Why Your Fitness Routine Is Suddenly Political

Think about it. Lifting weights. Crunchy moms looking for the best non-toxic mineral sunscreen. Investing in crypto. Losing body fat. Cutting out seed oils from your diet. Starting a business. Looksmaxxing. None of these things have anything explicitly to do with right-wing politics, and yet they’ve become entirely co-opted by the right-wing ethos, as though the left has just ceded the entire concept of self-improvement to the right.

Why does paying lip service to the value of free speech now carry the same ideological associations with the right as a jacked-up pickup truck waving around American flags? This is the observation made by Jason Pargin, who took to TikTok to ask what’s become of the left that we now make these one-to-one associations between self-improvement and right-wing politics. 

He suggests that if someone’s teenage son started talking about a new male self improvement YouTuber he started following who espouses these sorts of ideals—diet, fitness, finance, investing, the importance of free speech and personal responsibility and how much he hates censorship—we’d assume he’s falling down a “right-wing rabbit hole.” 

“The thing is,” Pargin says, “I think the people on the right would say that the very concept of individual self improvement is a right-wing idea; that all the people out there asking for a liberal Joe Rogan it’s like asking for an Amish Elon Musk and if they’re correct about that, that is crazy that you would just surrender the entire concept of self improvement to one side of the political spectrum.” 

The Ideological Roots of Self Improvement

Why is that, and how did we get here? Let’s consider the right-wing framing of self-improvement, taking Jordan Peterson, for example. He insists that self-improvement is a necessary precursor to fixing the world—that you can’t solve the world’s problems if you don’t have your room in order. Compare this to left-wing framing, which insists that not only do you not need to sort out your room or your psyche before taking on systemic problems, but that you can’t. “Sorting yourself out” is helpless because your personal failings are directly caused by the world’s problems. Self improvement is just a distraction designed to trick you into taking responsibility for the systems that are holding you down. Some make video essays insisting the “self improvement lie” is nothing but a neoliberal psyop. 

Your room is messy and your life is falling apart because of capitalism. You can’t fix your relationships because of the patriarchy. The system becomes a convenient stand-in for the abdication of responsibility. The system is both causing your sickness and withholding the cure. Your body is a soft, pliable mallow of fat because of racism. But the rise of pilates, running, and weight lifting, too carry the weight of menacing racialized, authoritarian ideologies. If I have to see another “The White Supremacist Roots of X Banal Hobby or Physical Pastime” (here’s a little collage if you’re curious) I’m genuinely terraforming Mars myself so I can dissociate completely from this planet.

These are just abstractions of locus of control—the degree to which people believe that they, as opposed to outside forces beyond their influence, have control over the outcomes of events in their lives. The right advocates policies and attitudes that reflect an internal locus of control: the belief that you alone are responsible for the outcomes in your life through personal decisions and effort, not some shadowy system or fate. The left implicitly advocates for an external locus of control: the belief that life is controlled by outside factors beyond individual influence.

How did the simple act of bettering yourself—recognizing there were flaws to fix—become an intrinsically conservative value?

These are generalizations that will oscillate in their accuracy depending on which direction you’re moving on the spectrum. While incels might generally subscribe to more right-wing beliefs or at least have been associated with more right-wing communities, their framework for interpreting information is through an external locus of control. 

You see this principle enact itself on every level, from the personal to the political. It’s the psychological roots of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” the conservative idea that no one can really hold you back from success if you put in the work. The left frames individual struggle as evidence of systemic failure. Anyone who’s struggling is doing so because the game is rigged, not because of any personal failing. 

Of course, neither framework is really the whole story. No one person is the sole author of their life’s accomplishments, nor purely at the mercy of fate. We are agentic beings influenced by an environment we didn’t create and genes we cannot alter. But even physical determinists who don’t believe in free will grant we ought to behave as though we do. The fabric of society depends on it. It’s useful. It’s psychologically beneficial. Likewise, even if you aren’t the sole author of your life (outcomes don’t occur in a vacuum), why shouldn’t you behave as if you are? What is the alternative? 

Pargin correctly points out that self-improvement in itself is somewhat rooted in a fundamentally conservative ethos—an internal locus of control. If you didn’t believe that you had any meaningful impact on what happens in your life, then why try at all? But the left at least used to find value in personal betterment as a tool for collective empowerment and resistance, even in the face of oppression. A perfect cultural storm has finally severed the last ties to individual agency.

The Modern Liberal Aversion to Fitness

But why has the left surrendered? Don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly happy to let them carry on pushing away any young girl who takes pride in her appearance by insisting she’s upholding the white supremacist patriarchy by taking a pilates class. Or that health-conscious men who lift weights are on a slippery slope to fascism, who pose a serious risk of starting right-wing death squads. Or that losing weight is a problematic manifestation of fatphobia that’s erasing the personhood of fat people. But that got me thinking. How did this happen? How did the simple act of bettering yourself—recognizing there were flaws to fix—become an intrinsically conservative value?

A generation ago, personal growth was a bipartisan value. Remember when we used to say, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”? In 1962, Democratic President John F. Kennedy addressed the nation with a call to action about physical fitness. He called on Americans to embrace the “vigorous life” and insisted a nation is only as strong as its citizens. He published an article entitled The Soft American in Sports Illustrated in 1960, detailing the decline of physical fitness in the United States, which lagged far behind Europeans. 

“Such softness on the part of the individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation,” he warned. Kennedy argued that the physical vigor of our citizens is one of the nation’s more precious resources; that allowing it to dwindle and grow soft will render us incapable of realizing our full potential as a nation. “In a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.” He proposed a national program to improve the physical fitness of all Americans.

Sixty years later, that legacy takes on a form of irony through his younger brother Robert, who has kept the health crusade alive through his Make America Healthy Again movement, a now markedly partisan ideal. The ethos of MAHA is coded as conservative, conspiratorial, and can’t escape the baggage that comes with its association with the Trump administration. Once a universal call to collective health of a nation and strength of its citizens, advocation for vitality is seen as right-wing paranoia, if not fascistic aesthetics that signal the ushering in of a new authoritarian age. One where disabled, trans, and fat people will all be erased. 

Liberals, who were once the champions of countercultural health movements now recoil at the rhetoric they once proudly called their own. In the same vein as the infamous “Party Switch” theory, I’m coining what I call the health consciousness switch. And a bizarre switch, it has been. Who would have predicted that hippie-adjacent concepts like sunning your balls, refusing to wear sunscreen because it contains cancer-causing chemicals, grounding by walking around barefoot to connect energetically with the earth, refusing to touch receipts, being skeptical of big pharmaceutical companies, engaging in new age spiritualism, and being preoccupied with leading a generally “natural” life free of toxins, chemicals, and genetically engineered ingredients would come to be the archetypal right-winger circa 2025 when this would have had all the trappings of a free loving commie-sympathizing hippie in the 60s? 

Liberals, who were once the champions of countercultural health movements now recoil at the rhetoric they once proudly called their own.

Until very recently, the stereotype of the Whole Foods liberal, who shopped for only organic, vegan, gluten-free, cruelty-free, and plastic-free products, reigned supreme. This was the archetypal liberal—the kind whose self consciousness of the quality and ethics of their groceries inspired the annoyance of every conservative in a five mile radius. The kind advocating for healthier school lunches under the Obama administration, as did First Lady Michelle Obama, which drew no praise from the conservative right at the time.

I remember being in high school when these very subtle changes were implemented. Changes that the modern anti-seed oil right would champion, but which the 2012-era pre-Trumpian right loathed. It was akin to stripping away our freedoms as gun-toting, slop-guzzling Americans. And the average conservative would be damned if you were going to infringe on their choice of seed oil slop or impose a soda tax (somewhat of a reversal of the current dichotomy, seeing liberals defending one’s right to soda while conservatives argue they should be banned from SNAP recipients while liberals awkwardly defend welfare recipients’ Diet Coke as a civil right).

The same anti-seed oil crusades and moves to ban harmful ingredients (such as red dye 40) that the right now champions were once dismissed by the 2012-era, pre-Trump right as nanny-state overreach. In 2013, Sarah Palin even took a victory lap during a 2013 CPAC speech by performatively sipping soda out of a Big Gulp cup and proudly declaring it safe after then-NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to crack down on large sodas (bigger than 16 ounces) was shot down by the State Supreme Court.

While this is more an issue about where our tax dollars should be going, rhetoric like the sort coming from West Virginia Governor Patrick Morissey shows a clear evolution in the GOP’s attitudes towards health and freedom of choice.“ Taxpayer dollars should be targeted toward nutritious foods,” he said, at a MAHA event.

The Health Consciousness Switch

Even the seed oil issue is divided along party lines, yet another health issue becoming a dietary culture war proxy. Somewhere between the kale chips and the yoga mats or perhaps a fortune cookie-induced earthquake, the wires got crossed, and the sides performed a Freaky Friday switch. The left ceded their conscientious concern for food, medicine, and bodily autonomy to a new right-wing identity. The shift didn’t happen in a vacuum; it paralleled a general reversal in trust toward institutions, as we watched elite universities, long-respected media publications, government agencies, and politicians being bullied and captured by identity politics.

The left’s axiom of questioning authority eroded when an anti-establishment populist became the face of the new right. Enter: Trump Derangement Syndrome, the tribal politics of COVID, where adherence to mask and vaccine mandates acted as a sort of political sorting hat, and moral safetyism that gave rise to the modern understanding of “woke” politics. In the 60s and 70s, being “crunchy” was an act of rebellion against the establishment; a way of reclaiming sovereignty over your own body and rejecting corporate control. 

But now, that middle finger to the system has firmly retreated back into its knuckles. “Question everything” because “trust the science” and “listen to the experts,” a dogmatic political trauma response to the rise of Trump’s anti-establishment right-wing populism, which inspired a new wave of establishment-skeptical conservatives and a political reversal of institutional trust. It didn’t come out of nowhere. 

That’s not to say that anti-establishmentarianism is inherently correct. Plenty get pulled down rabbit holes far detached from any semblance of reality. But “disagreeing with the science” when scientific rigor itself is being compromised, like erasing the differences between men and women and punishing those who speak out about it, is a different thing entirely from a dogmatic rejection of any evidence or reason. You could argue that the latter is currently operating under the facade of “science.” 

Of course, some have cautioned that throwing out our standards altogether is not the answer and puts us on a dangerous path of charlatans spreading pseudointellectualism to the masses under the guise of “speaking truth to power.” We don't necessarily need to get all of our opinions from random comedians with podcasts. It’s just that their elevation in the media landscape is a direct response to the unseriousness infecting modern academia, government, and even what should be our most rigorous scientific bodies. We needn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, as Sam Harris warns. But the left seems intent on drowning in the bathwater just to protect the illusion that the baby’s still safe. The problem isn’t that our institutions have no standards, it’s that they no longer live up to them.

The Modern Liberal Intellectual’s Oversimplification of Everything

In the 2010s, in response to the unwavering beauty ideals of the early 2000s, where hyper-thinness was king and anything that deviated was punished socially, we saw the rise of body positivity, which morphed into fat acceptance. At the same time, thanks to the popularity of new social media platforms like Tumblr, we saw the rise of the trauma economy and identity as capital. This is where we started to see “as a woman,” “my lived experience,” and narratives about privilege, systemic oppression, and the social capital of victimhood began to eclipse agency and achievement. 

Haidt blames this on “three great untruths” that wormed their way into education: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker (overprotective parenting has made our kids weak because they haven’t cultivated resilience by facing challenges), always trust your feelings (if I feel this way, that makes it true/prioritizing lived experience over reasoning), and life is a battle between good people and evil people (disagreement is a moral failing, which motivates call-out a.k.a. cancel culture). This is the gist of the woke mind virus that Haidt observed spreading like a contagion on college campuses around 2013 or 2014, but which was seeded in earlier childhood (something he expands more on in The Anxious Generation). 

On Charlie Rose, Haidt sums up the moral framework of the archetypal social justice warrior (what we now might call a wokescold) succinctly: “The key to the new morality is a method of looking at society and looking at power and privilege.” The old idea of education was to come to campus and be exposed to many different perspectives, but now, students are taught to see everything through one narrow, myopic lens: divide people up according to immutable characteristics, assign moral merit based on their level of privilege (bad) or victimhood (good), and view all of society through this single, totalizing perspective. “All social problems get reduced to this simple framework,” he laments. 

If we use this moment as a theory of mind exercise to try and inhabit the mental mode of a leftist that views the world through this lens, how might we interpret concepts like fitness, health, and aesthetics? In Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, he argues that liberals see hierarchies as inherently oppressive and unjust. Conservatives are much more naturally oriented toward hierarchy, seeing it as necessary or natural. This is pretty obvious on an economic basis, where conservatives tend to show an affinity for capitalism and libs might find socialism or even communism to be seductive ideas: systems that supposedly even the playing field. In rejecting hierarchy and seeing it as a tool of oppression, they will naturally try to dissolve it, especially in questioning just how “meritocratic” they truly are. 

How Tumblr Transformed Reveling in Ugliness into Activism

Culture writer and internet historian Katherine Dee makes an addendum in The American Conservative to the official understanding of the rise of wokeness, citing the forgotten age of Tumblr fandom, and the moment it broke containment into the broader culture, changing politics as we knew it, forever. Whereas media personalities like James Lindsay have supposed a clear University to culture pipeline, she noted some blind spots in the "University lab leak" theory, notably that the explosion of wokeness "colonized universities from the outside, not the other way around." The single most impactful "super-spreader" event? A curious little blogging site called Tumblr rising from relative obscurity to the main well from which we drew our cultural and political discourse, between the years of 2013 to 2015. Dee describes it as “a union of fandom, social media, and journalism."

Online fandoms (revolving around the cult-like interest and worship of certain people, media, and entertainment) helped assuage the pain of being a teenager. It often attracted people who were socially alienated in real life. "For the alienated, fandom gave them everything they needed and more—not only a support system, but a structure, and identity." The nature of it tended to attract misfits. But she describes a sort of cross-pollination between different fandoms, topics, and, being a safe space for the marginalized, a number of fantastical conversations about identity and activism. 

Slowly but surely, radical acceptance became an act of resistance.

The nature of endless streams of content from a hodgepodge of super fandoms necessitated means of curation, which gave rise to trigger and content warnings that could also hide the content from users unless they wished to see it. This practice, which encouraged self-censorship, quickly created echo chambers where quirky ideas were reinforced without any pushback, forming new "identity fandoms" which became incubators for the excesses of wokeness we abhor today.

Some of these identity fandoms of the 2010s reframed insecurities as proud aspects of identity. Fatness wasn't a failing to overcome, but a political identity to embrace. Body positivity and fat activism became counterforces to the prevailing hegemony of thinness and body shaming. It inverted stigmatization into pride. By refusing to hide themselves or cower to the orthodoxy of beauty ideals, shameless existence and indulgence in these historically shamed identities; sources of insecurity, became a form of activism. Slowly but surely, radical acceptance became an act of resistance. Aesthetic optimization became a tool of the patriarchy, a surrender to the male gaze, the white supremacist hegemony by adhering to eurocentric beauty standards. It quite literally became stunning and brave to embrace ugliness. 

The Future of Liberalism in the Absence of Self-Improvement

“If there is actually anybody out there on the left saying that any focus on self-improvement is some kind of betrayal to the cause because instead we need to focus on fixing society and the system, they’re speaking nonsense.” Pargin argues. There’s no contradiction there. Your movement is not going to take over the world and save the future unless its members are healthy, and I mean healthy in every way: physically, mentally, emotionally, financially. 

He leaves the left with this warning, “Let’s say a famous left-wing celebrity comes out and says the young men today they need to spend less time playing videogames, more time focusing on their fitness, going to meeting people, building up a social network, they need to focus more on their education, on learning new skills, if we’ve gotten to a place in society where we automatically assume that celebrity has become right-wing just because they said those objectively true things then the left is doomed.” 

The result will be surrendering a generation of young men who Pargin suspects don’t have their best interest at heart. “You will lose them if your only message is ‘there’s no point in trying because the deck is stacked against you.’ You have to give men something to aspire to as individuals and if you don’t do it, someone else will.” This is exactly what JFK warned us about: that neglecting personal discipline and vitality would erode the very foundation of the nation.