The private-sector vaccine mandate, much like the roiling debates over Big Tech regulation, is a proxy for a broader intellectual fault line on the Right. That divide is between the more adamantly classical liberal, libertarian-inspired pundits and politicians who believe the quintessence of sound governance is simply permitting individuals and private entities to do what they wish, and the more common-good-inspired figures who believe the breadth and depth of the threat from our wokeist ruling class is such that we must be less skittish about the prudential use of state power to secure the deplorables’ basic way of life.

On this matter, as in many other matters, the DeSantis-style common-good conservatives have the better of the doctrinaire “let businesses do whatever they want” libertarian absolutists. It is important to understand why.

President Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.'” That was probably true when the Gipper said it, but times have changed. The new, 21st-century threat comes in the form of a sprawling, pan-institutional ruling class whose public- and private-sector branches alike worship at the secular altar of wokeism. That ruling class has no interest in abiding by any sort of neutral “live and let live” niceties; its interest is in banning conservative speech from social media, soft-banning conservative ideas from the academy by means of “microaggressions” and “safe spaces,” and so on. As I have argued, we should think of the new “most terrifying words” as, “I’m from the ruling class, and I’m here to subjugate you.”