What The Hell America!

One faction within the MAHA movement is preoccupied with the imperiled human body — believing, not unreasonably, that Big Pharma’s synthetic quick fixes, industrial diets, environmental toxins, and sedentary lifestyles have systematically degraded human health. In response, they pursue a regimen of optimization and life extension through diet hacks, nootropics, exercise regimens, and high-tech treatments. These are the MAHA enthusiasts who instantly recognized the mysterious blue liquid RFK Jr was captured dosing himself with on a plane (methylene blue, for his mitochondria). Neophytes may venture down this path in search of simple health and lifestyle advice but find themselves drawn into a panicked internet demiworld, where some become consumed by obsessive, purity-focused diets and supplement regimens. Small-time disaster capitalists exploit those anxieties with entrepreneurial wellness ventures. While these anxieties do foster a sense of community, it is one largely mediated through online forums and subreddits, where endless discussion of supplement stacks, elimination diets, and off-label pharmaceutical use serve to reinforce shared fixations rather than deeper social or political engagement.

Another, often overlapping, tendency is retreat — the drive to escape the degraded landscapes of an empire in decline. On the survivalist end of the spectrum, this means preparing for inevitable collapse. Others seek refuge in remote areas or the home, environments where they can exert greater control over daily life. Retreaters attempt to recreate precapitalist household structures, embracing trad life, homeschooling, and the agrarian nostalgia of self-sufficient homesteading. Like the inward-looking obsession over bodily purity, withdrawal from society can foster reactionary politics. Isolation accelerates this process: many back-to-the-landers want only to be left to their own devices without irksome intervention from the state.

Leftists have tended to critique these kinds of hyperindividualist approaches, much as they have the health-conscious, consumerist ethos that overtook the organic farming movement, largely indifferent to exploitative labor conditions. The problem, however, is that the MAHA platform recognizes some very real social problems — problems that, ironically, undermine the very collective action required to transform the political-economic system that is their root cause.

Most Americans are aware that they live in a wealthy, developed nation where cancer rates are among the highest in the world. Many have also noticed, over the last few years, that cancer rates among young people are rapidly, and mysteriously, on the rise. The United States tops the list for autoimmune disease and ranks highly in diabetes cases. Researchers are increasingly interested in the prevalence of “civilization diseases” — noncommunicable diseases that they link to the rise of Western diets and lifestyles or, put another way, to the conditions associated with high levels of capitalist development.

It’s hard to ignore the mounting alarm over microplastics accumulating in the environment — in the ocean, inside birds and fish, in rocks, in our brains. Two years after a Norfolk Southern train derailed, spewing toxic smoke over East Palestine, Ohio, trains carrying the same chemicals still roll through towns across America, while the Rail Safety Act remains stalled. In the middle of Long Island, a massive plume of toxic chemicals creeps southward from the former Grumman facilities in Bethpage, New York. At the Hanford Site in Washington State, radioactive waste seeps from aging storage tanks toward the Columbia River.

US capitalism has long been a reliable producer of such “externalities.” The fact that these overlapping crises suggest, without definitively proving, a broader causality only fuels the background paranoia pervading contemporary American life. At best, awareness of these crises prompts political engagement, a recognition that their scale demands structural change. But their sheer enormity can just as easily lead to a siege mentality — a sense that one’s own body and family are under imminent assault. MAHA directs this anxiety toward a concrete project, albeit one of dubious ends, and the impulse to retreat — whether inward or away from a toxic society — accords with a reactionary or libertarian politics. It should be noted that these tendencies are in many ways rational responses given the sheer magnitude of the crises and the time horizon of an individual human life. Further, many adopt these orientations only after bitter firsthand experience of environmental toxicity and ill health.

Illness has a gravitational pull of its own, and Americans experience more than their share. Being sick — and trying to be well — can pull a person into a private world, one that, if they’re lucky, includes family. Not because they actively want to withdraw but because being sick in America is a full-time job. Time not eaten up by the illness itself, not stolen by pain, is consumed by the endless demands of managing it: researching symptoms, doctors, and treatments until one attains a graduate-level expertise in their own condition. It’s sucked up by the mind-numbing bureaucracy of the US health care system: fluorescent waiting rooms, Muzak on hold, circular conversations with insurance companies, and never-ending paperwork.

These experiences may produce a lonely, antiestablishment radicalization — something along the lines of what we are told motivated Luigi Mangione, who suffered from extreme back pain. Most of the time though, being sick is a simple obstacle to participation. It drains energy that might otherwise directed toward constructive action. Beyond that, it’s hard to be ill or in pain in social settings — bodies are unpredictable and do embarrassing things.

In his book The Class Matrix, Vivek Chibber describes how capitalism’s internal dynamics condition workers toward resignation, which forms an enduring obstacle to collective action. The systemic production of illness, injury, anxiety, and despair accomplishes a similar feat. These shared experiences can be — and have been — channeled into organized resistance and revolt, but they can just as easily deepen atomization and political malaise.

This makes it all the more unfortunate that RFK Jr’s is one of the loudest voices calling attention to America’s multiple health and environmental crises on the national stage. There is something undeniably exciting about hearing a prominent member of a presidential administration advocating for the wholesale transformation of our food system and ideas such as regenerative agriculture. That excitement is, however, severely blunted by reality: the kind of state investment needed to scale these kinds of projects is unlikely to materialize under an administration so committed to rolling back even basic environmental protections.

Kennedy’s inclination seems to be to strip away even more constraints from an already unfettered, rapacious capitalism. But no version of capitalism will “make America healthy again.” The central problem is not government overreach or individual bad actors but a system blind to human need. Capitalism will flood the market with high-fructose corn syrup and ultra-processed foods while restricting access to simple, nourishing ones. It will churn out microplastics and cancer-causing chemicals then offer Big Pharma’s treatments — ones that often come with side effects as debilitating as the conditions they claim to cure. Under capitalism, profit comes first — even at the expense of those who create its value.