Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate, or at least does so on the basis of age and health conditions rather than politics. Why, then, have views on how we should manage it — and particularly how we should treat vaccination — become so heartless, judgemental and politically tribal?

We have a milder case of it in Britain than some countries. But there’s a correlation between (broadly Remain-affiliated) liberal urbanites and the new hygiene-authoritarianism. This has been emerging for a while: back in 2020 the research group UK In A Changing Europe noted that while “it’s not the case that all Leavers are lockdown sceptics” nonetheless “it’s pretty much the case that all lockdown sceptics are Leavers”. More recently, 99 Tories voted against Covid passes before Christmas, compared to 22 in Labour.

In the US, analogous (and angrier) patterns emerge. Free-wheeling, mask-optional Republican Florida is pitted against Democrat California, which mandates indoor mask-wearing, including for all children over the age of two, and announced in October that vaccination would become mandatory for in-person school attendance. Vaccination is already mandatory for employment in the police force and healthcare on public-health grounds.

More interesting than arguing for either one side or the other, though, is what the arguments reveal about our ongoing political realignment. In particular, it sounds the death-knell for a relatively mild-mannered twentieth-century version of progressivism characterised by a desire to ensure the world is fair, and to avoid harming others.

What’s emerging to replace it is more bellicose, more ruthless — and increasingly religious. So-called “secular liberalism” has, in other words, stopped pretending to be secular. It’s been received opinion since the end of World War II that authoritarian religiosity was exclusive to the Right. Theodor Adorno’s 1950 The Authoritarian Personality cited batteries of research to argue that fascism, and the Holocaust, could be explained by the prevalence of an ‘Authoritarian Personality Type’. This ‘personality type’, he argued, was characterised by blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong, respect for submission to acknowledged authority, and a tendency to project one’s own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group.

More from this author

The importance of an angry woman

By Mary Harrington

In turn, Adorno’s conviction that these behaviours are characteristic of the Right crops up again in a far more recent, but also influential book: Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 The Righteous Mind. Here, Haidt argued that the reason ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ routinely misunderstand one another is that there exist five ‘moral foundations’ on which we all base our political views: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Haidt argues that liberals are only interested in care/harm and fairness/cheating, while the Right is attuned to all five foundations.

Does this apply in the Covid debate? Certainly at the surface, calls for coercive measures tend to start off with arguments about protecting people. For example, Scottish public health adviser Jason Leitch told BBC Good Morning Scotland that the aim of Covid passes was “to allow people to attend events and environments safely”.

At the core of this argument is the not unreasonable point that when it comes to physical wellbeing, we can’t be wholly individualistic. The moment you get ill or injure yourself as a consequence of having taken some risk (for example after breaking your leg skiing), you need care and are thus, by definition, no longer taking sole responsibility for your wellbeing.

Does this mean vaxx authoritarians have a point? Hiltzik points out that mandates have long existed on other health grounds where risk-taking imposes costs on wider society, such as seatbelt-wearing, smoking, or drink-driving. Insisting on the individual right to choose whether or not to be vaccinated therefore “places a perverse conception of individual “freedom” in opposition to the communal interest”.

We might simply shrug, and say this is just another data point for that 2021 study which showed that contra Adorno, there is abundant evidence for authoritarianism among left-liberals. Certainly, calls from self-identified progressives to “crush the resistance” to vaccines by making the lives of the unvaccinated a “total misery” might challenge the idea that the ‘authoritarian personality’ can only flourish on the Right.

But it’s the character and chosen terrain of the emerging progressive authoritarianism that’s distinctive. For it’s not merely a matter of progressives waking up to the possibility that they, too, may use coercive measures to pursue their chosen ends. It’s also the nature of those ends. Consider, for example, the fact that in 2020 fentanyl killed more Californians than Covid. But unlike Covid, the drug epidemic inspired few coercive measures — only safe injection sites, billboards encouraging users to take drugs with friends or programmes that pay them not to use.

Suggested reading

How fear fuels the vaccine wars

By Paul Kingsnorth

If avoiding harm justified coercive interventions, surely we’d have seen more of them in Californian drug policy. But their absence in the case of drug abuse, and fervent application in the case of virus control, suggests there’s a different motive at work than the prevention of harm.

In an Evening Standard piece last week, former editor Emily Sheffield argued that our capital city’s unvaccinated residents should “pay with their freedoms, not ours”. And on social media, we saw the same punitive ferocity recently when one American mother reported that when her son tested positive she didn’t just quarantine him but also “took the X-Box”, a measure more consistent with chastisement than infection control. The only reason she didn’t also confiscate the phone, she says, “is so he can text for food and water”.

Recently, we’ve had news that Omicron appears to be more infectious but milder, and research that indicates vaccination does very little to prevent transmission of the virus. So rationally, none of these vengeful attitudes make much sense. What’s going on?

The recent furore over the entry into Australia of (unvaccinated) tennis superstar Novak Djokovic offers a clue. One Melbourne journalist tweeted about how, since he was allowed into the country, fans “won’t want to come” to the tennis matches. Objectively, one single unvaccinated tennis player would make a negligible difference to someone’s risk of catching Covid; the only possible reason someone might skip the Australian Open because of Djokovic’s presence is if the fear was of a subtler, more metaphysical contagion.

In the Bay of Kells, in Ireland’s County Kerry, there’s a small secret graveyard that until recently was overgrown with brambles and largely forgotten. It was a place where grieving parents buried babies who died before they could be baptised — for the unbaptised were spiritually unclean, and therefore not permitted burial on a churchyard’s consecrated ground.

In Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), GK Chesterton observed that “it seems quite natural to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them madness to enforce baptism”. Today the prescience of Chesterton’s remark is clear, as is the convergence in terms of social meaning between vaccination and baptism.

The growing tendency for ‘the vaccinated’ to treat ‘the unvaccinated’ as other or impure recalls the willingness of an earlier age to deny others simple forms of inclusion on the basis of baptism. Never mind what studies say about the efficacy of Covid vaccination in protecting us from severe illness (which evidence strongly suggests it does) or mitigating further infection (perhaps more debatable). Increasingly, vaccination carries a social meaning as well as a medical one. It’s a ritual infusion — albeit via injection, not anointment — of sacred liquid, whose application confers freedom from spiritual taint.

Suggested reading

How vaccine mandates became a political weapon

By Geoff Shullenberger

Perhaps it’s just that the correlation between left-liberalism and secularism in both Britain and America has left progressives especially hungry for something to fill the God-shaped hole, and the yearning for measures that speak to the fundamental moral instinct Haidt calls ‘sanctity/degradation’. This might help account for the ongoing, fruitless, rationally debunked but nonetheless persistent obsession Tom Chivers recently noted, with disinfecting surfaces ‘because of Covid’ despite mounting evidence that the virus is airborne.

An increasingly post-Christian West, then, finds itself grabbing gratefully onto Covid hygiene theatre, in pursuit of a purity more metaphysical than bacterial. And as we’ve now spent two years clapping for carers, sharing dancing nurse videos, and creating window iconography and even altar-cloths to venerate medical professionals, it’s probably a bit late to rein this blossoming spiritualisation of hygiene.

For to imagine we can do so would be to say we still live in a world of reasoned debate. And when ‘experts’ offer ‘evidence’ to counter rumours of Covid propagandising, only to be met with derisive accusations of using fact-checking to propagandise, we might as well abandon ‘reasoned debate’ altogether and, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, stick two pencils up our noses and wear underpants on our heads.

Or, alternatively, start praying. Progressives spent half of the twentieth century telling us that this was pointless: the search for metaphysical purity was low-status, ‘authoritarian’ or simply obsolete, and reason replaced all that. Their children, though, have discovered that purification rituals don’t have to be confined to the individualistic realm of ‘juice cleanses’ or ‘clean eating’, but can be imposed on entire societies.

We can expect them to go on chasing that high. And meanwhile, it seems enough of the rest of us like having something to worship, and a suitable group of sinners to despise. If you don’t already pray, you might as well start; we all once again live in a religious world.

Two months ago, Xianzi (real name, Zhou Xiaoxuan) lost her fight against the Chinese media establishment. She had only intended to prosecute Zhu Jun, a prominent TV host, for an alleged sexual assault. But in the court case that followed, she found herself on the receiving end of the full force of the Chinese TV network and the legal establishment. Somewhere in the middle, she also managed to rekindle a feminist movement that the Chinese state is struggling to contain.

The initial incident occurred in 2014, when Xianzi was a 21-year-old intern at the Chinese state broadcaster, CCTV, and was sent to interview Zhu in his dressing room. As one of the most recognisable TV hosts in the country, Zhu regularly presents the annual New Year TV spectacular, the most-watched TV show in the world. He is also a leading member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to the Chinese state. He is, suffice it to say, a figure with not inconsiderable political weight.

During that interview, Xianzi alleged that Zhu sexually molested her and that she was only able to escape his clutches when someone came to the door. The next day, she went to the police, who told her that she shouldn’t slander such a prominent personality’s reputation and threatened her parents’ jobs if she persisted. Her case lay dormant until, empowered by the burgeoning #MeToo movement in 2016, she felt that her only course of action was to write a 3,000-word essay about the incident online.

Immediately, the tables were turned when Zhu accused her of libel; of sullying his illustrious 20-year career. He denied all charges and launched a counterclaim for “smearing” his good name. In the ensuing court case — where much of the defence evidence was deemed inadmissible — he was cleared with no case to answer. Immediately afterwards, Xianzi announced that her battle had been “an extremely arduous and glorious journey” and she intends to appeal. The following day, the Chinese state responded in the only way it knows how: by closing down Xianzi’s social media accounts.

Suggested reading

Could we win a war in China?

By Aris Roussinos

Xianzi had posted her original article on Douban, a social media platform in China that has increasingly become a forum for radical feminist voices. Such chatrooms have been allowed to flourish by a Chinese state happy to platform discussions that highlight the failings of the West and the superiority and stability in China. These forums are acceptable, that is, until Chinese activists begin to turn the conversation inwards.

As a consequence of Xianzi’s case, the state has become increasingly worried about the potential for “extremism and radical political and ideological thoughts” conveyed by feminist discussion groups. In April, for example, Douban closed a number of feminist channels, such the popular magazine forum “Feminist Voices” under the innocuous charge of “violating relevant laws and regulations”.

But even in China, even though it is difficult for them to express themselves or to find representation against the Party machine, activists continue to organise. In order to circumvent the ever-menacing presence of the state monitors and censors, Chinese netizens use codes and abbreviations to disguise their intent, often becoming memes in the process. For example, the phrase “rice bunny” in Chinese (mi-tu) is a homonym for #MeToo.

Similarly, the “6B” movement (the letter stands for “bu” meaning “no”) is a new feminist community that unites around a lifestyle encouraging no marriage, no child-bearing, no boyfriends, no romantic relationships with male partners, no accommodation to married women, and no sexist brands. Adapted from a Korean network of radical feminists, the addition of the “4T” hashtag in online discussion forums represents the refusal to accept mainstream sexual depictions of women, female beauty, religion, and fan culture. (“T” stands for “tal” meaning the removal of corsets.) It is an enigmatic mixture of bra-burning and Mao’s Four Olds campaign (the authoritarian Cultural Revolution slogan demanding the destruction of old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs).

Chinese radical feminism, then, seems to be a mash-up of Seventies US feminism and Chinese statist fundamentalism — something which President Xi is learning to exploit, subverting the conversation to suit his ends. When Chloé Zhao became the first female Chinese woman to win best director at the Academy Awards for Nomadland, her film was blocked in China and all references removed from the internet because she once said nasty things about her country of birth. Within a matter of days, however, the Party machine recognised her popularity, and used her status as a woman to criticise the lack of diversity within the Hollywood cinema industry.

Suggested reading

Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

But this kind of culture war is a dangerous game for China. Ever keen to expose the travails of the West in order to show up America’s decadence and political malaise, such campaigns only bring attention to its own shameful record on women’s rights: while the UK enacted its first legislation on domestic abuse in 1976, China only did so in 2015.

Xi, of course, is well aware of this. And in response, #MeToo cases in recent years have been used by the state media to demonstrate how the Party is rooting out vulgar elements and maintaining order. At the moment, two going through the courts — one of Kris Wu, a Canadian-Chinese singer who has been arrested in Beijing on suspicion of rape; and another of an Alibaba executive accused of sexual assault — are being publicised in order to “rectify” behaviour that the party considers damaging to its vision of a healthy and stable society.

Similar exposures of the excesses of machismo corporate culture have recently been revealed with young women bringing charges of sexual abuse against a series of executives of the taxi-hailing company Didi, and luxury drinks brand, Moutai. Immediately the Chinese Communist Party released a statement: “we must work together to establish rules for celebrities’ words and deeds, keep the influence of capital in check, curb the barbaric growth of pan-entertainment, strengthen industry self-discipline, and urge entertainers to establish correct professional values”.

But in reality, this only happens in select cases, and it is hard to marry the CCP’s recent statement with the rest of its actions. Take the current case of tennis player Péng Shuài, who has accused former Chinese vice premier Zhāng Gāolí of rape. Last week, her identity — even as a former World Tennis Organisation Number 1 doubles player — was wiped from the Chinese internet. She has effectively been erased: China’s censors are clamping down on any show of support. Even the hashtag #tennis has been banned.

Yet even this hasn’t silenced debate. It has just created more imaginative ways of sharing the criticism. One Douban social media post shared the story using proxy tennis and political characters, Serena Williams and former U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence. It too was taken down soon afterwards.

Suggested reading

The myth of monolithic China

By Lee Jones

Will China’s censors win this game of cat and mouse? It’s hard not to imagine that Beijing is increasingly concerned about the possibility of Chinese students returning from abroad and introducing the West’s subversive gender-critical militancy at home. Still, as long as the Party is seen as the arbiter of justice and can portray individual cases as random aberrations, it can be controlled. And if Chinese feminism follows the American model’s shift towards divisive identity politics, this will only become easier.

But whether the Chinese state can maintain supremacy under sustained cultural assault remains to be seen. The Party this year stressed its role in “coordinating protection of women and children with economic and social development”. But in the face of cases such as Gāolí’s, it seems only a matter of time before such claims are called into question.