Is there a more intellectually incoherent political force today than the Make America Healthy Again Movement? MAHA combines real concerns about the widespread use of chemicals with cavalier approach to experimental drugs or outright quackery. Its adherents have a somewhat understandable if disagreeable paranoia about mainstream medicine while they confusedly pursue “natural” remedies or products on gut feeling. The ongoing “crank realignment” is very real in MAHA, as crunchy fringes from the anti-government left stumble into common cause with culturally “Don’t-Tread-On-Me” elements of the right.
Aspects of MAHA – the distrust of science, the pursuit of “natural” remedies, the resentment of bureaucrats and liberal killjoys, and ultimately fear of the medicalized state – remind me of an offbeat but long-standing minor theme in conservatism: the affirmative defense of smoking. (RFK, Jr. is reportedly a Zyn user.)
Conservative tobacco enthusiasts no doubt suffer from motivated reasoning. Nevertheless, they light on several core conservative themes. First, perhaps most appealing, is the appeal of living well and enjoying life while defying left-coded busybodies and rationalists. In 1958, for example, National Review published an ironical article by William F. Buckley’s sister, Jane Buckley Smith about quitting and unquitting smoking.
The anti-smoking arguments were “unanswerable,” she acknowledged, “until I gave up smoking.” She became stressed, gained weight, recovered (unfortunately) her sense of smell. By the end of the ordeal, she advised readers to take up smoking again. “With happy resignation you will light a cigarette, inhale deeply – and possibly choke. But persevere. By the third one the past agony-laden seem as though they never were.” She had a new mantra: “Today and every day I shall smoke. I shall never, never stop.”
More than thirty years later, National Review repeated the trick. This time it was the quirky Southern writer Florence King with a cover article titled “I’d Rather Smoke Than Kiss.” For King, who began smoking at twenty-six, cigarettes were a joyful part of life. All the more reason to defend them against prim anti-smokers. She recalled a smoking former lover and wrote, “Today when I see the truculent, joyless faces of anti-tobacco Puritans, I remember those easy-going smoking sessions with that man; the click of the lighter, the brief orange glow in the darkness, the ashtray between us—spilling sometimes because we laughed so much together that the bed shook.”
For conservative smokers, anti-smoking was yet another example of liberal rationalism, puritanism, and anti-humanism. “Hatred of smokers is the most popular form of closet misanthropy in America today,” King lamented. It even had a class war component, allowing liberal snobs to sneer at the tobacco-addicted working class.