America is not a country with healthy people. Everyone recognizes it, even if they don’t feel it themselves. We struggle with any number of things in our lives which all come together to result in what we call “health”. So, take a phrase from Lenin, “what is to be done?” The current figureheads of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie believe they have a solution in a programme they unimaginatively call “Make America Healthy Again”. Yet much like their solutions to the low white birthrate and the lack of industrial jobs in the United States, they ignore the broad issues that result from the capitalist system that they defend and uphold. Instead, they propose solutions that push the problem-solving back towards individual decision-making, believing that if people make the quote-unquote “right” decisions within a fundamentally broken system, this will give them what they want without having to address the problems of the system. This liberal attitude of individual-based reform is completely inadequate to the challenges we face today as people in a deeply sick country. Hi, it’s J again, and today we’re gonna discuss Why MAHA Won’t Save You.

In an earlier episode, we discussed healthcare as an industry, and how capitalism’s incentive structure runs counter to its intended mission of helping sick people. The relentless commodification of healthcare is a critical issue in today’s great public health crisis, but there is a whole other industry that has wormed its way into the gaps formed by the twisting of the healthcare industry. This industry may seem to cover a wide range of fields in their products and services, but generally have the same bottom line: you, UNhealthy person, can, with the help of our products, become healthy again. Rather than commodify healthcare on an industry-wide level, keeping healthcare limited to those who can pay, this industry sells some form of change in lifestyle which will save people from being unhealthy. This “health industry” effectively turns its consumers into its commodity. 

Now quacks and failing celebrities selling miracle pills and cures for hundreds and thousands of dollars is not a new phenomenon-if anything it’s a defining tradition of American culture. But like many other useless goods, modern advertising and social media has given the health industry wide saturation and social credibility, even above that of legitimate medical expertise in some cases. We’re bombarded endlessly with 30-second ads for fad diets, food supplements, and pharmaceutical advertisements promising far more than they can deliver. As proof of how influential this industry has become, plenty of the political appointees to the Department of Health and Human Services are deeply connected with this industry. And this influence shows itself again in their recommendations in the so-called “MAHA Report”, itself filled with AI-hallucinated studies: the claims all decry ‘impure’ products that, if removed from American society, can lead to a “healthy” society filled with virtuous health decisions. It should be no surprise that this “health industry” is so at home in the current administration. After all, most of the tenets of MAHA, and obviously its name as well, all appeal back to that same idea of a better life that was had in the past. A purer, cleaner past, one that can be returned to by removing the impurities which hold down our pure white people. MAGA’s fascist obsession with racial and cultural purity becomes MAHA’s obsession with pure, healthy individuals consuming only the right products.

But anyone who knows even the basics of public health knows that food dyes and individual medication choices do not mean much to society at large. It is PUBLIC health after all; social determinants of health create the landscape that people interact with in their daily lives. Removing one specific red dye isn’t going to solve the problem of food deserts; banning, sorry, “no longer recommending” childhood vaccines is not going to address the industrially polluted environments those children grow up in. Through the recommendations pushed by the health industry through their MAHA platform, we see how the fascist politics of the current administration are no more than reformist liberalism, seeking to solve minor surface-level problems to keep people from recognizing the sweeping ways in which our capitalist society leaves us sick and vulnerable. MAHA will not create a healthier you; this parasitic “health industry” only serves to sell you on the calming illusion of a healthier lifestyle.