Bottled at the Source

Or not

They’re killing it, because they don’t know it exists.

Watching Victorian premier Dan Andrews warn that people who don’t get “the jab” won’t be given their “freedom pass,” or watching Canadian Prime Minister Derek Zoolander say, “If you’ve done the right things, you get to be safe…And those people who still hesitate, who still resist, well they won’t get to enjoy the same things as those who’ve done their part for others,” something becomes clear: we’re governed, all over the world, by officials who think government is the source of their power, and the question needs no further interrogation. The power of government comes from the power of government; it’s turtles all the way down.

This blindness is a product of life experience in the ruling class bubble. Look at the way Andrews has lived his adult life. He graduated from college, then went to work on the staff of a legislator, then became a legislator, with a few party jobs in the gaps and around the edges. He’s worked in politics, politics, and politics. The man has never done extended work outside of government or a political party as an adult, has never done a few years working behind a steering wheel or a front desk or a shovel. He’s institutionalized. He knows the perspective of a political hack, and no other.

But government has no power it doesn’t borrow, and it borrows on the collective faith. It borrows on agreement. Though the idea of the “consent of the governed” has been much abused and threatened with obsolescence, it’s still the concrete that holds the pilings. We “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic,” until we don’t. What happens when government coerces millions of people, or tens of millions of people, out of the work force? What happens when the taxable economy implodes, trucks go without drivers, and store shelves empty? What if you make a threat to drive people out of the life of the country, and they respond with the parallel decision to withhold their participation? What do you govern if a quarter or a third of the population stops showing up?

Power belongs to the people who put food on shelves, full stop.

Authority looks like this much more quickly than a peaceful world has chosen to remember. (Take a moment to watch a little of this meeting between Australian union members and their union leaders over the willingness of the leadership to limit work to the fully vaccinated.)

The threat of force plays a significant but finally imperfect role in making the withdrawal of consent slower and harder. But our own bizarrely obtuse leaders are also working to undermine their own ability to deliver it – because they think they own the delivery of organized force, and get it from what amounts to the push of a button. And so the US Navy, for example, nears the moment when it threatens to destroy the careers of a third to a fourth of its SEALs over their refusal to submit to mandatory COVID-19 vaccination; meanwhile, law enforcement agencies near the moment when they fire a bunch of cops for the same reason. What happens to the power of government if it purges a bunch of the people who deliver force on its behalf?

The explicit warning that government is losing patience for a quarter-plus of the adult population, and may drive them out of the economy and out of polite society, is the warning of people who think that reality is composed of ritual performances. (“#BringBackOurGirls.”) It all goes away very very quickly when the trucks stop rolling and the troops stop taking orders.

What happens when the little man behind the desk, the career politician, purges the people who build and maintain the world he purports to run?