GLP-1s and the DSA both end the same way
Life runs on incentives, competition, and dealing with scarcity. In a capitalist economy, you succeed by developing skills and making things that other people want to buy. Your body works in a similar way—it is governed by the laws of physics. If you want to lose weight, you must burn more calories than you take in.
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Lately, two completely different social movements have tried to fight these rules: the fat-acceptance movement and the rise of democratic socialism (the latter championed by groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA). Both groups share a common trait: a deep frustration with natural hierarchies and objective metrics of success.
When individuals in these movements fail to hit these benchmarks on their own, they demand that society change the rules to protect them at the expense of others. The sudden boom of new weight-loss drugs like Ozempic shows just how quickly these massive social arguments fall apart the moment a medical shortcut becomes available.
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For years, fat-acceptance activists argued that a person’s size was a permanent identity, completely unrelated to habits or behavior. They demanded that doctors, fashion brands, and public spaces change to accept their bodies exactly as they were.
But everything changed between 2022 and 2026 with the rise of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound. [1] Once a reliable injection could easily turn down their appetite, an enormous number of activists and online influencers quietly dropped their “body positive” slogans and started taking the medication. [2]
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This massive shift reveals a simple psychological truth: the “acceptance” movement was mostly a defense mechanism—and an offensive weapon. People championed it because the alternative—maintaining the caloric intake and expenditure needed to achieve their stated goals—was too hard. They used it offensively to shame fit people while demanding a free pass for themselves.
The moment a scientific shortcut made it easy, the movement fractured. This proved that the activists didn’t actually want to change society’s beauty standards; they just wanted an easier way to meet them.
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This exact same mindset drives modern socialist groups like the DSA. Today’s socialist movement is not made up of factory workers; it is mostly made up of young people who have struggled to find high-paying jobs in the modern economy—jobs that they think they deserve.
Capitalism rewards hard work, unique skills, and taking risks. People who lack the focus, work ethic, or in-demand skills to succeed in this environment naturally make less money and hold lower social status.
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Instead of fixing their own shortcomings—like learning a trade, studying tech, or working longer hours—socialist activists do exactly what the fat-acceptance movement did. They blame the system. They claim that the free market is “evil” and that anyone who succeeds must have cheated or used unearned privilege.
By framing their failure to compete as a human rights issue, they try to change the rules from earning money to demanding it. The main goals of the DSA—like universal basic income, government job guarantees, and wiping out student loans—are just economic tools designed to force hard-working citizens to pay for the lifestyles of people who cannot or will not produce adequate value.
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Underneath both of these movements lies a powerful, hidden driver: envy. Envy occurs when people see others possessing a trait, status, or level of wealth that they desire but have failed to achieve themselves. Rather than using that gap as motivation to improve, the envious mind seeks to destroy or devalue the success of others to make itself feel better.
In the fat-acceptance movement, this manifested as deep resentment toward physically fit individuals. Activists labeled fitness culture as “toxic” and healthy standards as “oppressive,” attempting to shame disciplined people into feeling guilty for their achievements.
Similarly, collectivist politics are fueled by an envy of the wealthy and successful. Instead of admiring entrepreneurs who create valuable businesses, socialists view them with hostility. They use terms like “the 1%” to paint financial success as a moral failure. In both cases, the psychology is identical: if I cannot or will not do the hard work required to achieve what you have and I want, I will create an ideology that claims your success is wicked and my failure is virtuous.
Tellingly, the massive use of drugs like Ozempic isn’t being paid for out of pocket by the people using them. The initial science behind these drugs was paid for with billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded government grants. [3] Today, the ongoing cost of these prescriptions is being pushed onto public and private health insurance. Medicare spends tens of billions of dollars a year on these drugs, which raises insurance premiums and taxes for every single working American. [4]
This is the ultimate goal of both the pathologically out-of-shape person and the socialist voter: they want to separate what they consume from what they produce. The disciplined worker suffers/suffered three punishments. First, they pay higher health insurance premiums to cover people who won’t exercise. Second, they pay higher taxes to fund welfare programs for people who refuse to learn valuable career skills. Third, they shelled out for increased drug prices on other meds to underwrite the R&D for GLP-1s.
A society that rewards laziness and punishes success will eventually stop producing anything of value. Markets create the wealth that socialists want to share. If we keep destroying the incentives that reward excellence—whether in personal health or the economy—we will end up creating the exact same poverty that destroyed every socialist experiment in history.
Yet, one group remains luckier than any other, no matter if the DSA wins or sanity (capitalism) wins: the overweight or obese.
The historical record shows that when a population refuses to manage its inputs voluntarily under a capitalist framework, a socialist framework will eventually force an involuntary restriction of resources through raw structural failure:
Paraphrasing Mel Brooks, “It is good to be the fat.”
If capitalism wins, science hands them an easy medical band-aid. If socialism wins, the inevitable starvation diet fixes the problem for them.
(Note from Andrea: If one wants to carry this excellent metaphor a bit further, of GLP-1s’ runs, the explosive diarrhea the medicine causes as part of its cure as a metaphor about the fact that everything in a socialist society eventually goes to a fecal end.)
Image created using AI.
Endnotes
[1] Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), KFF Health Tracking Poll May 2024: The Public’s Views on GLP-1 Drugs, KFF, 2024.
[2] See cultural media tracking data summarized in: Alex Abad-Santos, “The Battle for the Soul of Body Positivity in the Ozempic Era,” Vox, 2024.
[3] National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT), Project Data: Incretin-based therapies and GLP-1 receptor agonist development grants, NIH, 2023.
[4] Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Influences of Managing Weight and Obesity on the Federal Budget, CBO, 2024; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare Part D Drug Spending Dashboard Data, 2024–2025.
[5] Encuesta Nacional de Condiciones de Vida (ENCOVI), Informe de Resultados 2017: Alimentación, Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, 2018; Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, United Nations, 2019.
[6] Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform, Columbia University Press, 2007.
[7] Manuel Franco, et al., “Impact of Energy Intake, Physical Activity, and Population-wide Weight Loss on Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes in Cuba,” BMJ, vol. 335, no. 7629, 2007, pp. 1093–1097.
[8] Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962, Walker & Company, 2010.