Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, advocating republican form of government in the thirteen colonies, turned him into a national hero. Few people today realize that he in fact died poverty-stricken and alone—his opposition to religious dogma in his last major work, The Age of Reason, having proven significantly less popular in early American society than his writings against monarchy.
Today, the United States appears on paper the sort of representative democracy with formal separation of church and state that Paine championed. But in practice, the sort of dogma Paine warned about is ubiquitous, including in electoral campaigns. Perhaps nowhere is this most clearly visible than in the runup to the Texas race for the U.S. Senate, where Democratic primary winner James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, has made his faith central to his campaigning, counterposing his vision of godliness to the Christian nationalism he sees as ascendant in the Republican Party. But now Talarico himself is being accused of apostasy: not against god, but against barbeque. It is a telling moment where debating the finer details of religious dogma is being actively encouraged while even the slightest challenge to secular dogma (in this case meat-eating) is treated as unacceptable.
Ever since the charismatic young member of the Texas House of Representatives from Austin won the Democratic primary and began polling ahead of both Republican hopefuls—long-serving incumbent Senator John Cornyn and his challenger, Attorney General Ken Paxton—the GOP has been scraping the internet for oppo research. Last week they found it, improbably, in a speech Talarico gave during a state house race in 2022 to a small animal rights group called the Texas Humane Legislation Network. In it, Talarico told his audience that reducing meat consumption for animal welfare and climate reasons was “the right thing to do” and explained that his campaign was a “non-meat campaign … only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”
It’s a perfectly common-sense claim—and just the right amount of pandering to a special interest group—for a young Democrat running in a local election in Austin. But red meat for the Republican party culture warriors trying to win a state-wide race. Ted Cruz took to Twitter to claim, baselessly, that “This freak wants to BAN BBQ. That’s not Texas.” Cornyn chimed in: “Vote Republican this November. The steaks couldn’t be higher.” Newsmax, Fox, and The Hill immediately ran stories on Talarico blaspheming against both Texas’s culture and agriculture. How could he represent Texas if he shunned meat in the state that produces more beef than any other in the country and where barbeque might as well be a religion?
Talarico’s campaign fired back—at veganism. His campaign released a photo of him wearing a Texas flag shirt, chowing down on barbeque. And the day after the video resurfaced, at an event in Dallas hosted by The Bulwark, Talarico told the audience: “I deny all accusations of veganism… our campaign basically runs on barbeque these days.”
All electoral politics is to some extent identity politics, in that it entails a population choosing a representative who will speak for them—and therefore, typically, whom they also see as being like them in one way or another. This may be why Talarico, an outspoken Christian, is such a viable candidate, even as a Democrat, in a state where 67 percent of the population is Christian. But it’s also why being vegan or even being branded—pun intended—a vegan is such a hard sell for a politicians. Meat-eating is the one true cultural unifiers in the United States, crossing party, geography, class, and creed. The vast majority of Americans eat meat, and the average American eats about 225 pounds of it per year.
This has been exacerbated by meat-eating being pulled into the culture wars, primarily as a marker of masculine and conservative identity. This is in part why Republicans accuse any opponents who dare mention environmental issues of trying to ban meat. In 2018, when Ted Cruz was locked in a Senate battle with Democrat Beto O’Rourke, he claimed that “If Texas elects a Democrat, they’re going to ban barbecue across the state of Texas.” In 2019, when Alexandria Ocasio Cortex was championing the Green New Deal, conservatives claimed the New York Congresswoman wanted to ban hamburgers. In 2020, Cory Booker’s presidential campaign was beset with attacks on his veganism. And Joe Biden’s climate initiatives were attacked for allegedly requiring the rationing of meat.
In this sense, meat-eating works as both a cudgel in attack ads but also as something of a secular dogma, an ideology placed by its proponents beyond rational critique. Ideals of a democratic public sphere in an age of reason, as championed by Paine, rested on the idea that dogma of any kind, and especially dogma that undergirds power and oppression, should wilt under the light of rational scrutiny and critique. Sacred cows should be slain.
Talarico and his campaign have decided that to be seen as a legitimate Texan and to focus on ostensibly more important issues, he has to pretend he never gave that 2022 speech. But here’s the problem: That speech was right.
There is a broad consensus among environmental scientists that to keep global food production within planetary boundaries, and to reduce the food system’s contribution to climate change, we need to produce and eat far less meat. The ethical case for reducing harms to animals is no less salient today than it was four years ago when Talarico gave that speech. And research shows that the politicians who are most effective at championing both personal and policy changes to address climate and environmental problems are the ones who lead by example. In other words, to move toward a more sustainable food system, we need more politicians willing to talk about meat reduction and maybe even veganism.
And that’s particularly true in Texas, where the volume of cattle production makes the state one of the country’s biggest agricultural greenhouse gas emitters. The state’s massive cattle feedlots also choke local ecosystems and communities in particulate matter, including fecal dust. Politicians being able to freely speak about these documented harms, and linking them to meat consumption, should be the first step to being able to address them.
But modern electoral politics make this sort of speech extremely risky or even disqualifying. It forces what Paine called “infidelity,” or the professing of beliefs people don’t actually believe.
This isn’t Talarico’s fault. He’s making a rational decision about electoral strategy. But we should be very worried about what that decision represents: right-wing culture warriors’ successful poisoning of the public sphere, to the point that rational discussion about science and ethics is seen as politically disqualifying.
Two hundred and fifty years after Paine wrote Common Sense, we find ourselves with a public sphere where neo-scholastic claims about whose vision of politics better aligns with religious texts are fair game, but discussions of the environmental impact of food production and animal ethics are off the table, all enforced by an elite-owned media amplifying bad faith attacks. Thomas Paine imagined the opposite: a United States where the public sphere would be a robust democratic space for the rational exchange of important ideas about how to build a better society, free from the suasion of elites and organized religion. When even ostensible progressives abandon science and embrace dogmas—both religious and secular—we have never been further from that ideal. These are the times that try men’s souls, as it were.
