successful Covid response would have set a precedent for a modern, activist government—a precedent many on the right consider dangerous. So it’s worth considering the possibility that Covid public health measures may have been in the crosshairs for people like Bannon and Carlson for a deceptively simple reason: because they were public. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 600

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion ‘opposed because public’ reframes the whole vaccine/health-measure conflict as a defense of the legitimacy of collective public provision — a paradigm-defining point, not just a claim about the right’s motives.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s standing theme of how governments’ capacity for good is deliberately underdemonstrated. — connects to: COVID restrictions were opposed by the right on economic-withdrawal grounds, not health ones. — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 146; Christian right leaders framed pandemic restrictions as unconstitutional fear-based tyranny. — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 147
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this ‘opposed because public’ logic generalize to explain right-wing hostility to other successful public programs?