Is the MAHA movement building a genuine counter-elite?

As the entire world is having a temper tantrum over the most recent Epstein case revelations about our discredited elites – obsessing over the power networks, the private jets, the bank accounts in the Virgin Islands, the French ministers, the European royalty, the foreign intelligence agencies, etc. – I'm having an entirely different epiphany. And, strangely, a flicker of hope.

The rot on display is hard to take your eyes away from, but I find myself thinking more about what might rise in its place. I'm not talking about another faction of whip-crackers wearing better suits or pushing slicker slogans, but a quieter bunch, who appear to have the capacity to generate moral assent to a new political formula. That new elite prototype has started to take shape inside the MAHA movement. It might not yet be a fully formed counter-elite, but it certainly looks like a promising kind of one.

I cannot say it enough: MAHA's foundational event is the Covid crisis. For many people, it represents the most frightening moment of our existence. What happened between 2020 and 2022 was not merely a policy disagreement or a partisan shouting match. It was the moment when the state, legacy media, Big Tech, pharmaceutical giants, and a large segment of the professional class all eagerly agreed that the normal rules no longer applied, that they could do virtually anything they wanted to people's bodies, force any injection into children's arms, arbitrarily decide who would be allowed to earn a living, and that these acts were not merely permissible but morally required.

The violation was so deep that it felt physical. That visceral reaction many of us felt – and continue to feel – was the ultimate offense to what George Orwell called common decency, by which he meant the basic virtues of ordinary people, as opposed to ideologues or men of power.

The closest Orwell came to a definition appeared in his 1944 review essay Raffles and Miss Blandish, where he contrasted two literary works, E.W. Hornung's Raffles series and James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Raffles, the gentleman burglar (a kind of British Arsène Lupin), operates by an unspoken code defined by the very simple injunction that "certain things are 'not done,'" and the idea of doing them scarcely arises. Devoid of religious belief or a formal ethical system, he follows certain rules semi-instinctively.

To give but one example: Raffles will not abuse hospitality, meaning that he may commit burglary in a house he is invited to, but never against the host. He never commits murder, avoids violence, is "chivalrous though not moral in his relations with women," and is intensely patriotic (dispatching to the Queen, in one telling moment, a gold cup stolen from the British museum on the day of the Diamond Jubilee). His code is one of social form rather than absolute right or wrong.

By contrast, James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Orwell has noted, flatters the reader's "power instinct," offering escape not into action but into cruelty and sexual perversion. It is a novel where the thrill lies in domination.

Orwell saw the fork in the road right there. One path preserves a world where wonder is possible. The other, obsessed with certainty, leads straight to the managerial class we spend our days despising – not because they are powerful, but because they are indecent. They don't merely want to govern; they want you to thank them while they humiliate you. They demand that you internalize your shame while they play with your body and with your children's minds. They regulate your speech, your sleep, your very immune system, and integrate the results of their experiments on you as data into their dashboards and compliance metrics.

That indecency has been the real fuel behind the populist insurgency which crystallized into political dividends around 2015. The anger was legitimate. The sense of betrayal was deep. But most of the movements that tried to ride that anger turned out to be peddling the same old commodity with a fresh label.

Spend a few hours in Democratic Socialist of America's circles, in certain MAGA gatherings, in libertarian hangouts, among Catholic integralists, French sovereigntists, or any of the other self-styled "counter-elites," and the evidence is inescapable: the same hunger for the whip, the same gleam in the eye that says "Our turn now."

They pray to different saints, they wear different flags, they preach different gospels, but don't be deceived: the posture is identical. Above all, they think politics, in its most debased form, is the grand adventure of life. They are, indeed, intoxicated by it.

This is, again, in complete contrast with Orwell's common decency, which rested on his "horror of politics" as Simon Leys put it. Orwell "hated politics," writes Leys, which is a paradox for a writer who "could not blow his nose without moralizing on the conditions in the handkerchief industry." Yet, as Orwell's biographer Bernard Crick once observed, "[h]e argued for the primacy of the political only to protect non-political values."