RFK Jr.’s fuckups, idiocies, and crimes have been amply documented by others and still, like a catastrophe unfolding in slowed-down trauma time, we’ve watched his confirmation grind obstinately to what has seemed to be its inevitable conclusion. This feels like one more defeat in a long, long streak of losing battles for “science.” Crying foul over the offensively stupid and harmful shit he’s said and done, chronicling the troubling resonances (with, for example, 19th century eugenic race science) in his own statements and in the priorities of the broader MAHA movement, have come to nothing. Calling Senators to voice objections has proven to be the weak tea it has always tasted like. And now, the lightworkers will have their day. In a grotesque parallel to the administrative takeover of the federal payments system by 22 year old groypers, RFK Jr. is (if I had to guess) going use his authority to use the federal government to arrange a broad patronage network for supplements hawkers, reiki practitioners, illiterate homesteaders, and 5G psychos. Grim.
The framework that we’ve mostly been using to understand what has been happening here – the strange alignments that put Meister Brain Worm in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, for Christ’s sake – has been something like a “crisis of misinformation,” characterized in terms of a fragmentary information ecosystem and mounting distrust of experts through the Covid pandemic. A recent (and helpful, as far as it goes) post from popular Substack Your Local Epidemiologist says about as much. They recommend: 1) “Recogniz(ing) that top-down information doesn’t work anymore,” 2) “Meet[ing] people where they are,” and 3) “Tell[ing more stories.” I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this. I do, however, think that this analysis locates responsibility for the crisis with people we don’t understand – antivaxxers, TikTokers, lightworkers – and specifically inside their heads, somewhere in their information-processing cortex, where it’s inaccessible to political analysis. As such, I think that while the tone is appropriately serious, the post actually underestimates what is really happening here, and thus the scale of the problem we are facing. What’s really happening here, in my view, is a seismic process in the struggle to construct hegemony. I am suggesting that MAHA, and RFK Jr. as its figurehead, signal a serious and ongoing rearrangement of the power stakes of science.
When I say the power stakes of science, I am not talking about the administrative relations and the legal rules that govern how science is carried out in the USA. (Of course, this is important, it’s just not what I’m talking about right now.) To bring in Bruno Latour (I’m so, so sorry), science is a social activity that fabricates reality itself. This does not, as vulgar “social constructionism” would suggest, mean that everything is a social construct and thereby somehow fake or not real. It is meant to be an accurate description of what science is, as a process and as an attempt to make human understanding of the world, separate from the abstract construction of Science as an arbiter of objective reality. Latour wrote a 2004 book whose English title is The Politics of Nature that treats exactly this topic. I’m not going to attempt a comprehensive summary of it here (in true Continental fashion, a concise or clear summary is all but impossible), but I am going to pick up on some key themes and ideas from it because I think they help to illustrate one way of thinking about what’s happening with MAHA.
Latour essentially uses Plato’s Cave (Lord), through a lengthy and painstaking procedure, to allegorize what he calls a “bicameral” relationship between science and society. One of the houses, science (or Science, as distinct from “the sciences” as people actually practice them), is the domicile of objects, objective reality or ontology if you’re nasty, and “facts,” which are real and bear some ultimate truth but are silent. The other is where dwell subjects, the social world, “politics,” social constructions, and the sense people make of things (epistemology) – these can speak, but their contact with ultimate reality is mediated and compromised by the meddlesome presence of messy human subjectivity. The figure of the scientist can pass between these houses, endowed with the special power to make objective reality legible to the subject-world. This is heady as fuck, I know. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of arguing for the “truth” of Latour’s metaphor or his assertions. I just want to lay out the basic template of his thinking to help us to get thinking this way.
Latour’s crucial insight is that the fact/value distinction is epiphenomenal of, in many ways represents, a power struggle. The power distribution foundational to his “bicameral” organization is what allows capital-s Science to, as Latour says, “use nature to abort politics.” Nature (which we might substitute here with “facts,” or “data”) is a construction of objective reality that hasn’t, he points out several times, been democratically decided on. This maneuver, appealing to nature (science, empirical facts or data) to abort politics, worked really well for a long time. It is the maneuver that licenses the social authority and power of science and scientists. The reason it doesn’t seem to work anymore is that the power arrangement that made it possible is undergoing a significant shift thanks to the dedicated effort of organized right wing elements in society. This is why simply appealing to the data feels futile right now. One very important aspect of MAHA that has been underappreciated is that it is a critical front of the broader Trumpist popular-front struggle to establish hegemony, in this case by mobilizing the scientific construction of reality its very self. This is, of course, very fucking scary.
Of course, the degraded slop information environment, the pervasive and all too often justified mistrust of experts, and other such currents do not help the situation. But I want to preserve some of our agency here, by way of making an argument that MAHA, RFK Jr.’s confirmation, and so on, aren’t just happening as a consequence of this stuff. It’s not that the right’s misinformation-mind control game is so infectious and unstoppable, it’s that it works because they’re working it, like AA. The Trumpist right, of which MAHA is one pronounced strain, is – borrowing from Stuart Hall as I so often do – seizing on these powerful currents in the actually existing world (the fact that people get all their health information from influencers, the fact that doctors are dicks and sold everybody upstream during Covid) and articulating them to the right, as part of a right-wing hegemonic project. From this vantage, it makes total sense why they’re going after vaccines so hard in a way that it doesn’t make sense from a sober lives-saved public health perspective. Science is a primary site of the struggle to construct hegemony and common-sense reality, and scientific reality and how it’s made are thus both critical modalities to be mobilized (to use more Hall-like language); the effectiveness of vaccines and social consensus around them is a critical pillar of the preexisting technocratic and scientific hegemony that MAHA is seeking to destroy.
I have written before about the need to identify and exploit contradictions in the MAHA movement. One such contradiction might serve as a brief illustration here. Last night’s executive order establishing a so-called “Make America Healthy Again Commission” expresses the intention to “assess” the prescription of certain types of drugs to children (we can see this as a generalization of the right-wing struggle around parental authority over children, of which there are many sinister fronts today). The thing is, I don’t disagree with some of this prescription shit on the very superficial face of it. I do think we should be a lot more judicious about prescribing, for example, stimulants or weight-loss drugs to children. This is, however, in contradiction to RFK Jr.’s well-established personal and the MAHA movement’s general hostility to childhood vaccination, which has already killed hundreds of children and will harm many more if he gets his way as HHS secretary. This issue of vaccines might be read as a particular manifestation of a more abstract contradiction in MAHA ideology, the politics of corruption and patronage on the one hand versus the critical importance, for its credibility, of maintaining the public perception that the movement is somehow attacking “big pharma,” favorite bugbear of conspiracy theoristas.
The hegemonic struggle underway is to construct a reality where the contradiction between these two positions can be internalized, metabolized, and sufficiently neutralized. Hence the broad-based reconfiguration of the entire power apparatus enabling the construction of scientific facts and reality. This should scare the piss out of you. The post on Your Local Epidemiologist recommends (and I do not disagree) that scientists just stick to the data, and keep reporting on the data, even if the websites are down and all hell breaks loose. This is admirable, but it may not be enough – we must remember that data themselves are, in fundamental ways, also constructed by and through this very operation of power. In the hegemonic struggle to reconfigure the relationship between science and society (how power is distributed and what part of it scientists will bear), objective data themselves are at stake. Latour, later in The Politics of Nature, goes on to develop his idea of an alternative arrangement of science and society, not the bicameral one but what he calls a “collective,” and it sounds very nice. MAHA’s collective, though, is sinister beyond Latour’s wildest dreams. (Probably. I didn’t know him.) The fact/value distinction is a source of power for Science and for scientists, and the MAGA struggle is a struggle to break it down, dissolve it, attack it at the very root. It is a struggle not to bring us into lovely democratic collective harmony but to neutralize the social and political authority of science and scientists in order to get Medicare to reimburse nootropics – that is, to line the pockets of the wellness grifters who played a serious role in bringing Trump, and with him MAHA, into power.
If I were pitching this to some outlet, I’d have to conclude here with some kind of “what can we do” statement. I’m not pitching it anywhere, and this newsletter is free and it’s mine, so I can frankly say: I do not know what to do, and I am not pretending to know. What I have attempted to do here is outline the contours of the problem as I see it and to offer one possible explanation for why the traditional model of scientific political engagement seems completely powerless against MAHA. Some people have mentioned to me that MAHA’s base of public support is probably negligible. This is likely true (I haven’t seen any kind of numbers one way or the other), but it’s also irrelevant. It may not be numerous, but it doesn’t have to be numerous to be powerful – the idea that it does need some kind of popular mandate to do its work corresponds to a form of American politics that, like the bicameral organization of science and society into distinct structures, is seriously outdated if not already dead. As a starting point – not as a conclusion or a take – I think we need to move away from the representational/electoral picture of power and towards the concept of a hegemonic project as articulated by Hall and, before him, Gramsci. If anything can (not will) equip us with the tools we need to exit the closed loop of appealing to Science as Science is stripped for parts, I think this type of analysis can.