Lifting hasn’t always had such an obvious link to right-wing politics in America. During the Civil War, socialist weight lifters organized and fought for the Union across the North in German immigrant enclaves. One such group, the Turners organized gyms and advocated that a balance of body and mind was needed to advance social justice. As Devin Thomas O’Shea writes in Jacobin, “Back in the nineteenth century, it was the Left that was politicizing exercise.” In postrevolutionary Russia, the New Soviet Man was meant to be well-read and well-built. The 1960s saw the rise of muscle magazines—pictorial offerings of brawny and bare men, ostensibly for a health-and-fitness-minded audience—which were shared in the gay community at the start of their fight for civil rights. But little by little, as the Old Left (rooted in the New Deal, labor unions, and blue-collar workers) gave way to the New, the left’s connection to muscularity atrophied.
“Within the living memory of a generation older than us, being in a union, being organized in your workplace and working at the steel mill, that was a clearly intractably, inarguably, left-wing political orientation that was attached to a robust male identity,” says Joshua Citeralla, an artist who researches online political subcultures and hosts the Doomscroll podcast.
That political identity started to crumble in the 1970s and 1980s as deindustrialization gutted blue-collar professions and shifted the American worker from the shop floor to the cubicle. The result was, according to Citeralla, the “rise of the urban professional as a core constituency of the Democratic party, and people who work in the manufacturing belt leaving their union and leaving the Democratic party.”
The political connotations of muscularity have since seesawed over the decades. But since Trump’s 2016 election, lifting and extremism have become entwined, argues Aspen Vera Mulvey, PhD, a University of Michigan anthropologist who has studied the connections between American fascist groups and gyms. You are “easily able to find, just on YouTube, white nationalist lifting bros,” she says. “They’re all over the place.”
In 2018, Dr. Mulvey conducted a yearlong ethnographic research project in a white nationalist gym and found that working out together helped the members form a collective purpose and sense of belonging.
One of the reasons fitness and muscularity have become such a strong right-wing talking point, says Dr. Mulvey, is that it provides a version of “what masculinity ought to look like, acting as a convenient foil to trans femininity, to fem boys, to this fear of a weakening state of American masculinity. I think that strength in this kind of rhetorical arena is imagined as a perfect defense.”
This success is more than just rhetorical. As Dr. Mulvey’s research found, it has also helped to build community based on “shared devoted repetition” and “collective embodied connection.”
But Dr. Mulvey doesn’t see strength and muscularity as irreversibly right-coded. “Fitness is redeemable or an interesting kind of prospect for the left when it is performed in a similar manner—when people are coming together.”
