The backlash to Billie Eilish’s vegan comments explains a lot about the American left (and everyone else)

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.

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.

The most-liked response to the Eilish video came from an X user who invoked Indigenous peoples. The poster said that they “stopped taking white vegans” seriously after watching a documentary about Inuits who have an ancient cultural tradition of hunting seals and other marine mammals for sustenance. Over 130,000 people liked it.

The problem was that Eilish’s argument was clearly directed at the average American consumer who eats dozens of factory-farmed animals each year, not a small group of Indigenous peoples for whom hunting such animals is a core part of their identity — unlike factory farming, a century-old practice that is not core to any culture.

Another user said that veganism is not morally superior to meat-eating because the vegetables and fruits that vegans eat “are also harvested via immense cruelty & exploitation.”

The poster wasn’t totally wrong; the farmworkers who pick America’s fruits and vegetables toil in awful conditions. But veganism has never been about eliminating all harm in the food system. It’s about making individual choices that reduce it.

And if you’re particularly concerned about farmworker welfare, know that being vegan doesn’t require you to eat more fruits and vegetables than the average person. Veganism largely revolves around replacing animal proteins with plant proteins, like beans, lentils, tofu, tempeh, and plant-based meat products made with soy and wheat, all of which are harvested with combine tractors, not picked by exploited farmworkers. Plus, workers on animal farms and in slaughterhouses — who are disproportionately immigrants — often face conditions every bit as abusive as farmworkers in the fields.

The user concluded that “if you care about animals, the position to take is anti-capitalism,” without any explanation as to how the end of capitalism would also bring about the end of animal cruelty. (Capitalist countries don’t have a lock on cruel food systems — in response to the post, Vox contributor Jan Dutkiewicz pointed out how East Germany and other socialist states adopted intensive factory farming in the second half of the 20th century.)

And yet, the post received 80,000 likes.

Others called Eilish’s veganism privileged, even though research has found it’s actually more affordable than the typical meat-heavy diet, so long as you’re not buying a lot of specialty plant-based products, like Impossible burgers and almond-based ice cream.

I could cite other muddled arguments, too, but you get the idea. And while it might be easy to dismiss Twitter critics, over the years plenty of leftist scholars have bemoaned their peers’ indifference and even antagonism to animal protection.

When faced with an absolute argument — like “you can’t say you love all animals and still eat meat” — it’s not uncommon for people to try to dismiss them with rare edge cases, like seal-hunting Inuits, or find supposed hypocrisies, like the exploitation of farmworkers in picking the fruits and vegetables that everyone eats, not just vegans.

But what these responses have in common is that they are distractions from the simple fact that over 10 billion land animals are tortured for food annually in the US for one reason above all others: because American consumers love to eat them, as well as their milk and eggs. And it’s a distraction from the equally simple fact that an enormous amount of animal suffering could be averted by individuals choosing to change how they eat, whether by going vegan altogether or eating fewer animal products, especially chicken meat and eggs.

I’ve written dozens of articles about what companies and governments ought to do on these issues, and animal advocacy groups have made some political progress in banning the worst of the worst practices. But it’s hard to see how all of them get banned, let alone how we might bring about a drastic reduction in the number of animals farmed, when much of the American left — which in many ways is a natural ally to the animal advocacy cause — seems so invested in ignoring this atrocity. Or, even worse, antagonizing its loudest critics with lazy and misinformed arguments dressed up in the language of social justice.

None of this is new. I went vegan almost 20 years ago and have spent much of my life surrounded by people across the left-ideological spectrum. For every one weird argument against veganism I’ve read on X, I’ve heard 10 iterations of it in real life.

But it’s always confused me, and fellow left-leaning animal advocates I know, because meat companies are leading contributors to so many of the social problems with which the left is concerned:

Leftists also tend to espouse many of the same values as animal protection advocates, like compassion, fairness, justice, and opposition to oppression and hierarchy — all values that animal agriculture violates.

So what can explain many on the left’s indifference or even opposition to animal advocacy and veganism?

On the surface, it might be as simple as these five words: “no ethical consumption under capitalism.” What this leftist slogan means in practice is that individual consumer choices are largely meaningless in the face of widespread environmental destruction and worker (and animal) exploitation. In this view, to focus on individual consumer action is a distraction from what really matters: holding governments and corporations accountable for wrongdoing along the way to the ultimate goal of overhauling or overthrowing capitalism.

But even if you believe that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, there is certainly less ethically fraught consumption under capitalism, or any economic system. A diet composed of 10 or five or zero tortured animals does less harm than one composed of dozens or hundreds of tortured animals. And according to some of America’s leading agricultural economists, your food choices do affect long-term demand and production. Simply saying your choices have no impact on animals doesn’t make it true.

In this way, the slogan can serve as a sort of moral license for doing something that many people know, at some level, causes harm.

When it comes down to it, though, most Americans — whatever their political beliefs — were raised eating lots of meat. They like the taste of it, and they don’t want to be bothered with eating less or none of it, even if it just involves a few weeks of inconvenience until they become used to it. And they really do not like being called out on that fact. Cognitive dissonance isn’t a pleasant experience, and human beings will go to great lengths to deny it.

I understand that sentiment because I’ve felt it too; there are plenty of things I know I could do to live a more ethical life, and yet don’t. But the outcome of simply not trying — or justifying not trying on the grounds of whatever matches one’s political beliefs — is that no one demands anything of themselves, and few ever get around to making credible demands of governments and corporations.

I write all this knowing that many readers will perceive me as a scold. And by making the case that individual choices really do matter for animals, that individuals — not just corporations — do have some responsibility for what they choose to eat, maybe I am scolding. I also know some will then use that scoldiness as justification to wave away veganism or meat reduction, as if me being annoying somehow is grounds to ignore animal suffering.

But animal suffering isn’t pretend. As you read this, tens of billions of animals are in dark warehouses somewhere, suffering from confinement, mutilation, disease, and a host of other problems. If they could speak for themselves, they’d be far less polite than the most annoying vegan you know, and whatever reasons are used to justify their suffering would be cold comfort.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!