Is MAHA fascist? If yes, why or rather how is it fascist? I think I can finally give a satisfying answer to this question that is based on something more substantial than just vibes. I am going to reconstruct my thought process about it in a more orderly sequence (basically I am describing the process of writing – I’m going to write about it) for your consideration. I know my limits; I am neither a psychoanalyst nor a critical theorist, nor a historian, nor a scholarly expert in fascism. My reading of Deleuze and Guattari to follow is secondhand, as I need time (and resources) to actually read Anti-Oedipus myself. I am offering these thoughts with humility, in case they are as constructive for anyone else as they are for me, but they remain open to revision. 

My basic answer to the titular question is: yes. As we will see, I think MAHA is a production of a certain type and style of reality; specifically, of life-destroying reality. This will make more sense, hopefully, by the end of the essay. I think that this understanding is able to hold all the apparent contradictions of the MAHA movement together in a coherent whole. The vaccine denial, the fascination with raw milk and saturated fats, the freebirthing, the embrace of supplements held in equal measure against hostility to (e.g.) folate, the disinterest in gun violence and violence towards children, the lax regulations on pesticides and real environmental contaminants, are not actually contradictory or hypocritical positions. Or rather, they’re only contradictory if you insist on holding them to the standard of technocracy – rationality. As various desires that produce and are part of a reality hostile to life, however, they’re perfectly consistent. 

It all starts with my recent reading of Klaus Theweleit’s two-volume Male Fantasies (1977). You may remember that I tried and failed to read these books a few months ago. In light of the recent escalations of state terror in the Twin Cities and elsewhere, I picked them up again and this time I was able to positively tear through them. I wasn’t necessarily expecting this to yield any insights on the MAHA question in particular, but since this question occupies a lot of my thinking it’s perhaps not surprising that my reading did generate some thoughts in this direction. I need to lay some groundwork (and work through some of my own understanding) to get to the really interesting parts, so I hope you’ll bear with me. 

Male Fantasies is a psychoanalytic reading of primary texts written by members of the German Freikorps, an association of interwar paramilitary units that transformed themselves into the Nazi Sturmabteilung (“brownshirts”) during the Third Reich.* Theweleit focuses on texts from and about the period of the “white terror,” the Freikorps’ rampage of extrajudicial violence against leftists and workers in Germany – roughly from the end of WWI until the mid-1920s. (The subtitle of Vol. 2 is “psychoanalyzing the white terror.”) Theweleit reads these texts not on the literary merits or lack thereof but “on the face.” How did the “soldier males” of the Freikorps describe what they were doing? How did they relate (or more often, fail to relate) to other people? As the title suggests, he’s particularly interested in their conceptualizations and descriptions of, and attitudes and relationships towards, women. I get the impression that Theweleit expected to apply traditional Freudian psychoanalytic concepts to these texts, but ultimately finds those concepts inadequate to make sense of his reading. What he finds is not, for example, repression of Oedipal desires erupting in violence against sexually liberated Bolshevik women; there is plenty of said violence in the texts, but actually very little repression. The authors and narrators move through the texts in hallucinatory “disintegrated ego states” where socially unacceptable desires are consciously expressed and fulfilled in paroxysms of slaughter.

For reasons that Theweleit expounds at length, none of the neuroses originating from the “Oedipal triangle” quite apply to what is happening in the texts of his soldier males. What does work is the structure and function of the unconscious (if we want to call it that) proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. (I am skipping a lot of detail regarding Theweleit’s actual findings pertaining to the psychic structures of the soldier males because it won’t be important for our purposes.) This – Theweleit’s putting-to-work of basic ideas from Anti-Oedipus – occasioned my conversion from someone who was interested in but confused by Deleuze and Guattari to a full D&G head. The key thing to understand is that Anti-Oedipus is – it’s right there in the title – a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and its corresponding concept of the (“Oedipal”) structure of the thing that Freud called “the unconscious.” 

For Deleuze and Guattari, the “unconscious” isn’t a vault of repressed desires that are unacceptable to vent in civilized society, it’s just an engine of desires as such, capital-D Desire. The engine metaphor is intentional; Deleuze and Guattari describe the mode of function as “machinic,” almost cybernetic, apparently informed by, e.g., Klein’s theories of part-object relations. (I’m way out over my skis here, but as I understand it, the famous example of a mother’s breast is a “part object” before it is perceived as belonging to a person who is “the mother”; infant mouth and breast come together to discharge or satisfy some desire, say the desire to eat, then disengage and recombine in  new productive connections.) The unconscious “desires to desire,” making Desire akin to libido or life force. Deleuze and Guattari draw a fair amount on Wilhelm Reich, as I have recently, and you can see the similarities here. What Reich conceived of as specifically genital, sexual energy, Deleuze and Guattari instead posit as content-neutral desire, which needs to go someplace, discharge itself somehow, and crucially, to produce something. 

The activity of the unconscious is what Deleuze and Guattari call “desiring-production” and, per Theweleit, what desiring-production produces is reality itself. This has resolved some confusion for me. Deleuze and Guattari are not suggesting (as I thought before) that fascism is a transhistorical feature of the human psyche, some little homuncular demon living deep in all of our minds. Rather, it is a form that unconscious desiring-production has taken and still can take under certain social conditions.** Here is Theweleit (emphasis mine):

If we admit that there is a specifically ‘fascist’ mode of producing reality and view that as a specific malformation of desiring-production, we also have to admit that fascism is not a matter of form of government, or form of economy, or of a system in any sense. In this sense, an analysis of fascism becomes necessary for reasons above and beyond its hideous political effects. We need to understand and combat fascism not because so many fell victim to it, not because it stands in the way of the triumph of socialism, not even because it might ‘return again,’ but primarily because, as a form of reality production that is constantly present and possible under determinate conditions, it can, and does, become our production. The crudest examples of this are to be seen in the relations that have been the focus of this first chapter, male-female relations, which are also relations of production. Under certain conditions, this particular relation of production yields fascist reality; it creates life-destroying structures. (Vol. 1 pp. 220-221)

If fascism can be understood as a form of reality resulting from relations of desiring-production possible under certain determinate conditions, then some good questions become: what are the productive relations and determinate conditions underlying the MAHA phenomenon? I’ve found Reich’s theories useful as a starting point for thinking about MAHA but all along I’ve been replicating what D&G see as Reich’s principal error in drawing a distinction between social and psychic reality. Where the Reichian question asks which psychic realities originate in which material realities,  Deleuze and Guattari insist that the two realities are in fact one and the same. 

As indicated in the quotation above, Theweleit is interested in the productive relation of gender relations in “patriarchal Europe,” and the determinate conditions he’s interested in are those of Wilhelmine and post-Wilhelmine Germany. The obvious analogy to Theweleit’s actual subjects in our present day would be the various loser goons of ICE/CBP/BORTAC. But I think there’s a version of this – a form of reality producing structures that destroy life – that goes through social and administrative murder rather than face to face (or, realistically, gun to back) homicide. What are the relevant productive relations here? Certainly there are some of the same ones of “classical” European fascism: class struggle and gender relations. I want to venture a few more that are unique to our time and place, and to the MAHA phenomenon specifically. These are productive relations between the roles of doctor and patient, between expert and “laity,” or, perhaps most generally and abstractly, between system and individual. 

At this point, I find myself compelled to make the distinction between the political leadership of MAHA and the “rank and file” guzzlers of slop and consumers of ads (more on this later) – but it’s important to resist this. Making this distinction assumes that what MAHA is doing can’t possibly be what some people actually do want; it’s no different than blaming everything on disinformation, which is worst of all. Where Reich is right, and where Deleuze and Guattari accordingly praise him, is in his refusal to see fascism as trickery, deception, or false consciousness – rather, it’s a way of organizing and channeling Desire under certain conditions of social repression. 

Returning to the system-individual productive relation, I want to close out by offering a little bit of speculation on what this looks like. (I’ll leave the determinate conditions for a later newsletter; I think these are, in general, more accessible and better characterized, including by me in previous installations.) Theweleit’s soldier males associated women and leftism through a raft of familiar associations – between women and water, between Bolshevism and an overwhelming “flood” or “wave.” The threat they perceived was annihilation, dissolution of the self in the overwhelming flood and Male Fantasies chronicles the ways that the soldiers made themselves “hard” against the flowing masses – by marching in formation, by particular styles of fascist architecture, by hardening the body through extreme physical discipline and pain. What does this look like when the (possibly malformed or distorted) productive relation we are interested in is not the one between genders but between system and individual?

It’s helpful to continue to proceed by analogy to the soldier males here. Rather than flooded, enveloped, or overwhelmed, the threat to the boundaries of the self corresponding to the system-individual relation are dissolution, dispersal, scattering, even disarticulation. At the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop undergoes an entropic “decrease in personal density” and literally comes apart and scatters over the blasted landscape of postwar Europe – just at, not coincidentally I’m sure, the dawn of the blessed age of high technology. The attitudes of MAHA underlying their eclectic and nonsensical range of woo-woo positions do indeed involve asserting the sovereignty and integrity of the individual against dispersal into technocratic, globalized systems of dependency. Taking a vaccine, or worse, the state mandating that everyone take a vaccine, is an unacceptable concession to the threatening idea that your health is, at some level, dependent upon the health of the population and how well it’s administered. Drinking raw milk is, straight up, a rejection of the industrialized commercial food system (and folk-dietetic fables about “our great grandmothers” provide appealing emotional gloss over the reality that the MAHA agenda in fact involves choking back prodigious amounts of waste products of industrial beef ranching). You can freebirth because your body is sufficient and knowledgeable as it is; to assert that the survival of your body (or your child’s) is dependent on tight coordination among a team – a network – of specialist experts is to threaten its integrity. And so on.

 These desires manifest a life-destroying reality when they are structured by a world where other forms of productive desire are foreclosed and where interconnected systems of mutual dependence, and their administration by technocrats, are indeed necessary for preventing infants from dying from measles or ensuring that the milk you buy at the store (that you have to buy at the store, by the way) doesn’t give you a raging case of necrotizing enterocolitis. There are also interesting strategies of protecting the self and the physical body against dispersal that are characteristic of MAHA, involving making oneself solid and dense. This will be the subject of my next newsletter. 

*Leftists recognize the Freikorps as the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919 when the Social Democratic leader of the Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, licensed his defense minister to use the Freikorps to crush a communist-led revolt against the government.

** Guattari’s statement that “a military machine, as such, crystallizes a fascist desire” regardless of political regime in Everybody wants to be a fascist (and indeed, Everybody wants to be a fascist itself) makes a lot more sense in this light.