Is Fitness Culture Right-Wing Now?

T hose on the left still looking for an explanation for Donald Trump’s presidential election victory might want to take an honest look at the assault on normalcy they have waged over the past few years. According to some of our cultural mandarins, objecting to graphic material in grade-school libraries and the presence of men in women’s sports, embracing displays of patriotic vexillology, and enjoying The Lord of the Rings are all signs of far-right extremism.

When a descriptor gets stretched beyond all recognition, to encompass the commonplace and commonsense, we shouldn’t be surprised when people defiantly reject it — or reluctantly warm to it, accepting their status as an “extremist” under such ludicrous definitions (as I myself would be).

A possible recent addition to the index of customary affinities now coded as suspect by the Left is personal health. Its presence there is particularly damaging to the country and illustrative of the extent of the challenge the Left faces in rehabilitating itself.

This effort has taken a familiar form. Media outlets fear that any source of information they cannot control or understand risks transmitting dangerous ideas. Just before the election, Joy Reid blogger Ja’han Jones fretted for MSNBC about “online influencers who use health, food and wellness content to promote ultraconservative extremism.” Academic Cynthia Miller-Idriss worried for the same outlet that “the realm of online fitness now provides a new and ever-expanding market for reaching and radicalizing young men.”

In the Guardian, author James Ball outlined the dangers of what he called the “wellness-to-fascism pipeline.” Psychology lecturer and public-health researcher Williams in Time magazine expressed concern that “some New Age spirituality and wellness influencers are aligning themselves with extreme right-wing anti-science activists.” And history professor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, interviewed for the same magazine, wants us to remember that widespread enthusiasm for exercise began as “totally part of a white supremacy project.” (She has also argued that running is racist.)

To be sure, some of these same figures are careful to include their “to be sure” qualifiers. “Fitness of course is a staple and a hobby for many people, for whom it is enjoyable and rewarding for brain health and overall well-being,” Miller-Idriss stipulated. And Petrzela, despite her potted history of exercise, now wants us to make “a collective public investment in making fitness and recreation available to everybody and much more accessible than it currently is.”

I’ll add a “to be sure” of my own: Sometimes, right-coded fitness enthusiasm can go to some inadvisable places. Consider the male-body-obsessed, anti-Christian, anti-Founding lifting fetishist Costin Alamariu, who goes by the internet pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert. His “exhortation” Bronze Age Mindset gives readers the blatantly pagan and narcissistic counsel to become stronger so that someday they might lord over lesser humans and “be worshiped as a god!” Working out should humble you, and even bring you closer to others, not make you think you’re some superior form of life meant to dominate them.

But the general thrust of left-wing wariness of exercise culture is to place physical activity and wellness within limits the Left deems acceptable — that is, limits that it controls. And it does so at the same time that concepts such as “fatphobia” (which casts the perception of a trimmer form as rooted in inherent prejudice) and “ableism” (which derides the presumption of physical capabilities as the same) receive elite affirmation.

The memory of Covid-19 lockdowns, which entailed extensive and counterproductive proscriptions of physical activity, also lingers — and rankles. Throw deteriorating health measures for Americans into the mix — declining life expectancy, rising rates of obesity — and it is not hard to see how some people may begin to reject supposedly mainstream edicts about how best to live.

The fact that such a rejection can go in some unproductive directions does not discredit the sentiment entirely. Rather, it makes the case for an acknowledgement of elite failure, and an effort to offer more reliable authorities who share, promote, and cultivate physical wellness and its attendant virtues. It is not just possible to believe in self-reliance, self-improvement, discipline, and persistence, without descending into dangerous digital rabbit holes; it is essential. To treat such traits otherwise is only to hasten their disappearance from national life at a time when they are needed more than ever, and to marginalize those who still evince them.

So are fitness, wellness, and personal health right-wing now? They don’t have to be. Many on the left take care of themselves, and many on the right do not. And most people who go to the gym don’t think of it as a political act. But if some on the left want such things to be seen as right-wing, they may get their wish. And they would remain stuck in the political and cultural wilderness as a result — with plenty of time to work out.