Give Us Liberty — and Listeria

Raw milk is one of the latest flash points of the clash between natural-food advocates and scientific consensus. While there are few proven benefits to unpasteurized cow’s milk, the problems are numerous: it opens the drinker to a litany of pathogens and is incredibly dangerous for pregnant or immunocompromised people. It poses risks for potential exposure to campylobacter, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), salmonella and listeria, which could lead to stillbirths and the transmission of diseases in utero.

Pasteurization is an important measure to prevent its transmission, as are safety watches from government agencies. But it is exactly these measures that have raised the ire of raw milk advocates, who see modern food-safety treatments as creating, not preventing, a toxic food system.

While modern listeria outbreaks are generally from post-pasteurization contamination, raw milk introduces voluntary risk to a problem with a clear, modern solution. That is why few were surprised when Kennedy drastically shrank the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) FoodNet program, which tracks foodborne illnesses, from eight pathogens down to two, deprioritizing listeria and campylobacter and leaving only salmonella and STEC.

Kennedy’s shift on vaccine policy may be the most extreme of all: he fired all seventeen members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, narrowed eligibility for COVID vaccines, opened the door for insurance companies to refuse coverage, and dramatically cut vaccine research despite his vocal concerns over vaccine safety. He justified this while citing discredited COVID-19 studies. Kennedy also accepted a recommendation to remove the vaccine preservative thimerosal from American flu shots.

Thimerosal is a chemical that is claimed by vaccine skeptics, without evidence, to cause everything from autism to cancer, but it has long been phased out domestically except in rare cases. Nevertheless, its removal could hinder vaccine distribution in low-resource regions, where multidose vials are necessary, drastically lowering vaccine access for preventable illness at a moment when pandemics are among the most severe threats to life on the planet. Under Kennedy’s leadership, HHS has also canceled National Institues of Health (NIH) studies, closed pandemic preparedness centers, and stopped flu vaccine advertising.

Instead of focusing on the verifiable foodborne illnesses on which there is broad scientific consensus, Kennedy declared war on what he calls ultra-processed foods (UPFs). Dietary experts note that the category lacks a consistent definition, but it generally includes foods that come in packaging or have been modified to prevent the very contamination the CDC is now de-emphasizing. While processed foods are tied to real problems in the American diet, Kennedy’s grouping is not based on verifiable metrics like sodium or glucose levels, but on broad, rhetorical categories that reflect underlying suspicions of “modern processing” more than evidence about diet-related illnesses.

The scientific community has been clear in repudiating his drastic measures — including over a thousand HHS staff calling for his resignation on September 3 — but Kennedy’s supporters have cheered his changes as a victory for health. For them, dismantling the infrastructure of food safety is not a reckless gamble but precisely the measure required to liberate us from a toxic system that is making us all sick.

Kennedy’s logic is not a new one, nor is it confined to the world of fringe medical cures and outlandish food claims. It rests on a broader belief that what is “natural” is inherently good, and what is modern, technological, or institutionally managed is destructive — a dangerous intervention into organic harmony. This idea has been foundational to reactionary politics since the industrial revolution created some of the largest communal shifts in history. Today it is warping how millions of people understand what is a legitimate global crisis of health, ecology, and human relationships.

Against the Modern World

People hate the modern world. This tension is hardly new; ever since industrialization and the rise of mass politics, critics have warned that modern life corrodes health, morality, and meaning. But the last decade has provided an especially raw version of that discontent — marked by polarizing politics, social media anxieties, widening income inequality, worsening health outcomes, mass shootings, and widespread alienation. Many of these concerns are swept into a broad indictment of “modernity,” as if it were a coherent construct rather than traced to specific, material causes.

As crises tied to advancing technologies and globalization pile up, a popular argument emerges: our crisis is distinctly modern, not merely political, economic, or otherwise solvable. The accelerating pace of climate change adds weight to this claim. So do the crimes of pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and the cruelty of modern factory farming, both of which suggest that technology and progress have failed to deliver.

When right-wing “tradwife” influencers argue that women should leave the workforce and return to the home, they point to the dehumanizing jobs many women are forced into by today’s economy as evidence. What, after all, do modern feminism and liberal values amount to if you end up working at Walmart?

But it’s worth asking who actually controls the direction of innovation and development — and whether the problem lies in an allegedly coherent “modernity” or in more identifiable, material causes. While debates over these questions span the political spectrum, the right-wing tendency to venerate the past has positioned conservatives as the natural beneficiary of vague distrust in the trajectory of progress.

As the entire country shifts politically, and as right-wing movements grow ever more animated by conspiracy theories and suspicion of scientific consensus, we are being pushed further from the forward momentum that underpinned the optimism of the 1990s and our faith in technological change and discovery.

The rejection of modernity has been a central theme of right-wing politics since the spectrum itself first emerged. At the start of the French Revolution, those who sat on the left of the parliament argued that radical change might produce a more just society, while those sitting on the right romanticized the benevolent rulers their opponents were seeking to overthrow and mused that the monarchy should be restored.

As populations shifted from agrarian to urban societies — with all the attendant liberalization and cosmopolitanism — Romanticism emerged to celebrate ruralism and the traditions of the deep past, a time when families were supposedly stable, work was meaningful, and people knew who they were. While Romanticism was not uniformly nostalgic or right-wing, it did create a reactive frame through which contemporary anxieties could make the past seem like the only viable future.

The Historical Strands of Right-Wing Reaction

By the late nineteenth century, precursors to the far right were spreading across Europe. Political movements and theorists warned that “enemies in our midst” were dragging people away from tribal and national communities into a world of crippling abstractions and alienation. Their fixation on Jews was so pervasive that critics and commentators began calling these ideas “antisemitic” — a term coined in the 1870s to give a pseudoscientific gloss to older chauvinisms. The claim was that Jews embodied a corrosive modernity that disrupted allegedly natural and normal Gentile, white social relations.

These narratives became the raw material that early-twentieth-century fascist movements would turn into a mass politics. Fascist theorist Julius Evola declared the “modern world” his primary enemy. In his telling, humanity’s fall began when modernity disrupted an imagined natural world — a fantasy in which people lived in harmony with the earth, races were kept apart, and firm hierarchies governed social life.

This appeal to an idealized past has flowed through every far-right movement since, from the European New Right’s fables about the “Indo-Aryans,” to American white nationalists’ obsession with Nordic paganism, to the selective Christian nostalgia invoked by figures like “Groyper” leader Nick Fuentes and by traditionalists gaining influence in the national conservative movement.

​Each generation of the Right has told a story about the alleged natural harmony that was disrupted by social, political, and technological progress. These stories often synthesize legitimate concerns — such as unemployment resulting from industrial shifts — with bigoted dog whistles, such as blaming migrants. Over time, this reactionary analysis has hardened into a generalized distrust of human intervention itself: the notion that efforts to improve our lives and the world around us are futile or even harmful. Maybe it was better, the argument goes, before we tried to “fix” everything.

Currents of the early environmental movement were explicit about this impulse, championing land left untouched by civilizational hands while mixing in anti-immigration and “social Darwinist” views about the supposed dangers of artificial societies: gluttony, overpopulation, and decadence. Deep ecology emerged as a radical trend, more often associated with the Left than the Right, which argued that human societies themselves, especially industrial and urban ones, were the problem. This kind of reasoning often relied on an intuitive sense of distrust in urban life, but it ignored the evidence showing that urban density could be one of the best options for environmental sustainability.

In 2020, as people retreated into their homes during the global pandemic, the same kind of sentiment surfaced: “Nature is healing — we are the virus” memes proliferated across social media as people saw empty national parks as evidence that a rewind of modern human activity was the solution. But these observations were false; emissions continued to rise. Meanwhile, fears about overpopulation persisted, often obscuring the fact that it is not rising populations in the developing world that most strains the biosphere but the concentrated wealth of billionaires.

Policy Directive: Do Nothing

Framing modernity as a single, malignant whole has often been presented as a radical critique of capitalism and empire. Yet it has also provided cover for some merciless austerity projects. While Kennedy railed against Big Pharma and posed as a health defender, Donald Trump slashed Medicaid spending and ensured millions lost coverage.

While Kennedy has courted allies in his campaign against synthetic chemicals and polluters — likely contributors to chronic disease —  cuts to epidemiological and public health research guarantee that no real progress on illness trends is possible. This same pattern plays out with the attack on universities, where combating “wokeness” often serves as the pretext to strip funding from public goods.

No argument fits this model better than Kennedy’s “vaccine hesitancy,” a tradition on the Right since the first smallpox variolation campaigns of the early 1700s. Vaccines, framed as an attempt to override nature, are depicted as creating mysterious problems we cannot yet grasp. In 1998, when Dr Andrew Wakefield suggested in the Lancet that the MMR vaccine caused autism, it resonated with a movement already primed to believe modern medicine was the disease itself.

Autism has always played a special role in the medical-critical world of alternative healing, often because it strikes at the heart of parental fears. Its relatively recent clinical recognition also makes it appear, to the uninitiated, like a newly emergent condition. On September 22, the White House issued a statement suggesting that acetaminophen use during pregnancy may be linked to autism — despite a lack of credible scientific evidence.

The move reflects Kennedy’s long-standing insistence that autism is a chronic disease caused by environmental factors, rather than what the modern autism advocacy community recognizes as a neurological difference that calls for support, not stigma. This declaration risks reshaping prenatal guidance, drug labels, and medical counseling, disregarding scientific consensus in favor of folk narratives that undermine decades of progress in understanding autism.

But while over-the-counter pain medication may be one target, vaccines remain the primary enemy for Kennedy. On September 18, the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, which Kennedy packed with “vaccine skeptics,” shifted course and began prohibiting the measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (MMRV) vaccine before the age of four. This vaccine package was one of the great achievements of childhood medicine, greatly reducing the rate of these diseases by making inoculation easier and more accessible.

Kennedy is now pushing for all vaccines to go through a placebo-controlled trial, something that experts say makes little scientific sense and carries severe ethical problems. None of this makes sense unless it’s understood as a pretext for erecting barriers and lowering vaccine rates, which Kennedy appears to believe will have broadly positive impacts on public health.

He is also now going to war on mRNA vaccines, the essential biomedical technology that made the COVID-19 vaccine possible and that the government funded to the tune of nearly $32 billion between 2020 and 2022. In Kennedy’s model of health, the course of nature is always healthier than intervention: doing nothing is probably better than doing something. And it’s always cheaper.

Competing Futures

One foil to the Right’s narrative is that its own political vision is, in fact, a thoroughly modern concept. Historian Jeffrey Herf captured this paradox with the phrase “reactionary modernism,” describing fascism as a distinctly contemporary project designed to more effectively stratify society and subjugate its chosen “lessers.”

This helps explain why, even as medical Luddism justifies budget cuts in some areas, Silicon Valley is reaping the benefits of a new Republican partnership. Despite railing against tech and social media companies during his campaign, Trump has become their biggest advocate: he attempted to halt possible regulation on AI development in his budget, secured $500 billion in investments through the AI venture Stargate Project, and recently held a CEO dinner at the White House where he granted tariff exemptions on resources critical to domestic tech companies.

These gestures came only after tech leaders had aligned themselves with Trump, opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and mobilizing advanced technologies to reinforce Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations, support private prisons, and offered innovative restrictions on civil liberties.

For the Right, modernity ceases to be threatening once it is stripped of its emancipatory potential — its ability to free people from the shackles of long-standing social mores and hierarchies. This logic underpins the influence of the neo-reactionary movement, which combines technological fetishism with hostility to democracy, a push for extreme libertarian geopolitics, and a grounding in race science. Its vision is technologically advanced but directed toward justifying the politics of past empires.

​To counter this trend, much of the liberal world has tried to venerate what it casts as the positive features of modern culture — the sphere of critical inquiry America’s universities claims to represent or the scientific institutions so often celebrated as beacons of progress. Yet the critique of modernity is not without merit: these institutions often operate as hyperreal factories of inequality and dispossession, reflecting existing power structures more often than the lofty ideals projected onto them. Defending what already exists is not enough; we must instead imagine a modernity in which technology and innovation are directed toward real social needs.