The Deep Politics of Vaccine Mandates | RealClearPolitics
The most important thing is that the Biden administration s mandate approach is standard-issue progressivism. The pushback is equally standard. The mandates exemplify a dispute that has been at the heart of American politics for over a century, ever since Woodrow Wilson formulated it as a professor and then president. That agenda emphasizes deference to
- Experts, not elected politicians,
- Rational bureaucratic procedures,
- Centralized power in the nation s capital, not in the federal states, and
- A modern, living constitution, which replaces the old Constitution of 1787 and severs the restraints it imposed on government power.
Implemented over several decades, this progressive agenda has gradually become a fait accompli, without ever formally amending the Constitution. The bureaucracies began their massive growth after World War II and especially after Lyndon Johnson s Great Society initiatives of the mid-1960s (continued, with equal vigor, by Richard Nixon).
Yup.