MAHA, Vaccines, and a Tradition of Authoritarian Hypocrisy

Comrade Brezhnev owned a Rolls-Royce and anti-vax-enabler Trump will get the jab. The leader never sacrifices like the people do.

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Donald Trump is a germaphobe.

It may seem an odd thing to point out right now. With the president’s full-backing, anti-vaxxer-in-chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is carrying out a mini-coup inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy is also narrowing eligibility for COVID inoculations.

Still, Trump’s contamination fears are well-documented and predate the pandemic. A 2019 feature in Politico described a “Purell presidency,” reporting how Trump enthusiastically enforces hand-washing and jumps at even a light cough from an aide.

No matter what new plague RFK’s actions unleash on the American people, you’d better believe Trump will get vaccinated, and he’ll probably make sure his grandchildren and closest associates are too. He’s also clearly decided that feeding the Make America Healthy Again cult is a politically expedient course, societal risks be damned.

Demagogues know how to whip the masses into a frenzy around self-destructive ideological crusades. Yet they are never pious adherents themselves. There’s always some kind of exception for the leader.

I grew up in the USSR during the Brezhnev years. When I was allowed to travel abroad for chess competitions, I got a rare window onto the West: music and film, books, styles, and so on.

I quickly recognized that my experience was very atypical.

For tens of millions of my fellow Soviets, Western cultural and consumer imports were either banned, inaccessible, or both.

Not for Leonid Brezhnev.

The geriatric general secretary was an avid car collector. European and American manufacturers were the communist ruler’s favorites. Brezhnev owned high-end British, American, and West German models. Richard Nixon famously gifted Brezhnev a Lincoln Continental.

Karl Marx wrote that “luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.” Comrade Brezhnev decided that a ‘66 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow belonged to the latter category.

Back when Brezhnev was rolling enemy automobiles into the Kremlin garage, trading in Beatles albums could get you expelled from a Soviet university.

It wasn’t just cars, of course. Soviet leaders always had access to a fantastic spread of Western luxury goods that the proletariat did not. There were special screenings of banned foreign films (Stalin was a cinephile). Brezhnev and other party elites regularly called on American physicians.

This tradition of authoritarian hypocrisy has carried forward to modern Russia and other latter day dictatorships.

Vladimir Putin rails against the degeneracy of the West while his lieutenants’ children enjoy posh lifestyles in European capitals. At the start of the war in Ukraine, Polina Kovaleva, the stepdaughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, was living in a nearly-$6-million London flat. Kovaleva bought the apartment without a mortgage when she was 20 years old.

Liquor flows for the rich kids of Tehran. For an ordinary Iranian, enjoying a drink can be a death sentence.

It’s classic Orwell: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Now, in America, the president is endangering public health in order to enforce a pseudoscientific secular religion that he knows is dangerous. Donald Trump has actually shown on more than one occasion that he understands why vaccines are important. Nevertheless, vaccine skepticism turned out to be a useful, if blunt, political instrument in 2020. Energizing that cultural current bred the MAHA movement, an unholy marriage of far-left Marin County-granola nutjobs with the conspiratorial far-right. And that made RFK Jr. an indispensable ally for Trump.

It’s par for the course. The everyman is always expected to sacrifice for the cause. The average Soviet couldn’t get nice things—nor any things—from the West. The party told them that America and Europe were black holes of bourgeoisie excess anyway. That didn’t stop Brezhnev from enjoying a Mercedes Benz here and there.

So it is with Trump. COVID, or some other disease may soon find less resistance in the US. It may be harder for you to get the jab. But that will be your problem to deal with, not the president’s.

P.S. Whether you agree or disagree, let’s continue the discussion—in the comments, and on a Zoom call. Yes, Zoom! I’ve recently announced new Zoom calls for paid subscribers so that we can have a real conversation. Click here to upgrade and register for our first Zoom call.

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