The Authoritarians Who Don't Trust Authority

The rhetoric of the revolt against vaccine and mask mandates during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was strongly libertarian, even to the point that anti-mandate activists appropriated the abortion rights slogan "my body, my choice." To be sure, that particular move could have simply been trolling, but there is no doubt that the core of the opposition sounded in medical libertarianism, thereby tapping into a centuries-old American tradition that is hardly an exclusively right-wing phenomenon (as documented in Professor Lewis Grossman's terrific book Choose Your Medicine).

So what happened? How did Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been one of the primary proponents of freedom to avoid vaccination, end up using his perch as Secretary of Health and Human Services to restrict choice with respect to vaccines--as he did last week when HHS approved the reformulated COVID-19 vaccines on a more limited basis than prior boosters? Those are the questions at the heart of my latest Verdict column: What Happened to Medical Libertarianism?

In the column, I suggest that the libertarian rhetoric of the mandate critics was never absolutely libertarian, indeed, that libertarian rhetoric is almost always exaggerated. After all, any credible version of libertarianism must be a rebuttable presumption of liberty--one that can be overcome by a sufficiently strong showing of countervailing interests. It is thus not surprising that libertarianism on the right and civil libertarianism on the left differ, because people on the right and left disagree about the strength of various countervailing interests. Thus, it often looks like self-described libertarians are hypocrites, because they want freedom to do what they want but not necessarily for others to do what those others want. However, this is not necessarily hypocrisy, as it could simply reflect varying valuations of harm.

That said, my column also offers a further account of the particular brand of medical libertarianism that has been prominent lately. Whereas conventional libertarianism seeks freedom from government regulation, the contemporary version of medical libertarianism seeks freedom from the rule of experts. The slogan "do your own research" captures this anti-expertise feature of the movement. Seen through this lens, RFK Jr.'s actions at HHS make a certain kind of internal sense: he is busy ridding the government of medical experts. The resulting diminution in choice is only a diminution in options favored by the medical establishment. RFK Jr. and his ilk continue to favor expanding options to try alternative and unproven treatments. Thus, as I note in the column, just last week he praised a new Texas law that permits the sale of Ivermectin over the counter, saying "I think Americans should have the choice."

To be clear, the analysis in my column and above explains how the rhetoric of medical libertarianism can be used to restrict the range of medical choices. I do not in any way endorse the terrible damage that RFK Jr. and the Trump administration more broadly are doing by rejecting the overwhelming expert consensus on the costs and benefits of vaccines, the threat from climate change, the economic impact of tariffs, and a wide range of other matters.

That said, in the spirit of explanation, I now want to turn to a further seeming contradiction: If the people comprising the MAHA and MAGA movements don't trust authority, why do they seem comfortable with the rapid transformation of the United States from a constitutional democracy into an authoritarian state?

A simple-minded explanation might go like this: To the extent that Trump is or at least successfully plays at being a populist, he draws support from populists who, by definition, trust the wisdom of the volk more than they trust expertise. Trump also happens to be an authoritarian, and thus he also draws support from people who have an authoritarian personality type. That is a simple-minded explanation, however, because it treats attitudes towards populism and authoritarianism as at best orthogonal, with Trump and Trumpism putting together a coalition among populists and authoritarians, regardless of how much overlap there is between the two groups.

In fact, however, populism and authoritarianism are not separate phenomena that happen to be combined in the rhetoric and person of Donald Trump. They are intertwined in the authoritarian populism of Trump and similar figures around the world. Authoritarian populism is "[n]ativist, exclusionary, and ultimately illiberal," scapegoating and imagining dangers from out groups--in its current incarnation focusing on immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and persons whose sexual identities challenge traditional gender norms. That explains how people who distrust scientists and other experts could nonetheless accept the authority of a leader whose claim to authority does not run through expertise but derives from the will of the volk, which he claims a unique ability to distill and reflect.

Still, one can wonder why a movement driven by hostility to out groups perceived as threatening would be distrustful of experts, who tend not to be members of those out groups. For example, although the percentage of female and minority basic science medical school faculty has increased somewhat in recent years, white men still make up a clear majority of such faculty. Why don't MAGA types trust them?

The simple-minded explanation would be that the MAGA movement just happens to combine ethnocentric authoritarianism with populism, and populists have always distrusted experts. A more sophisticated view, however, sees the MAGA distaste for expertise as intertwined with the othering of immigrants and racial and sexual minorities. MAGA types perceive experts as part of the liberal establishment that is allied with the out groups, even if most of the experts themselves are not members of those out groups.

That perception is not entirely wrong. In recent years, the Democratic Party coalition has included highly educated people of all racial and ethnic groups as well as racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. And highly educated whites tend to be more sympathetic to out groups than are less educated whites. One sees the fusion of anti-expert views and hostility to out groups in the "anti-woke" assault on American universities. The assault has three main prongs that braided these ideological commitments together: reassertion of racial hierarchy by elimination of DEI; repudiation of gender-inclusivity; and demotion of expertise by the defunding of scientific research. 

I'll conclude with two caveats. First, and I hope needless to say but I'll say anyway (again), in trying to explain the combination of attitudes that characterizes the Trumpist movement, I am not endorsing any of those attitudes or saying that the combination ultimately coheres even on its own terms.

Second, I am painting with a very broad brush that leaves out lots of nuance. For example, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaxxerism and other attitudes that now travel under the MAHA banner were at least as prevalent among the new-age left as among the right. That continues to be the case for some, no doubt.

So too, the relation between Donald Trump and his followers is complex. Sometimes he adopts a view they hold because he discovers it brings applause. From the other direction, a substantial portion of Trump's supporters simply adopt his views, even when they are contrary to what they long believed--and  even when they are contrary to what the mercurial Trump himself espoused for years. Trumpism is partly a cult of personality, making any claim about its characteristic beliefs and attitudes necessarily incomplete and tentative.

-- Michael C. Dorf