The Left Should Want to MAHA

We've completely abandoned a pillar of traditional progressive thought.

Driving through a particularly hippy-ish part of Western Massachusetts a few months ago, I saw dozens of RFK Jr. lawn signs and bumper stickers. I went to college in the same area, and back then, 15 years ago (I’m getting old :(), it was a bastion of a specific kind of progressivism. People spanned the spectrum from middle-of-the-road Democrats to Bernie stans to outright communists, but all seemed to share a belief that we needed to get corporations out of our food systems, that industrial agriculture was ruining people’s health, and that we should be skeptical of any kinds of cures that come from a for-profit health system.

One of the first stories I ever reported, when I was an intern at a tiny college town NPR affiliate, was about an underground network of lefty organic farmers who sold raw milk illegally. They’d risked being shut down and losing their livelihoods because they believed that strongly in its benefits.

But the more I thought about the bumper stickers and the yard signs, the more it made sense. Of course many of these people had gravitated towards RFK—he was the only one talking about everything they cared about!