Lessons From a Vegan Conservative

Leaning to the Right can still be going against the grain.

By Eliza Krigman
March 13, 2006

Meet Jon. He has tousled dark brown hair, blue eyes and typically wears Diesel jeans paired with a faded ringer T-shirt, a characteristic trendy-bohemian look popularized by the men’s section of Urban Outfitters. He works as a bartender and a landscaper in Madison, Wisc., and hopes to go back to school to study urban planning. In his spare time, he is learning to speak Korean and goes to indie rock shows. The New York Times is his homepage on his web browser.

By all cultural accounts, one might immediately jump to the conclusion that Jon should be a liberal. But he’s not; in fact, he is a conservative. A vegan conservative who abstains entirely not just from meat but also dairy and honey. That makes Jon both a political enigma and an anomaly within the vegan community. Most people consider the choice to be vegan a moral stance against cruelty to animals and just one component of a philosophy that typically embraces progressive ideals like human rights and environmentalism. It also attracts plenty of punks, hippies and other seemingly alternative cultural types.

So, then, how did Jon end up embodying this anomalous pairing?

The intrigue might have ended quickly for me if Jon were merely a vegan for health reasons, but that’s not the case. Herein lays the central paradox: How could someone who makes a significant dietary sacrifice based on consideration for the treatment of animals also support a political party and an administration that can only be considered hostile to this very cause?

Like many of us, Jon’s political beliefs were instilled by his family. He spent the first half of his childhood growing up in one of the worst neighborhoods on the Southside of Milwaukee. Raised by a single mother, Jon lived on welfare until his mother “woke up” and was able to get work; his word choice is indicative of his belief that their transition out of welfare was not a matter of changing external circumstances, but rather the result of his mother deciding to take responsibility for herself. Subsequently they moved to Waukesha, which is a particularly conservative region of Wisconsin. As Jon approached voting age, his mother brought him into the voting booth, pointed to all the Republican candidates and said, “This is who you are going to vote for.” According to Jon, his mother is a fanatic Bush supporter who thinks that Bush is the “greatest orator of all time.” This was said with a half smile, which I took to mean that while he doesn’t share the same blind enthusiasm for Bush, he is a supporter nonetheless.

Today, at age 28, Jon defines himself as both fiscally and socially conservative. He didn’t have a lot to say about why he identifies himself as conservative, but after some prodding, he opined that the government’s primary responsibility is to ensure security, and beyond that, to maintain a structure which allows people to ‘achieve’ or ‘advance their cause.’ Conspicuously absent from his response were traditional conservative principles like small government or fiscal discipline. Perhaps this is why he is not particularly bothered that the Bush administration does not heed many of the founding tenets of conservative ideology. When asked how he felt about Bush’s fiscal practices, including huge deficit spending, Jon shrugged and offered up a vague response that exonerated President Bush: “We are a slave to our times” and “There are other forces in the world” that caused the abberations.

When we got down to specific policy issues, his perspective was a mixed bag of conservative and progressive positions. He is pro-life and highly critical of welfare but also for gun control and okay with gay marriage. “I don’t know where the line between embryo and person exists and my younger siblings were born premature, so I’m more comfortable saying no to abortion,” he says. Jon’s firsthand experience with welfare leads him to believe that there is a serious dependency problem in this country and that welfare programs need to be dramatically reformed in order to justify their existence. He acknowledges that some welfare recipients are victims of difficult circumstances but is quick to point out that many others are just not trying.

When Jon didn’t draw a particularly detailed portrait of his conservative political identity, I expected him to resort to the more commonplace political approach of defining himself in relation to what he is against. I waited for him to tick off a list of reasons why he didn’t like liberals, but he didn’t take the bait and stayed vague. When asked what it is that liberals “don’t get” or “do wrong,” he initially stated that “Liberals hate on success” and are responsible for “political correctness,” which he considers contemptible.

Ultimately, he stated his preference for a more Hobbesian outlook on human nature, which he feels conservatives intuitively understand and operate under. In Jon’s eyes, humans are selfish creatures and conservatives understand this and adopt it into their modus operandi, while liberals pretend to act on the behalf of others but do not do so in reality. This statement particularly stood out for me, because it revealed Jon’s overarching distrust of elected officials on both sides of the aisle, a sentiment shared by nearly 50 percent of young people. Ultimately, Jon’s preference for current conservative politicians could, in this respect, best be summed with the adage “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

I asked Jon to name five positive things the Bush administration has done for our country and he was only able to come up with one, sort of. His answer was the war in Iraq, which he believes will one day result in the world crediting President Bush with reforming the Middle East. His support of the war is underpinned by the belief that we need order before justice, which is a clear extension of the premium he puts on enforcing security and restraining the less good-hearted inclinations of people.

Jon feels that his politics have shifted to the left a bit since he started living in Madison, a hotbed of progressive thought and activism in the Midwest. He even crossed party lines to vote for Wisconsin ’s Democratic Senator, Russell Feingold. Feingold won his lifelong support by being the only Senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act. It wasn’t exactly that Jon hated the legislation (he is strongly pro-security), but he respected the total integrity it required to go so publicly against the grain to stand up for what you believe in.

While few of us will ever be perfectly logical or consistent in our beliefs or our political choices, Jon’s choice to be a vegan and a conservative makes for a particularly odd union. Ultimately, it is less specific policy issues that make him call himself a conservative but a vaguer, sometimes more powerful, emotional tie to the values he believes conservatism should stand for. In fact, Jon is admittedly neither particularly informed nor passionate about specific conservative policy positions. Prior to the interview, he half-jokingly worried that the outcome of the piece would be that “Jon is dumb.” Actually, I don’t think Jon is dumb at all. I do think he is disengaged with what happens within the Beltway and disassociated from the real reasons he identifies as a conservative. This certainly isn’t an exclusively conservative malady; too many young progressives would be unable to articulate a coherent framework of policies and theories that they believe in. Still, I was a bit surprised because, unlike your average Madison lefty, Jon’s beliefs are frequently questioned so he must defend himself often.

So the question for us, then, is how do we reach out to people like Jon who could, in certain issue areas, serve as a supporter of progressive causes and candidates? I believe I gained a lot of credibility with Jon simply by being willing to listen to his opinions and trying to understand him instead of disdain him. Too frequently the debate between liberals and conservatives becomes a shouting match that drowns out any meaningful exchange of ideas. In this era of conservative domination, it is important to consider what it will take to get people like Jon to come around. Assuming that conservatives are intractably stupid and giving up on them, or continually creeping towards a watered-down mainstream to placate them, are not workable ideas. As the fissures within the Republican Party begin to reveal themselves, progressives need to work harder to understand our colleagues or neighbors or relatives who may seem impossibly different. We need their support to make change.

Eliza Krigman graduated from UW Madison in 2005 with a degree in International Relations and Spanish. She just completed an internship at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina and now plans to move to Washington, DC to pursue a career in public policy.

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