To say that we live in an age of polarization is akin to saying that Senegal is hot. It’s so obvious that it almost feels insulting to point it out. Ya think?!
On many issues, this sort of polarization is inevitable. Either the U.S. should attack Iran or it shouldn’t. Either men can become women or they can’t. Mutual agreement is not always possible, any more than all businesses can be profitable, or all nations can win the World Cup.
Sometimes, though, there are opportunities for productive bipartisan accord. A surprising example? Animal welfare.
Generally, of course, right-wingers are caricatured as steak-crazed carnivores, and left-wingers as lettuce-nibbling vegans. As a right-leaning vegetarian, I have found myself to be unusual enough that I can’t deny these stereotypes contain a fair bit of truth. Turning up at a conservative conference and announcing that you don’t eat meat feels a bit like trekking to Mecca and proclaiming that you don’t believe in Allah.
Still, the Save Our Bacon Act—a bill to bar states from setting livestock production standards on animals raised in other states—has met with a surprising degree of bipartisan opposition. Introduced in July 2025 by Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA), the Save Our Bacon Act is ostensibly intended to secure free interstate commerce for livestock products. Its backers say that it will lower grocery prices for consumers and fight blue states’ “overregulation.” In practice, it would prevent state governments from making laws to protect animal welfare.
Democratic lawmakers and left-wing commentators have opposed this, of course. Nicholas Kristof called it “a substantial setback for animal rights in America’s livestock gulag” and Steven Pinker implied that it entailed “vicious cruelty.” But they have not been alone. Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren has been scathing on the subject of gestation crates, used to confine pregnant pigs. She has called the practice—I think rightly—“torture.”
Some Republicans, like Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), oppose the bill because they believe it supports Chinese interests in the livestock industry and “strengthens Beijing’s grip on America’s food supply.” (Several major food-processing companies in the U.S., like Smithfield Foods, are Chinese-owned.) But many conservative voices have emphasized the significance of animal welfare. Even Mike Cernovich, author of Gorilla Mindset, has said that protecting “horrific factory farming practices” is “demonic stuff.”
Of course, these right-wing critics of factory farming are not about to embrace vegetarianism. They support more traditional means of raising animals—because they are more humane, yes, but also because they make for healthier products. The “Make America Healthy Again” emphasis on “real foods” has centered meat in the American diet, but it has also idealized more natural, grass-fed livestock. (I am no nutritionist, but it does seem like keeping animals in a near-constant state of stress and inactivity and pumping them full of antibiotics to compensate for their feculent conditions would result in suboptimal nourishment.)
I prefer to opt out of meat-eating altogether. But there is a big moral difference between an animal being allowed to live its life more or less as it would in nature before being swiftly dispatched, on the one hand, and one made to endure a cramped, drug-addled, overfed, violent and overall miserable existence, on the other. Modern intensive farming has ensured that death is far from being the most problematic element of the process.
It is hardly surprising that conservatives support meat-eating. Carnivorism is as traditional as nearly anything we humans have ever done; it is coeval with civilization itself. But factory farming is another matter—not just a cruel business, but a novel, dehumanizing and disruptive one. Reducing sentient creatures to “production units”, as former George W. Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully has written in these pages, perversely combines the modern and the barbaric. It is, as Mr. Scully writes, “a betrayal of honorable animal husbandry”.
I understand why some small-l liberals might see this as yet another instance of unnecessary government regulation. But you don’t have to be a hippie to acknowledge that there is at least some extent to which the harm principle should apply to other animals. No one thinks that pet owners should have the unfettered right to determine the manner in which their dogs are raised, and no one should think the same of farmers and their livestock.
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Right-wingers pride themselves on acknowledging the harder truths of reality. They congratulate themselves for not conflating that which they would like to exist with that which actually exists. Well, factory farming depends upon consumers not acknowledging reality—not acknowledging, for example, that a pork chop was once a part of an intelligent and sensitive animal that would have loved to roam and play, but instead spent its entire miserable life in cramped, filthy, and frightening conditions.
I’m sure many people are never going to agree on whether it is right to kill animals for meat. Yet I would like to believe that we can at least agree it is wrong to allow livestock producers to torture animals to keep their costs low. Bipartisan resistance to the cruel and cynical Save Our Bacon Act seems like a good step forward.
We can argue about grass-fed beef elsewhere.
