The anti-vaxxer tendency on the populist right is a variation on the practice of what I have in the past called “acting white,” embracing the dysfunction and bumptiousness of the white underclass as signs of authenticity. Donald Trump is a guy who adores the music from Cats but made a political career performing a kind of white minstrel show for people who think they are characters from Jason Aldean songs. Never mind that the leaders and practitioners thereof mostly don’t know much about the white underclass they claim to champion and identify with, any more than it mattered that the gangsta rappers of the 1990s were not really very representative of the experience of most black Americans or that the Village People didn’t really represent the aspirations of many gay people in the 1970s. Write down the lyrics to your favorite pop song and read them aloud — they are invariably stupid and often illiterate, but what matters is how they make you feel. Political speeches may be a little more organized and grammatical (or not!) but they work according to the same principles.

The anti-vaxxer stuff on the right is best understood not as a medical controversy in any genuine sense but as a ritual of disaffiliation. “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.” The response to COVID-19 — the lockdowns, the mandates, the government action on a vast and practically unprecedented scale — was a sobering display of power, and that power is very much on the minds of millions of Americans who seem to have quite suddenly realized that they don’t have any.