Meet Jon. He works as a bartender and a landscapist in Madison, Wisconsin. He is learning to speak Korean and hopes to go back to school to study Urban Planning. He is into indie rock and has the NY Times as his homepage; by all cultural accounts he should be a liberal. But he's not; in fact, he is a conservative. A vegan conservative. This certainly makes Jon an anomaly among the vegan community as well as a political enigma. Most people consider the choice to be vegan a moral stance against cruelty to animals and a component of a philosophy which typically embraces progressive ideals such as human rights and environmentally friendly practices. The intrigue might end here if Jon were a vegan for health reasons, but that is not the case. To try and tackle why Jon remains conservative despite his liberal cue cards, and gain insight into what could make the rest of his political choices as progressive as his food habits, I asked him for an interview, and fortunately he complied.

Jon is, indeed, a vegan for ethical and not health reasons. It's important to pause here and identify that vegans are not just taking a stance against killing animals for food. A vegan abstains from dairy, a natural product of animals, and is therefore making a statement against the poor treatment of animals; essentially it is a form of progressive social activism. Precluding dairy from your diet is not easy in our society, least of all for someone who spends his days landscaping and then rushes to work in a bar where most of the food choices on the limited menu include dairy.
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 cause?

This is partially due to the fact that Jon refuses to recognize the conflict of interests between his choices to be a vegan and a conservative, even when given an example that clearly illustrates where the conflict exists. The non-renewal of the Multi Fibre Arrangement, a trade agreement that gave developing countries preferred treatment, is an example of a conservative policy that condemns both humans and animals to cruel conditions as it severed the only economic advantage that many countries had to compete within the global economy. Jon would not accept the connection sighting his belief that 'there are greater forces in the world' and things are improving over time because mortality rates are going down.

In Jon's case, like many others', his political beliefs were instilled by his family. He spent the first half of his childhood growing up in one of the worst neighborhoods in the South side of Milwaukee. Raised by a single mother, Jon lived on welfare until he was eleven and his mother was able to get work. They moved to Waukesha, in a particularly conservative region of Wisconsin. As Jon was approaching the 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." He relayed this information to me 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, a decade after his first opportunity to vote, 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 at the behest of more specific questions 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.' When questioned about particular issues his answers were a mixed bag of conservative and democratic positions. He is pro-life and highly critical of welfare but also for gun control and okay with gay marriage. His pro-life position stems from not knowing where the line between embryo and person exists and being personally wary about abortion because his younger siblings were born premature. Jon's first hand experience with welfare leads him to believe that there is a serious dependency problem and welfare programs must demonstrate improvement in order to justify their existence.

Given the lack of engagement in his response about his conservative political identity I expected him to have specific reasons for not liking liberals, but here too he was very vague. When asked what it is that liberals 'don't get' or 'do wrong' he struggled to come up with an answer. Eventually he answered by stating a preference for the way he interprets conservatives to operate. 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 in reality.

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 have Bush credited with reforming the Middle East. His support of the war is underpinned by the belief that we need order before justice.

Jon feels that his politics have shifted some to the left since he started living in Madison but undoubtedly labels himself as a conservative. However, he crossed party lines to vote for Wisconsin's democratic Senator, Russell Feingold. He told me that Feingold won his lifelong support by being the only Senator to vote against the U.S. Patriot Act. Not because of something he didn't like in the legislation, but out of respect for the integrity it takes to go against the grain for what you believe in.

It occurred to me to ask Jon whether or not he would consider voting me into office. His answer was that he would need to do more research on me, but he felt good about it.

While none of us are perfectly logical or consistent, Jon's choice to be a vegan and a conservative makes for a particularly odd union. It seems to be his psychological and emotional profile that keeps him anchored to the right end of the political spectrum. When it comes to policy issues, Jon is neither informed nor passionate about conservative positions, a fact he admitted inadvertently before the interview by half-jokingly saying that the outcome would be that 'Jon is dumb'. I don't think Jon is dumb at all, but rather intellectually disengaged from the reasons he identifies himself as conservative. More importantly, he serves as a prototype of a person that democrats should be targeting for votes.

I believe I gained a lot of credibility with Jon simply for being willing to listen to his opinion and actively trying to understand it. 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 vote democratic. It doesn't work to assume that conservative voters are stupid, or to make compromises on stances that keep shifting the political spectrum to the right. As the fissures in the Republican Party are beginning to reveal themselves and the 2006 and 2008 elections loom ahead, Democrats need to work hard to understand the votes on which their victory depends.