Is the MAHA movement building a genuine counter-elite?

When Orwell engaged in provocations such as publishing a eulogy of the common toad in a leftist journal, "it was to remind his readers that, in the proper order of priorities, the frivolous and the eternal should come before politics." Politics, Orwell learned, wasn't a noble contest; it was, as Leys put it, a mad dog, lunging at any throat turned aside, and that image should mobilize all our attention.

As we are starting to see political estrangement turning sour again, the teeth of politics look ready to tear apart all social fabric if we don't pay attention.

Today's political fever may differ from 1930s Spain, but the reasons for our resistance remain similar to the ones Orwell stated when he wrote, in Homage to Catalonia: "If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: 'to fight against fascism,' and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: 'Common decency.'" The logical question which flows from this – which the current crop of discredited elites always neglect and which most competing segments of the counter-elite pay strictly no attention to – is, to paraphrase Jean-Claude Michéa: how do we universalize common decency?

It's on that premise that the MAHA movement formed, and that's why it's of a different character from the other segments of the counter-elite. The health freedom movement that became MAHA was about common decency.

I felt it first, in the bitter January of 2022, at Defeat the Mandate. I watched it gather real traction through the RFK, Jr. campaign. At Rescue the Republic, in September 2024, I saw the alliance harden. That was when the strange alliance between the MAGA movement and the medical freedom movement was sealed, and MAHA came to be.

What makes this crowd different isn't superior policy papers or slicker messaging. It's the gut-wrench reaction when politics gets too close to the body. MAHA people speak about childhood vaccines, about chronic disease rates, about the food we eat, about overmedication, about restoring trust in science, but underneath the language is a deeper refusal: we will not allow you to make our bodies the Empire's final frontier. We will not let "health" become the new secular religion that licenses every coercion you've ever dreamed of.

The philosopher Paul Kingsnorth has declared the Covid era a "revelation." The virus didn't create the fractured lines in the social fabric; it cast a bright light on them. Legacy media collapsed into shrewd propaganda. Silicon Valley became the Ministry of Truth. Politicians knelt before corporate power while preaching "Follow the science." It brought into stark view that we had all been ruled for a long time by a clerisy worse than that of the Roman Catholic Church before the Reformation.

Most of all, Kingsnorth wrote, "it has revealed the authoritarian streak that lies beneath so many people, and which always emerges in fearful times." We were stunned to watch "media commentators calling for censorship of their political opponents, philosophy professors justifying mass internment, and human rights lobby groups remaining silent about 'vaccine passports.'" We could not process as we watched "much of the political left transition openly into the authoritarian movement it probably always was, and countless 'liberals' campaigning against liberty."

Hundreds of millions experienced this not as an argument to be debated, but as a wound. Something primal had been desecrated. This goes beyond abstract rights and policy preferences. We are talking about the basic compact that says: you do not do certain things to other people's bodies against their will and call it virtue.

You do not lock children out of playgrounds. You do not force experimental shots while lying about the data. You do not turn medicine into a loyalty test. You do not treat the human person as the property of the state's therapeutic priesthood. These are not points of view up for negotiation; they are lines in the sand.

Perhaps no contemporary novel better speaks to the notion of liberal state coercion than Juli Zeh's 2009 dystopian novel The Method. She wrote about a society so terrified of illness that it makes perfect health the only legitimate form of citizenship. Submit your sleep logs, your steps, your blood markers every month. Exercise is compulsory. Deviation is not merely unhealthy; it is subversive, a crime against the collective.

The regime calls it the Second Enlightenment, after the first one collapsed in an era of dismantling which saw notions like the nation, religion, and family lose their meaning and left people isolated, directionless, fearful, and sick with stress and purposelessness. The solution? Make health the highest duty of the citizen. Make the body the new frontier over which the state can claim total jurisdiction. Like all good dystopian fiction, The Method is not about an imaginary world. It amplifies reality to force us to see what is before our eyes.