This Campus Progress article by Eliza Krigman has been bugging me, and I've been trying to figure out why. The piece is a breathless, slightly-awed exploration of her friend Jon -- a vegan Republican. I know! How, she wonders, could such a creature possibly exist?
As the profile unfolds, you find that Jon's mother was on welfare and got off it through work, inculcating a hatred of the dole and a glorification of the paycheck in her kid. You find that Jon in a committed interventionist who thinks the War on Terror an epochal, necessary struggle. He's pro-life, Hobbesian in outlook, and mistrustful of politicians. He is, in short, a conservative who doesn't eat animal products. So Krigman concludes:
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.
Bizarre. Jon is a conservative on a host of specific policy issue. He also doesn't eat cow. But the Democratic Party has no stronger a prohibition against hamburgers than the Republicans do. Just because a strong belief in animal rights correlates with progressive outlooks in other issue areas, doesn't mean it's a causal factor for progressivism. There's no contradiction between disliking the welfare state and disliking McDonalds. The two aren't even related. And I found it weirdly condescending to watch Krigman treat Jon like some bearded lady for combining a series of perfectly coherent positions into a slightly surprising whole. The kid's just an extreme sort of crunchy con -- a birkenstocked burkean -- nothing more, nothing less.
