Wellness ideals supply the toxic compound that dissolves left-right political boundaries

Evidence

Whatever I once thought the line was between “them” and “us,” it was no longer holding. Clearly, a poison had been released in the culture, and it was not only coursing among right-wingers with the help of a few liberal crossover stars. This was something else: a poisonous compound enmeshed with powerful notions of natural living, bodily strength, fitness, purity, and divinity—alongside their opposites: unnaturalness, bodily weakness, slothfulness, contamination, and damnation. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 552

Categorization

• XREF: The purity/contamination binary echoes the earlier ‘One Square Inch of Silence’ framing of purity ideals and moralized dichotomies; also relevant to the reader’s interest in how doubling produces insight. — connects to: Political questions about toxicity get deflected into anxieties about personal consumption choices. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 77; Chemical well-being can suppress the motivation for political struggle — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2380; Moral crusades substitute for absent left-right political demarcation. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 509