A conservative opinion site, American Greatness, is currently featuring a column on the COVID-19 vaccines that perfectly encapsulates what the populist conservative movement has become.
The piece, headlined “I Won’t Take the Vaccine Because It Makes Liberals Mad”, is written so that people would talk about it, share it on social media, and make it relevant when, really, it’s anything but. However, the underlying sentiment of the post - that we could and should do things because they annoy the left - is an idea that came to power as Donald Trump began his campaign for President in 2015 and has persisted even after he left office.
The very broken system of politics we live in can be best summed up as simply the politics of pettiness. Each side does what it can to piss off the other side of the aisle. It keeps escalating and the result is a deeply divided and unrepentantly vile society that thrives off dunks, insults, and every sort of behavior that not even ten years ago was considered inappropriate for polite society.
Ultimately, this is why Trump failed. His political persona, from 2015 all the way through his failed 2020 campaign, was premised entirely on attacking the other side with petty insults, playing the victim, and fighting. His administration had good political victories, but his hesitation to address the COVID-19 pandemic more forcefully and the resulting economic crash, coupled with his inability to stick to a single campaign message, doomed him in his re-election bid, giving way to Joe Biden’s presidency.
It is people who still hold on to that idea that we win via trolling who make it difficult for Republicans to move on and establish an identity in a post-Trump era (and I truly believe that, despite what his acolytes and media alike pray for, we are past Trump). They are holding their own conservative movement back by refusing to fight on real ideas and instead seek to just piss off the people opposite of them on the political spectrum.
This politics of pettiness should be rejected, not just because it is childish and immature, but because it lacks the ability to win over the people who are constantly looking for rational behavior when they vote. Yes, the vaccine hesitancy caused by irresponsible media stories on scary (and incredibly, almost impossibly rare) side effects is bad. We are seeing a slowdown on vaccination rates. But, just as irresponsible is the behavior witnessed in the aforementioned column about rejecting vaccines because Democrats.
We should be better than this. I wish we were. I hope we can be again. This “I must piss off the other side” doesn’t advance anything. It continues forcing us to stoop lower and lower, in a never-ending race to the bottom. Eventually, it will be impossible to elevate ideas because that would get in the way of owning the libs/cons.