What Vegans Did To Republicans

Apparently the later national PublicPolicyPolling survey covered a bunch of issues related to food. One of those questions, apparently, was whether people liked or disliked vegans. According to a tweet from PPP:

On our food poll we found that Republicans have a negative opinion of vegans...not sure what vegans ever did to them...

Now, the answer to this could be that Republicans are associating vegans with the kind of people who commit illegal acts, mostly crimes against property, with an animal-rights-y agenda. It's fair enough to dislike the latter, I'd say, though insofar as they avoid violence against people I think it's also fair enough not to dislike them. But I don't think this is the impetus behind Republican dislike of vegans.

Rather, I think it's that they, and we vegetarians as well, make them feel bad. Very few Republicans are vegans or vegetarians. Most Republicans like to eat meat. And I think that, for many or most of them, that isn't just because they like how it tastes or whatever. They positively like the fact that they're eating the remains of a formerly living animal. It makes them feel powerful, like they have dominion over the earth. And vegans make Republicans feel bad about this. Sometimes this is through explicit criticism in conversation, or whatever, but it doesn't even need to be. Simply by adhering to a moral code that considers something these people do on a regular basis to be wrong, vegans and vegetarians by our very being imply that these meat-eating Republicans are doing something wrong. We're the worst possible manifestation of the liberal tendency to want to control everything about a person's life: we want to control what you can eat. And that's not even wrong, entirely, though I do know some vegans who'll tell you that what you eat is a personal choice (something I don't believe, on this particular issue). And we invade the natural social-conservative terrain of moralizing (though of course, if we get into the philosophical weeds, I could say that the vegan/vegetarian moralizing is consequentialist, while the typical Republican variety is deontological, so they're very different things). Basically, simply by being vegans or vegetarians we offend the Republican idea that the right kind of people, at least, can stomp around the world doing whatever they want, and making other people feel bad for doing the wrong things. So they dislike us: it's not surprising.