America’s Blue and Red Tribes Aren’t So Far Apart
Large swaths of America’s vaccinated masses—along with elites in the White House, boardrooms, public schools, hospitals, and the mainstream media—are feeling frustrated with their unvaccinated neighbors. And understandably so. COVID-19 vaccines offer stellar protection against hospitalization and death. I despair that many thousands more unvaccinated Americans will die needlessly, that overcrowded hospitals will keep struggling to treat people with other medical emergencies, and that continuing spread of the coronavirus puts vulnerable people such as my grandparents at greater risk of contracting a breakthrough infection.
But I also worry about the enmity I see between vaccine proponents and vaccine skeptics, especially when it’s directed not within America’s red tribe or blue tribe but across the growing chasm that divides these polarized factions. Even before the pandemic, the right and the left were defining themselves far too much through negative partisanship—that is, their disdain for the other side. So this is a perilous moment to confront an urgent new dispute that implicates life, death, bodily autonomy, freedom of movement, and the ability to get or keep a job in many fields.
Although vaccine hesitancy exists on both the left and the right, the partisan gulf is undeniable: Pew last month that 86 percent of Democratic voters but just 60 percent of Republican voters had received at least one shot. As David Leonhardt of
