MAHA is Just Biopower and Purity Binaries

Michel Foucault and Mary Douglas are rolling over in their graves

I’ve found myself trying to explain RFK to a lot of people recently, including some reporters. I thought I’d try to put some version of it here succinctly so that I don’t have to keep going around in circles.

At its core, the RFK and MAHA Movement essentially appropriate Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower. MAHA applies this idea by enforcing purity binaries, categorizing people based on rigid distinctions of purity and contamination. Fat people, sick people, vaccinated people, immigrants, elites, and diabetics are contaminated. Okay, so what the fuck does that mean?

Foucault’s concept of biopower describes how modern states regulate life itself, shifting from sovereign power (which could kill or spare life; think: police killing a person) to a power that optimizes and controls populations. It operates on two levels: disciplinary power, which shapes individual behavior through institutions like schools and hospitals, and regulatory power, which manages populations via policies on health, reproduction, and labor. Biopower is central to capitalist economies, ensuring a productive workforce while reinforcing social hierarchies. Rather than merely protecting freedom, modern governance actively structures life, deciding who thrives and who is marginalized.

RFK’s basic political platform is to raise this fact to public consciousness and ask: Do you all want the elites to decide who lives and dies? To which the vast majority of Americans (God bless our souls) answer, fuck no! For what it’s worth, most European countries might answer something like, well…maybe? This is, of course, how you get widespread vaccine skepticism in the US and widespread vaccine support in Europe. Covid, of course, was fundamental to the rise of RFK and the rise in awareness of biopower as a kind of power exerted by institutions on citizens.

So that’s the concept of RFK and MAHA: biopower. Of course RFK does not quote Foucault, but it doesn’t matter if he’s aware of what he’s doing conceptually. The more important thing, and the one people are more interested in today, is how he goes about politicizing this concern. In science, we call this “operationalizing” a concept. Anyway, RFK operationalizes a critique of biopower through purity and pollution binaries—and, I argue, this is what explains the reason the landing pad for his politics ultimately ended up within the MAGA movement.

Central to cultural anthropology and sociology is Mary Douglas' concept of purity and pollution, outlined in Purity and Danger (1966), where she argues that societies define purity to maintain order and pollution as a way to mark boundary violations. What is considered "dirty" or "impure" is not inherently harmful but rather something that does not fit neatly into a cultural classification system. She famously describes dirt as "matter out of place,” meaning that pollution is context-dependent—mud on the ground is normal, but mud in a home is "dirty."

Now, in one sense, this is literal. Things can literally have dirt on them. Actual poisons like cyanide and Roundup exist. But the point of Douglas’ work is that purity rules often reinforce social hierarchies, distinguishing insiders from outsiders and justifying exclusion, as seen in racial, caste, and religious purity laws. All religious traditions use purity codes to separate the sacred from the profane, as in kosher or halal dietary laws. Ultimately, Douglas shows that purity is less about hygiene and more about power, identity, and social control.

Purity logic is central to Trump and the politics of MAGA. Immigrants are dirty. They are disgusting because they eat cats or whatever, or undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The point of the RFK and the MAHA thing is to convince folks that the corporations, Big Pharma, Big Ag, and elites are poisoning them. Instead, we should eat organic food and work out.

The problem is, of course, that every other thing that RFK talks about is true. For instance, RFK has advocated banning “Red Dye No. 3” in the United States, highlighting that this additive is effectively prohibited in the European Union. Red Dye No. 3 has been linked to health concerns, including cancer, in animal studies. In January 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a ban on Red Dye No. 3 in foods, beverages, oral drugs, and dietary supplements, with full implementation by January 2027. This isn’t just a Mary Douglas “socially constructed” purity binary, but a literal poison—the exact terrain where nature and culture come together into a devil’s brew of politics.

The reason that RFK landed in MAHA land rather than somewhere on the left is that his politics aligned better with that coalition, which is bound more tightly by a coherent kind of purity politics than the current left. No doubt, the actual concepts behind the MAHA movement come from the left. I mean, Jesus Christ, we’re talking about Michel Foucault! Which is why it still feels, like, kind of weird.

I mean, talk to women about the biological regulation of their bodies—they’ll tell you its been a thing for a long-ass time. The fact is that today our political coalitions are bound not by ends—what they’re working toward, what concepts, morals, or political ideals they cherish—but by means—the aesthetics, strategies, and basic logic of day-to-day politics. The truth is that the purity shit gets both RFK and Trump going. A coherent quasi-populist message can be put together (“the elites are poisoning you”) even if Trump is giving more money to Big Ag and Big Pharma in the background. Over time this will fall apart, but for now purity is holding these boys together just fine.