In the 1984 John Milius film Red Dawn, a Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan force stages a surprise attack on the United States. But the invaders encounter unexpected resistance in Colorado from a group of guerillas who call themselves the “Wolverines.” “What is a Wolverine?” a Soviet commander asks one of his Cuban military comrades. “A small animal like a badger . . . terribly ferocious,” the Cuban replies. He adds: “It is also the name of the local school sports collective.” This is communist-speak for “school mascot,” a tell that the American guerillas are, in fact, mostly teenagers—albeit heavily armed ones.

There is a whiff of this technically accurate but spiritually empty attempt to describe American culture in Compact magazine founder and editor Sohrab Ahmari’s recent condemnation of what he calls “lifestyle rightism.” Writing in the American Conservative earlier this year, Ahmari noted that a New Year often means new resolutions, including on the part of younger American conservatives: for example, exercising more, eating better, abandoning “harmful vices,” reducing technology use, or moving to more politically favorable environs. He described such aspirations as part of “lifestyle rightism”: the idea that “political change can be brought about by making better personal, investment, and consumer choices.”

It is, to Ahmari, the counterpart of “lifestyle leftism,” a superficial turning of the western left away from society-altering radicalism and toward “endless conversations about melanin content and genitalia.” (“Lifestyle leftism” is the coinage of German far-left politician Sahra Wagenknecht, who has lamented the turn of the socialist Die Linke party away from its roots.) However beneficial, even “noble,” lifestyle rightism’s promotion of a better life is insufficient. Its overt individualization, Ahmari claimed, at best, precludes necessary collective action and, at worst, leads to selfish vices. Lifestyle rightism “misdirects its adherents, shifting them away from collective action and the shared pursuit of common goods toward essentially private goods (some of which aren’t good at all).”

From the examples Ahmari chose to define lifestyle rightism, one might accept he has something of a point. The kickboxer, masculinity influencer, and current Romanian jail inmate Andrew Tate has some fans among young male conservatives, who find themselves socially adrift amid the modern distortions of relationships and sexuality. Yet Tate’s overall worldview reduces to a kind of crude alpha-male-ism that largely surrenders to prevailing sexual ethics without truly challenging them, albeit with the promise that Tate followers can end up ahead. Likewise, cryptocurrency, truly understood by few to begin with, seems of late only to have disappointed and even misled its right-wing fans, with promises of instant or durable wealth amid modern economic uncertainty revealed as uncertain. To the extent that lifestyle rightism leads one to such dead ends, it deserves some measure of skepticism.

Yet Ahmari has rigged the game in his favor. Aspects of lifestyle rightism that he merely alludes to have far greater power than he allows. And attributes of it that he outright ignores might be even more powerful still.

The most potent of these aspects is exercise. Ahmari affirms its value in a perfunctory, idiosyncratic fashion, wishing the best of those with New Year’s resolutions and allowing that “any movement should want healthy, wholesome individual members.” He was right to do so, curiosities about his apparent preference to value such activity only in terms of its importance to some kind of “movement” aside. The benefits of even small amounts of exercise are myriad. The physical rewards are obvious: improved bodily function, and a warding off or at least mitigating disease. Physically fit individuals were less likely to suffer seriously from Covid-19, for example. But enhanced mental function is an underappreciated benefit. Studies have found positive effects of exercise on brain function for groups as varied as young adults, stroke victims, and the elderly. And while the true secrets of human longevity still seem beyond our reach, few dispute that regular exercise can contribute to a longer and more functional life.

But exercise does far more than simply improve one’s health. It also emphasizes the good of an embodied experience. In his 2021 book The Unbroken Thread, Ahmari lamented the modern resurgence of Gnosticism, an early heresy of Christianity that saw the world as divided between the good (the spiritual, created by the true God) and the bad (the material, inflicted on us by the evil demiurge). Gnosticism prizes a secret knowledge kept hidden from us in this fleshy prison, one that frees us “from bonds of responsibility—and guilt.” Until we access this knowledge, and thereby liberate ourselves from the material, our lives are radically incomplete. Though countered aggressively by early Christians, Gnosticism has endured in various forms into the present, in spirit if not in name, via beliefs and habits that see the body and spirit as fundamentally at odds.

Exercise, understood and practiced rightly, defies such a worldview. It is a unity, not a division, of body and spirit, and a ready reminder of what is possible in this world. One needn’t be a professional athlete to experience the workaday satisfaction of a completed workout, to partake in the transcendent thrill of having challenged oneself and risen to and then above the challenge, and everything in between. To exercise is “to accept the body—with all its beauty and brokenness, its miraculous capacities and its shortcomings, its natural functioning and purposes” and thereby, as Ahmari put it, “to accept the self as we receive it: bounded, limited, enmeshed in intervening natural realities that include our ancestors, from whom we receive the particular shapes of our bodies, and our progeny, who receive the shapes of their bodies from ours.” It is also a thoroughgoing assertion of the physical in an age when so much is becoming digital, and artificial. That some Gnostics, too, practice their own asceticism does not negate the anti-gnostic tendency of exercise; after all, as Ahmari recounted, they were just as given to extreme libertinism as they were to radical asceticism, both being driven by the same contempt for the physical body, as part of a shared tendency to deprecate “natural virtues or perfections (arete).”

At its best, especially (though not only) in its competitive forms, exercise points to precisely that kind of arete, and thus to a moral vision. In The Joy of Sports, the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak noted that the very word “asceticism” derives from the Greek “ascesis,” which referred to disciplines that ancient Greek athletes imposed on themselves for bodily preparation. It is true that ascetic practices are not inherently moral. Consider, if you like, their gnostic appropriation—but then consider also that Christians through the centuries have used the term for their own disciplines. Exercise can also, in some senses, exemplify virtue ethics. “Common sense, perennial wisdom tells us that the human being has agency over the formation of his or her ‘mind-body’ and therefore responsibility for exercising this agency,” Allen Porter argued in Law & Liberty last year. Novak, similarly, saw in sports not merely basic lessons about obligation, duty, and command, but also how “to build up skills and habits over time, to make oneself a better person in those respects” and “to meet new concrete situations, under whatever pressure, head-on.”

It is important not to take this too far. Replying to Porter, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn faulted him for a reductive view of virtue, one that ignored certain therapeutic and selfish tendencies that exercise does not automatically obviate, and failed to acknowledge that exercised-based virtues are not guaranteed to transfer. “There are many virtuous people who do not have the ideal weight, and many fit people who are far from virtuous,” she rightly observed. (Mugshots of Cincinnati Bengals football players not infrequently populate newspaper and TV reports in my hometown.) Novak, likewise, admitted that, though “sports inculcate important moral values,” an athlete “is not necessarily a moral man in other spheres of life.” However, he maintained that some degree of spillover is inevitable, because “human beings cannot forever live their lives in separate compartments.”

Indeed, that some of the West’s great moral traditions and thinkers cannot fully escape the language of exercise and athletics, even if only if used metaphorically, suggests not just their power, but also their applicability in that realm. In Book One, Chapter 12 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle framed virtue in this way:

Everything that is praised seems to be praised for being some sort of attribute or for holding itself in a certain condition, since we praise someone who is just and courageous or generally good, as we also praise virtue, on account of actions and works, and we praise someone who is strong or a good runner, and so on, for being naturally possessed of some attribute and standing in some relation toward something good and serious.

And in the Apostle Paul’s second letter to Timothy, Paul, nearing his death, wrote:

For I am already being poured out like a libation, and the time for my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

So, caveats stipulated, there does seem to be a moral framework at least implied in exercise and athletic contests, and a concomitant potential to facilitate virtues that can apply beyond. There is, moreover, an extent to which personal health, to which exercise can contribute, directly correlates to one’s capacity to engage with other institutions. As Rachel Lu, responding to Porter and Lasch-Quinn, argued, “a person who neglects her health is diminishing her long-term potential to be a contributing member of her family or society at large.”

This is hardly the only way in which exercise can affect one’s engagement with the wider world. Though much exercise can be done alone, it has a tendency to point outward, to others. Look at the sheer profusion, throughout American life, of activity centered around some form or another of organized exercise. Everything from cycling clubs, charity 5ks, pickleball leagues, local gyms, and even walking around with a friend can provide continued rigor and friendship based on the mutual interest of adults. And children’s sports provide for the young the aforementioned benefits, while also setting them on paths to lifelong activity and serving as the first proving ground for some of the most basic moral virtues. 

Beyond the merely physical, these forms of socialization can supply rootedness and particularity. In its organized and spectator forms, exercise and athletics can provide exactly these goods. For athletes, especially younger ones, teams can become worlds unto themselves. They can create meaning, rituals, and memories that form powerful bonds, generating lifelong friendships. As for spectators: Entire schools, towns, cities, states, and regions can experience the victories and defeats of others as their own. Families pass down their loyalties and attachments through the generations. And countless fans structure rituals around their pastimes. “Sports are carriers of traditions, of rituals,” Novak argued. “They war against traditionless modernity. They satisfy the most persistent hungers of the human heart.” Not for nothing, the modern word “fan” come to us from the Latin, “fanum,” referring to the shrine of a deity specific to a place. Both participation and fandom, moreover (mostly) sublimate tribal, primal passions that would otherwise go suppressed, and/or to more dangerous ends.

Exercise obsession and sports fanaticism can and do go too far, of course; one thinks of the will-to-power weightlifting fetishism of Costin Alamariu and his “Bronze Age Mindset,” or of the soccer hooligans so memorably described in Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs. But proper acculturation can make these defects aberrant, not prototypical. Nor are possible or existing defects or excesses reasons to discount such pursuits, especially when around 41 percent of US adults are medically obese (according to pre-Covid numbers), and when civil society is struggling. Thus, it seems prudent not to discount exercise and its attendant manifestations. Bread and circuses or “bowling alone” they are not—or at least, need not be.

One could argue, in response to this, that there is nothing inherently conservative about the forms and emanations of exercise that have been outlined here, and that the definition of lifestyle rightism has been broadened beyond utility. And it is obviously not true that exercise or watching sports are—or should be—favored only by conservatives. Indeed, of late, national-level controversies over their politicization have tainted their appeal. This itself, however, backhandedly affirms that the appeal of athletics arises from their apolitical nature. Downplaying their value for the right proceeds from an unfortunately reductive understanding of what conservatism should be.

Ahmari, while welcoming attempts to “lift and eat clean” and “to gather power over the slothful self,” urged us not to “mistake these things for politics.” But attempting to shoehorn these and other activities into an explicitly political vision misses the point. “The preservation of parts of life not drawn up into politics and work is essential for the human spirit,” Novak argued. Yes, they can strengthen the individual, the family, and civil society, units that do comprise a polity. But these are the entities that politics is meant to protect, whose flourishing it works to facilitate but whose functioning it must not overwhelm, lest they be crushed. Conservatives have spoken of Burkean “little platoons” or Tocquevillian “associations” well past the point of cliché. But they have done so for a reason: They matter.

To think otherwise requires thinking of all aspects of public life as existing in a unified, top-down, centralized whole, seeking constantly to reabsorb into politics any lingering or stray elements, and disdaining what one cannot easily understand. If this rampant desire to politicize is not a form of totalitarianism outright, it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to one, particularly in its inability to perceive things as valuable in themselves, as opposed to merely as subdivisions of something greater. For true individual flourishing, for authentic civic expression, and for a politics that enables both, we’re better off sticking with Burke, Tocqueville—and the Wolverines.