It should be clear that opposing vaccine mandates as a substitute for opposing vaccination itself is a fundamentally incoherent position.

Opposing mandates isn't a substitute for opposing the vaccine. I am vaccinated. I oppose the mandates. Both can be true.

Obviously, the mandates exist because these diseases threaten not only infected persons themselves, but the community, meaning anyone they come in contact with. That’s the folly of the anti-mandate argument: It places a perverse conception of individual “freedom” in opposition to the communal interest.

Yeah, except we know that these vaccines don't stop or even reduce the spread which was conveniently left out of this argument. The only correlation between the vaccines and the spread of covid is a small positive correlation in places that are highly vaccinated. They don't serve a communal interest at all in that regard.

government mandates have been with us for untold decades. We require drivers to wear seat belts

Not in my state we don't (and we have some of the lowest car insurance rates in the country)

Vaccine mandates themselves have been part of the educational system for longer than anyone can remember in every state in the Union

Vaccine mandates for well tested vaccines that have gone through years of trials and been approved by the FDA. And religious exemptions to those mandates have largely been upheld. Covid vaccines are novel. We know they're experimental because our understanding of how they work and what kind of protection they impart has changed since they were rolled out just a year ago. We have never allowed the Federal government to use "emergency" powers to mandate vaccines for all employees via OSHA - this is a first.