When it comes to assessing the idiocy of the masses, it’s hard to beat the pithy and cynical wisdom of 17th-century French diplomat Joseph de Maistre: “Every country,” he said, “has the government it deserves.”

The same holds true for states and cities, of course — which is why New Yorkers were forced to suffer through more than a decade’s worth of Governor Andrew Cuomo, and why Gothamites are still suffering through the second term of Comrade Mayor Bill de Blasio, who won reelection in 2017 despite the fact that just 8.5% of New York City’s residents voted for him.

De Blasio will leave office on January 1, but not before leaving his constituents with a lovely parting gift. In what he called “a preemptive strike” against a virus that continues to strike irrational levels of fear into shockingly large cadres of leftists, de Blasio on Monday issued a directive that all of the city’s private-sector employees must be vaccinated against COVID-19.

“We’ve got Omicron as a new factor,” he told Mika Brzezinski and the lemmings of “Morning Joe.” “We’ve got the colder weather, which is going to really create additional challenges with the Delta variant. We’ve got holiday gatherings. We in New York City have decided to use a preemptive strike to really do something bold to stop the further growth of COVID and the dangers it’s causing to all of us.”

One wonders who he means when he says “We.” But perhaps the city’s residents aren’t yet ready to move beyond the Democrat-driven permanent pandemic. De Blasio seemed to be bragging when he called his vax mandate a “first in the nation measure.” Indeed, it’ll cover all private-sector employers and employees in the city, and it’ll be effective beginning December 27, just a few days before he leaves office. As Fox News reports:

De Blasio’s office also said it is broadening “Key to NYC,” its program requiring proof of vaccination for indoor dining, fitness and entertainment — expanding the measure to include 5- to 11-year-olds. De Blasio’s office said approximately 20% of that age group is vaccinated in New York City.

Beginning December 14, the program will require children aged 5-11 to show proof of one vaccination dose for those venues, and starting December 27, New Yorkers aged 12 and older will be required to show proof of two vaccine doses, instead of one, except for those who have received the [single-shot] Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The requirement that children ages 5-11 be vaccinated seems especially appalling, since the threat of death or even severe illness posed by COVID-19 to those in this age group is minuscule. It’d be one thing if these vaccines were being forced on a population that’s particularly vulnerable, but the data have shown all along that young people are the least vulnerable among us. In the hard-left wasteland of San Francisco, for example, which recently enacted a similar mandate, not a single one of the 664 city residents who’ve died from the virus was under 21.

Zero, incidentally, is the exact same number of young people who’ve been done in by runaway streetcars and falling safes. And one therefore wonders: Why aren’t big-city tyrants like de Blasio and San Francisco Mayor London Breed asking themselves whether allowing kids to travel in automobiles is really worth the risk?

Sadly, not even the children of leftists are immune from Pfizer and BioNTech and their fellow vaccine pushers.

“Democracy,” said the iconoclastic Henry Louis Mencken, “is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” Sadly, nothing could be more true about the sheepish citizens of New York City and San Francisco, who seem to enjoy their democracy good and hard.