The backlash to Billie Eilish’s vegan comments explains a lot about the American left (and everyone else) |
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The backlash to Billie Eilish’s vegan comments explains a lot about the American left (and everyone else)
Why are American leftists so reluctant to confront the meat industry?
Last week, in a video interview with Elle magazine, the pop star Billie Eilish was asked the following question: “What’s one hill you’d die on?”
“Y’all not gonna like me for this one,” Eilish said. “Eating meat is inherently wrong.”
She then added that it’s hypocritical to say you love all animals but also eat meat: “Sorry — you can eat meat, go for it, you can love animals, but you can’t do both.”
Whatever you might think about Eilish, her statement could be taught in an intro to logic class. You can say you love some species, like cats and dogs, while eating other species, like chickens and pigs. But you can’t say you love all animals if you also eat some. And boy, do Americans eat animals: about 37 individual animals each year. (If you include shrimp, which you probably should, the number balloons to 174.) And even before they’re killed, 99 percent of those animals are raised in truly horrific conditions.
Nonetheless, Eilish wasn’t wrong that y’all are not gonna like her for this one. After the interview was posted, a firestorm on X ensued with thousands of users criticizing her. Which wasn’t a surprise — any vegan who ventures on the internet knows that even implicitly criticizing people’s eating choices is a fast track to a flame war.
But what was unusual was that the overwhelming opposition to Eilish’s argument didn’t come from who you might expect, like carnivore influencers or conservative political pundits. Instead, it mostly came from users who seem to be on the far left of the political spectrum, like Eilish herself.
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The ferocity of the response illustrated how people will often come up with illogical or downright lazy justifications to ignore or implicitly allow for extreme cruelty to animals, whatever their political ideology. It’s such a common response that psychologists have a name for the cognitive dissonance that occurs when people feel their love for animals clashes with their love of eating them, and the justifications that follow. They call it “the meat paradox.”
How people attempt to resolve that paradox can depend on their politics. Some on the political right might try to resolve this cognitive dissonance by, say, arguing that God gave us animals to eat, that being told to eat less meat restricts their own freedom, or that humans are superior to all other animals.
On the political left, as was the case with the response to Eilish, some use leftist political ideas to criticize veganism as somehow colonialist or anti-Indigenous. Or they’ll simply say that there is “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” dismissing veganism as an impotent response to a cruel system.
These sorts of arguments may have earned Eilish’s critics a lot of likes on X, but they collapse under scrutiny. More importantly, though, those responses also revealed that many on the left use political slogans to avoid honestly confronting their individual complicity in supporting one of the most violent and environmentally destructive industries on the planet.
People being wrong on the internet
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