When Fitness Becomes Fascism: Please Step Away From the Treadmill, Comrade

I have apparently been exercising under politically suspicious circumstances.

For years, I thought I was walking into a gym. Now I learn I may have been entering a fluorescent training ground for authoritarianism, armed with a water bottle, a pair of increasingly questionable knees, and the dangerous belief that climbing stairs without bargaining with God might be useful.

This revelation comes courtesy of a controversy surrounding a panel at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago. As reported by Jeremiah Johnson in The Argument, panelists connected physical fitness, weight-loss drugs, capitalism, eugenics, and fascism in ways that promptly escaped the conference room, landed online, and were greeted with the kind of public tenderness normally reserved for a raccoon trapped in a vending machine. One speaker argued that people should abandon the dream of becoming fitter than fascists. Another described the political use of GLP-1 drugs as fascistic and diet culture as a weapon in a war against fat bodies. The clips went viral, critics mocked them, defenders blamed hostile editing, and everyone returned to their usual internet positions with the grim efficiency of soldiers reporting to assigned trenches.

I watched the argument unfold and found myself asking a question that should not require a political philosophy degree: when did taking care of a human body become morally suspect?

The wellness industry is hardly innocent. It could sell insecurity to a mirror. It has monetized shame, disguised vanity as virtue, and persuaded millions that inner peace arrives in a monthly shipment of powdered grass. But criticism loses its mind when it cannot distinguish between health and holiness, influence and force, preference and persecution. Once every cultural pressure becomes fascism, the word starts functioning like a car alarm that goes off whenever reality brushes against somebody’s theory.

And that is where I get off the ideological exercise bike.

The Body Is Personal, but It Is Never Only Personal

I understand the starting point. Bodies do not exist outside society. Employers judge them. Doctors dismiss them. Insurance systems price them. Clothing companies exclude them. Schools discipline them. Advertisers create anxieties and then rent us temporary relief. Disabled people are routinely treated as logistical problems rather than complete human beings. Larger people are often subjected to ridicule, lazy assumptions, and medical encounters in which every symptom is routed through weight before anyone bothers to listen.

None of that is imaginary. None of it becomes less cruel because a gym membership can be good for someone.

So yes, I reject the smug morality that treats physical condition as a complete autobiography. A thin body is not a certificate of character. A muscular body is not proof of courage. Illness is not divine punishment for insufficient meal planning. Disability is not a failed audition for personhood. Human dignity cannot depend on whether a body is efficient, profitable, conventionally attractive, or easy for institutions to accommodate.

That is the serious foundation beneath the more theatrical claims. The problem is what happens next. A humane principle—people have equal worth regardless of physical capacity—gets fed into an ideological wood chipper and comes flying out as the proposition that pursuing health is collaboration with oppression.

I can oppose discrimination without pretending all physical conditions are medically identical. I can defend a person’s right to refuse treatment without declaring treatment a political crime. I can condemn coercive weight-loss programs without accusing every willing patient of saluting an empire of bathroom scales. Moral equality does not require biological sameness. It requires us to treat differences without converting them into a hierarchy of human value.

This distinction is not complicated. It merely lacks the theatrical excitement of announcing that the elliptical machine is Mussolini with cup holders.

Fascism Is Not a Synonym for “Pressure I Dislike”

Words matter most when the thing they name is dangerous.

Fascism is not an especially intense vibe. It is not a protein shake with aggressive branding. It is not your coworker telling you about his personal record before you have finished saying good morning. It is not a doctor recommending movement. It is not a company selling a medication that some people freely choose to take. Fascism is a political tradition organized around authoritarian power, ultranationalism, hierarchy, mass mobilization, suppression of opposition, and the subordination of individual life to a mythic collective destiny.

Can regimes politicize health? Obviously. Governments have used forced sterilization, racial pseudoscience, institutionalization, marriage restrictions, reproductive control, and murder in the name of national or genetic “improvement.” States can define certain bodies as burdens and use medical language to rationalize brutality. The history is real, hideous, and worth remembering precisely.

That precision is why I object when the vocabulary of atrocity gets inflated until it includes voluntary weight loss. If everything is fascism, historical fascism becomes merely one item in a very crowded complaint box. If genocide includes a person discussing a prescription with a physician and deciding the potential benefits outweigh the risks, then what word remains for the organized destruction of a people?

This is not a sterile semantic objection. Exaggerated language corrupts moral judgment. It trains us to respond to differences of degree as though they were differences of kind, while treating actual coercion as just another example of a label we encounter fifteen times before lunch. Language meant to awaken the conscience can anesthetize it when used indiscriminately.

There is something deeply patronizing about assuming adults are merely puppets of a political order. Some want to lose weight. Some do not. Some lift because they enjoy strength. Some run because it quiets their minds. Cultural influence does not erase agency; if it did, no decision could be authentic. Liberation cannot mean that choices are valid only after approval from whichever seminar currently claims jurisdiction over the body.

That is not freedom. It is supervision wearing compassionate vocabulary.

When Every Value Becomes Sacred, Thought Becomes Decorative

The most interesting part of the original commentary is its discussion of sacred values: beliefs a group removes from ordinary trade-offs because even questioning them feels morally contaminated. I think this explains a great deal of modern public speech.

Every movement has sacred values. Conservatives, progressives, libertarians, nationalists, corporate cultures, and fandoms all have them. I have them too, although I prefer to imagine mine arrived through pure reason and everyone else’s came in a promotional email.

A sacred value is not necessarily false. Opposition to eugenics should be fierce. Equal dignity should be nonnegotiable. The trouble begins when allegiance to a moral principle is measured by a willingness to deny obvious facts or extend the principle into absurdity.

Within a group that already agrees discrimination is wrong, repeating that baseline earns no distinction. Moral status comes from moving one step further. Respect larger people. Then affirm every larger body as equally healthy. Then describe attempts at weight loss as surrender to oppressive standards. Then treat medication as political violence. Then suggest that becoming fitter might itself reinforce a sinister hierarchy. The argument keeps escalating because escalation displays commitment.

This is how moral outbidding turns politics into an auction where everybody competes to purchase righteousness with increasingly unusable ideas.

Nobody wants to be the person who interrupts and says, “I support the underlying goal, but this particular claim is nonsense.” That sentence sounds weak in a culture trained to confuse nuance with betrayal. It does not generate applause. It cannot be printed attractively on a protest sign. Worst of all, it might be clipped by the opposing side, and modern politics regards being quoted by an enemy as evidence that one has committed treason against the group chat.

So allies defend the speaker’s intentions instead of the statement’s meaning. She is on the correct side. He is expanding solidarity. They care about marginalized people. All of that may be true, and none of it determines whether a claim is coherent.

Good intentions are not intellectual diplomatic immunity.

I do not want a politics in which every foolish remark by someone on “my side” must be protected as though it were the final bridge out of occupied territory. If my principles cannot survive one ally saying something ridiculous, I do not have principles. I have a public-relations strategy.

The Wellness Industry Deserves Criticism—Real Criticism

Here is the maddening part: the wellness and fitness industries provide critics with an all-you-can-eat buffet of legitimate targets.

The market routinely manufactures a problem, attaches it to identity, and sells the solution on auto-renew. It tells men that ordinary aging is humiliation, women that a normal body is an unfinished renovation, and everyone that rest must be optimized until even sleep feels like a performance review. Apps count our steps, watches grade our recovery, platforms rank our appearance, and influencers transform private insecurity into sponsored content filmed beside suspiciously clean kitchen counters.

There are exploitative gyms, unsafe supplements, irresponsible prescribers, predatory telehealth operations, disordered-eating pipelines, and medical biases that can make care worse. GLP-1 medications raise legitimate questions about side effects, affordability, long-term use, unequal access, supply, aggressive marketing, and the extent to which social prejudice shapes demand. Those are serious questions. They deserve evidence, regulation, informed consent, and honest discussion.

Calling the drugs fascistic answers none of them.

It is the rhetorical equivalent of setting off fireworks in a library and claiming the brightness improved the research.

When criticism becomes maximalist, institutions escape scrutiny. A pharmaceutical company would much rather debate whether its product is an instrument of fascism than answer a detailed question about pricing, adverse-event reporting, marketing practices, or access. One conversation is an operatic culture war; the other may produce regulation.

These demands are concrete. Concrete demands are harder than slogans because somebody can measure whether they were achieved. They also lack the addictive glamour of diagnosing civilization from a conference microphone.

I would rather improve a flawed health system than win a vocabulary contest inside a room already convinced of my virtue.

Fitness Can Become Authoritarian Without Becoming Fascism

There is a version of fitness culture that does make my skin crawl. It treats the body as a public résumé and softness as confession. Its language is obsessed with domination, purity, pain, conquest, and the supposed moral superiority of people who wake at 4:30 a.m. to drag a tire across a parking lot.

I am happy for anyone who finds purpose in discipline. I become less enchanted when that person mistakes a preferred routine for a universal theory of human worth.

Fitness becomes authoritarian in spirit when it stops asking, “What helps this person flourish?” and starts declaring, “Every worthwhile person must live this way.” It becomes cruel when illness is framed as weakness, disability as failure, aging as negligence, and rest as evidence that civilization is collapsing. It becomes politically menacing when physical strength is fused with racial hierarchy, militarized masculinity, national purity, or the belief that vulnerable people exist to be ruled by the supposedly strong.

Those tendencies should be confronted. But calling every workout fascist makes it harder to identify the moment a fitness subculture actually does become a recruitment channel for extremist politics. Categories help us see. Blurred categories help us perform alarm while missing the fire.

I can imagine employers turning wearable data into surveillance, insurers punishing people for biomarkers they cannot control, or governments restricting care according to bodily standards. Those possibilities make me more protective of precise language, not less.

The moral line is not drawn between fit and unfit. It is drawn between choice and coercion, care and contempt, persuasion and punishment, accommodation and exclusion. A person choosing to train for a marathon is not oppressing a person who cannot walk. A society refusing to build an accessible entrance is. A patient asking about weight-loss medication is not committing violence against larger people. A clinician refusing to investigate symptoms because of a patient’s size may be causing harm.

If a theory cannot preserve these distinctions, it is not revealing hidden power. It is hiding ordinary reality behind dramatic nouns.

My Body Is Not a Manifesto

What bothers me most about this entire debate is the demand that every bodily decision become public testimony.

If I exercise, must it signify obedience to capitalism? If I refuse to exercise, must that signify resistance? If I lose weight, have I betrayed body acceptance? If I gain weight, have I escaped a beauty regime? If I take medication, am I endorsing the system that manufactured my desire? If I decline it, am I rejecting medical authority or simply afraid of nausea?

Sometimes a walk is a walk.

Sometimes I want to feel better in my clothes. Sometimes I want more energy. Sometimes I want the mood improvement that arrives after movement. Sometimes I am motivated by vanity, mortality, insecurity, pleasure, fear, habit, or the discovery that I have made a noise while standing up that used to belong exclusively to my grandfather.

Human motives are mixed. This is not a scandal. It is practically the membership requirement for being human.

My body is not proof of my politics. It is the condition through which I experience having any politics at all.

That should encourage humility. The athlete will age. The healthy person may become ill. The independent person may need care. The body celebrated today may be mocked tomorrow because markets require novelty and insecurity requires maintenance. None of us earns permanent exemption from vulnerability by selecting the correct groceries.

But vulnerability does not make agency meaningless. Dependence does not erase desire. Social influence does not invalidate every attempt to change. I can recognize that beauty standards are constructed and still prefer how I look at a particular weight. I can believe society should accommodate disability and still hope physical therapy improves an injury. I can know that health is not a moral achievement and still work to protect mine.

Contradiction? Perhaps. Or perhaps adulthood is what happens when we stop demanding that reality fit on merchandise.

The Internet Rewards the Worst Version of Every Argument

It is fair to worry about clipped video. Social media can reduce a complicated discussion to twelve seconds selected by an ideological opponent, and audiences rarely sprint toward the full panel in a heroic search for nuance. But “out of context” cannot become a universal solvent that dissolves responsibility for anything said in public. Sometimes context transforms a statement. Sometimes it merely supplies a larger room in which the statement remains foolish.

The online cycle guarantees mutual deterioration. A provocative clip circulates. Opponents choose the most absurd interpretation because mockery travels faster than analysis. Allies refuse any concession because concession feels like betrayal. The speaker points to the hostile response as confirmation. Each side becomes evidence for the other. Nobody learns anything, but several newsletters enjoy an excellent afternoon.

Some ideas deserve ridicule, but ridicule works best when paired with an argument. Mine is simple: opposition to dehumanization does not require opposition to fitness. Respect for larger and disabled bodies does not require pretending all health claims are invented. Awareness of medical coercion does not transform voluntary medicine into genocide. Solidarity is not strengthened when its defenders demand that everyone applaud obvious nonsense.

A Better Politics of the Body

I want a politics of the body that begins with dignity and keeps its grip on reality.

Such a politics would guarantee access to care without making care compulsory. It would make public spaces accessible. It would challenge discrimination in employment, education, medicine, and housing. It would regulate deceptive marketing and require meaningful disclosure of medical risks. It would treat mental health, chronic illness, pain, nutrition, movement, housing, pollution, and working conditions as interconnected public concerns.

It would also leave room for people to want different things.

One person may seek weight loss. Another may pursue strength without caring about size. Another may focus on mobility, blood pressure, endurance, pain reduction, or simply getting through the day. Another may reject treatment whose burdens exceed its benefits. None of these choices should determine whose life counts.

A humane society does not say, “Change your body or lose your dignity.” It also does not say, “Keep your body unchanged or betray the movement.” Both commands turn a person into raw material for somebody else’s moral performance.

Doctors should offer evidence, explain uncertainty, respect informed refusal, and avoid contempt. Policymakers should expand real options rather than disguising abandonment as autonomy. Fitness professionals should remember that encouragement becomes humiliation when it treats clients as defective objects. Activists should attack exclusion without attacking individual aspiration. And the rest of us should resist the temptation to interpret a stranger’s body as a readable political document.

This approach is less thrilling than declaring war on the gym. It does not provide a villain for every photograph. It forces us to handle trade-offs, incomplete evidence, plural values, and the irritating possibility that people can make different choices without one of them representing historical evil.

In other words, it requires politics for grown-ups.

Please Return the Dumbbell to the Rack

When I hear that fitness is fascism, I do not hear radical compassion. I hear a theory so frightened of hierarchy that it begins policing desire. I hear an effort to protect people from moral judgment that ends by morally judging them for trying to change. I hear the language of liberation quietly becoming another instruction manual.

The answer to body tyranny is not to reverse the approved body. It is to reject the idea that bodily condition establishes human rank.

That principle protects the marathon runner and the wheelchair user, the person taking a GLP-1 medication and the person declining it, the devoted lifter and the devoted napper. It allows us to discuss medical evidence without converting biology into destiny. It allows us to criticize corporations without treating consumers as brainwashed livestock. It allows us to remember that systems influence people while people remain more than the sum of those influences.

Most importantly, it prevents solidarity from becoming absurdity with excellent intentions.

I will continue exercising, inconsistently and without ideological supervision. I will occasionally resent the treadmill for reasons that are personal, spiritual, and related to the fact that running in place feels like an allegory written by a cruel god. I will refuse to treat fitness as proof of virtue. I will refuse to treat illness as proof of failure. I will also refuse to pretend that wanting a stronger heart is a rehearsal for dictatorship.

If fascism ever arrives at my gym, I suspect it will announce itself through something more substantial than adjustable benches and a two-for-one membership offer. Until then, I plan to lift modestly, stretch inadequately, and remain deeply suspicious of anyone who turns a private health choice into a loyalty oath.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go undermine the revolution by doing three sets of squats.

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Source note: This essay responds to Jeremiah Johnson’s September 12, 2026 commentary, “When fitness becomes fascism”, concerning viral remarks from a panel at the Socialism 2026 conference. The analysis and language here are original.