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The Culture of Experts and the Rise of MAHA

The left won’t win over rural Americans by condescending to them.

My wife and I have been drinking raw milk for nearly 20 years. Over that period, two different local dairy farmers have used Virginia’s “herd share” rule to legally provide raw milk to customers like us, who pay to own a portion of the cow rather than buying it through a typical retail channel. For the past 15 years, our milk has come from a diversified local farm that also produces eggs, chickens, turkeys, and beef, all raised on the rolling pastures of Russell County, Virginia. We know the farmer and his family well and have visited the farm several times over the years.

This raw milk has never made us ill, nor has it sickened the scores of family and friends who have stayed with us over that time and had this milk on their cereal, in their coffee, or straight up.

Maybe we’re just lucky. After all, studies have shown that raw milk and products made from it are more likely to cause food-borne illness than pasteurized milk. For the most part, I accept those studies, so I guess you can say we also accept a higher level of risk in order to drink a richer, better tasting and, we believe, nutritionally superior product, supplied by a neighboring farmer.

I mention raw milk not to debate its merits but as a window into MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement. The question is how liberals handed the right a part of our base—historically left-leaning, countercultural people seeking to live, eat, and be healthier, many of whom also supported sustainable farming and organic foods. Annie Levin covered this shift well in her February, 2026 piece in The Nation, delineating a number of the cultural and political reasons behind it.

But one important reason is missing from that account: Many Americans simply want more control over their own lives and more autonomy in how they make decisions, especially regarding what and how we eat. This is particularly true in rural areas, where we tend to lean more libertarian. Much of the liberal establishment, on the other hand, admonishes us to “listen to the experts,” marginalizing or dismissing challenges to the prevailing wisdom. That’s a surefire way to piss us off in the countryside.

One example of this comes from an April 2025 edition of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Discussing MAHA and the relatively new phenomenon of “crunchy conservatives,”........

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