More broadly, this attitude is reflective of a deeply baked-in defensive ideology among liberals that helplessly legitimizes conservative grievance. Democrats have been bending over backwards to appease conservative rage for 40 years — convincing themselves that they had to submit to Reaganism, attack their own core constituencies, retreat from civil rights, cut welfare, and so on, to win back the white working class. We see this today in moderate Democrats scolding Black Lives Matter activists to pipe down because they might alienate white voters.

But appeasing conservative grievance all this time has only strengthened their bottomless sense of entitlement and victimhood. At this point the whole right-wing project of stealing elections and setting up a one-party state depends on liberal cowardice — the solid majority of the country that supports democratic institutions, not to mention ending the pandemic as quickly as possible, simply lying down and taking it. Witness D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who anxiously instructed residents of her city not to come out and counter-protest against the putschists on January 6 (for fear of inflaming conservative rage), thereby leaving the Capitol open to attack.

What’s more is that pushing hard on responsible COVID measures is good politics in the here and now. Polls show a large majority of Americans support both vaccine mandates and virus control measures to fight Delta and save lives. Standing up for that platform puts Democrats on the winning side of a culture war battle and drives a wedge deep into the Republican base (which is not at all uniformly against vaccination).