As the entire world is having a temper tantrum over the most recent Epstein case revelations about our discredited elites – obsessing over the power networks, the private jets, the bank accounts in the Virgin Islands, the French ministers, the European royalty, the foreign intelligence agencies, etc. – I’m having an entirely different epiphany. And, strangely, a flicker of hope.
The rot on display is hard to take your eyes away from, but I find myself thinking more about what might rise in its place. I’m not talking about another faction of whip-crackers wearing better suits or pushing slicker slogans, but a quieter bunch, who appear to have the capacity to generate moral assent to a new political formula. That new elite prototype has started to take shape inside the MAHA movement. It might not yet be a fully formed counter-elite, but it certainly looks like a promising kind of one.
I cannot say it enough: MAHA’s foundational event is the Covid crisis. For many people, it represents the most frightening moment of our existence. What happened between 2020 and 2022 was not merely a policy disagreement or a partisan shouting match. It was the moment when the state, legacy media, Big Tech, pharmaceutical giants, and a large segment of the professional class all eagerly agreed that the normal rules no longer applied, that they could do virtually anything they wanted to people’s bodies, force any injection into children’s arms, arbitrarily decide who would be allowed to earn a living, and that these acts were not merely permissible but morally required.
The violation was so deep that it felt physical. That visceral reaction many of us felt – and continue to feel – was the ultimate offense to what George Orwell called common decency, by which he meant the basic virtues of ordinary people, as opposed to ideologues or men of power.
The closest Orwell came to a definition appeared in his 1944 review essay Raffles and Miss Blandish, where he contrasted two literary works, E.W. Hornung’s Raffles series and James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Raffles, the gentleman burglar (a kind of British Arsène Lupin), operates by an unspoken code defined by the very simple injunction that “certain things are ‘not done,’” and the idea of doing them scarcely arises. Devoid of religious belief or a formal ethical system, he follows certain rules semi-instinctively.
To give but one example: Raffles will not abuse hospitality, meaning that he may commit burglary in a house he is invited to, but never against the host. He never commits murder, avoids violence, is “chivalrous though not moral in his relations with women,” and is intensely patriotic (dispatching to the Queen, in one telling moment, a gold cup stolen from the British museum on the day of the Diamond Jubilee). His code is one of social form rather than absolute right or wrong.
By contrast, James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Orwell has noted, flatters the reader’s “power instinct,” offering escape not into action but into cruelty and sexual perversion. It is a novel where the thrill lies in domination.
Orwell saw the fork in the road right there. One path preserves a world where wonder is possible. The other, obsessed with certainty, leads straight to the managerial class we spend our days despising – not because they are powerful, but because they are indecent. They don’t merely want to govern; they want you to thank them while they humiliate you. They demand that you internalize your shame while they play with your body and with your children’s minds. They regulate your speech, your sleep, your very immune system, and integrate the results of their experiments on you as data into their dashboards and compliance metrics.
That indecency has been the real fuel behind the populist insurgency which crystallized into political dividends around 2015. The anger was legitimate. The sense of betrayal was deep. But most of the movements that tried to ride that anger turned out to be peddling the same old commodity with a fresh label.
Spend a few hours in Democratic Socialist of America’s circles, in certain MAGA gatherings, in libertarian hangouts, among Catholic integralists, French sovereigntists, or any of the other self-styled “counter-elites,” and the evidence is inescapable: the same hunger for the whip, the same gleam in the eye that says “Our turn now.”
They pray to different saints, they wear different flags, they preach different gospels, but don’t be deceived: the posture is identical. Above all, they think politics, in its most debased form, is the grand adventure of life. They are, indeed, intoxicated by it.
This is, again, in complete contrast with Orwell’s common decency, which rested on his “horror of politics” as Simon Leys put it. Orwell “hated politics,” writes Leys, which is a paradox for a writer who “could not blow his nose without moralizing on the conditions in the handkerchief industry.” Yet, as Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick once observed, “[h]e argued for the primacy of the political only to protect non-political values.”
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.
Sad to say, the world of The Method is not a projection into the future; it’s a portrait of our present. Christopher Lasch named it long ago: the therapeutic state, where the cure of souls has been replaced by mental hygiene, salvation by numbed emotions, the battle against evil by the war against anxiety, where a medical idiom has been substituted for a political one. The World Health Organization gave the new priesthood its global orders, defining health as “complete physical, mental and social well-being,” a definition so total it licenses intrusion anywhere.
Thomas Szasz saw the endgame with merciless clarity: once health values are allowed to justify coercion while moral and political values are not, those who wish to coerce will simply enlarge the category of “health” until it swallows everything else. We have watched that enlargement for half a century. The Covid moment was when it accelerated into plain sight.
MAHA’s deepest message is a refusal to let that enlargement continue unchallenged. The movement coalesced around Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. not because he was the most charismatic, but because he was willing to say out loud what millions felt in their bones: the body is not the property of the state, and “health” is not a blank check for total control.
That refusal is what makes MAHA feel, for the first time in my life, like something more than another bid for the ring of power.
Even more importantly, my experiences in the MAHA circles have revealed that their counter-elite takes seriously the need for legitimacy in the form of personal behavior. It was on display, a week ago, in Washington, D.C., at the MAHA roundtable, where the NIH’s new leadership explained its vision. It was like nothing I had ever heard or seen before from DC officials.
Unusual for a scientist, particularly one at the head of an institution awarding close to $40 billion annually to medical research, the NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, did not speak like a demiurge. He did not preach an escape from nature, into transcendence from the material world led by a vanguard of elites with a special connection to the laws of the universe or access to secret knowledge.
He started with a striking moral admission of sin on the part of the scientific community that attributed powers to themselves that were not theirs when they summoned the whole world into treating their neighbors as biohazards. As a result of that fundamental ethical violation, the population lost trust in its scientists whom they now view as a pack of self-righteous sheep. The Science Emperor is naked and NIH’s new vision is to clothe it again, patiently, humbly. Though the goal stated is ambitious (Bhattacharya proposes no less than a second scientific revolution), the tone was never hubristic.
Bhattacharya’s argument, in brief, is that science suffers from a “crisis of replication,” meaning on the one hand that incentives in medical research reward groundbreaking, novel, big bang discoveries to the detriment of replicable and reproducible results, and on the other hand that medical research community is not honest about admitting failures.
In other words, he’s telling us that the NIH has piles of trash worth goldmines, and that instead of starting from scratch every time to find miraculous remedies which take decades to be accessible to the public, we should pick up the low-hanging fruits directly accessible to us with repurposed drugs, better nutrition etc., with a concern for affordability.
This is bold talk, but there’s something about Bhattacharya, and for that matter most of the people present with him, that engenders trust. One of the lessons I learned from years of reading anarchist literature and spending time in renegade circles is that if you want to make the world a better place, the best place to start is by making the out group a model of what human relations can be. In this, I think of the great Wendell Berry, who wrote that “[t]he Amish are the only Christians that I know about who actually practise the radical neighbourliness of the Gospels.”
They truly honor Jesus Christ’s second commandment “Love Thy Neighbor Like Thyself,” by not replacing their families and neighbors with technological devices. In other words, an organized elite carrying a new political formula must display some trustworthy personal standards of behavior, a kind of “noblesse Oblige” ethics, if it wants to collect the moral assent of the majority. (Of course, this is precisely what our current crop of elites, and those who aspire to replace them, fail utterly to understand or even acknowledge.)
Will this common decency survive contact with power? That is among the many questions of a moment full of them. We know that history is not kind to such bets. And Orwell himself was not a believer in happy endings (cf, his image of the boot stomping on faces without cease). But while it lasts, MAHA should compel our attention. Not because it promises paradise, not because it has all the answers, but because it tells us that some things are not done. And that’s reason enough, I think, to get behind it.
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