The present anti-vaxxer craze is a Trumpian phenomenon, but the underlying cultishness is the tribal allegiance to the Republican Party and to movement conservatism, which goes back at least to the 1980s. The bad faith began then, when socialism was equated with soviet communism, and when Republicans tried to establish a warped, anti-Jesus version of Christianity in the US which was supposed to have separated church and state.
When the conservatives lost the culture war, with the rise of feminism, abortion, homosexuals' rights, and immigration, and with young people's growing disinterest in going to church, the older, diehard Republicans reacted not by looking inward and changing their attitudes and policies to make them attractive to more civilized Americans, but by trolling, by becoming anarchistic contrarians who would rather burn down the country than concede the legitimacy of Democratic rule. See, for example, Trump's big lie and how McConnell stole Obama's pick for the Supreme Court, a bit of unamericanism he still boasts about.
I've written some 23 Medium articles on Trumpism, so I lay out my observations and evidence in them. Anyway, the trolling of Democrats by Trumpian Republicans has become common knowledge. South Park did a whole season on it. The trolling is obvious because the evidence for it is overwhelming. The Trumpian anti-vaxxers are looking for excuses to ruin the country when Democrats are in charge. If Trump had won a second term, the Republican base wouldn't have made a tribal issue out of the vaccines. They might have still refused to wear masks due to laziness and a macho sensibility, but they wouldn't have tried to sabotage their cult leader's term in office by helping to prolong the pandemic.
Of course, rural Republican anti-intellectualism isn't just a political tactic. The Dunning-Kruger effect there is based on real ignorance and impudence which dovetail with old-school white Evangelical religiosity. The Trumpian hypocrisy and shamelessness likewise begin with right-wing Americanized Christianity which goes back to the 1980s. It's not only the Trump cult that causes cognitive dissonance because it doesn't belong in a modern, superpowerful civilization; Evangelical Christianity is also an embarrassing anachronism. There are true believers in these cults, to be sure, but one of the things they believe is that anything goes in the service of their cause, and that includes making fools of themselves to demonstrate their fidelity to their tribe. The crazier their publicly expressed beliefs, the more they prove they care about the insiders much more than the conventional wisdom of the outsiders.
Libertarians have the American right to endanger their personal health, not their country's. That's standard liberalism (Mill's harm principle).
