MAGA’s free-range food fight The Right is split over factory farming

What matters more: acknowledging and honouring the nature of things, or reshaping nature to our own ends? For a sense of your own instincts, I suggest searching for images of crated pigs.

What do you feel, confronted with an image of living animals caged in neat grids on a bare floor, as though in a giant metal spreadsheet? Do you wonder at the efficiency with which these living production units can now be managed, or do you shudder at the claustrophobia, the minutely calculated minimum amount of space allocated per animal to just-about lie down, and the cold indifference this system evinces to the needs and instinctive behaviour of sentient animals trapped in its bars?

In practice, most feel a queasy mix of the two, and prefer to look away. But within the ideological Right, the split is starker. And we may be about to see that split at scale, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr faces his confirmation hearing this week. This longstanding critic of Big Pharma, now Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health, has long viewed food additives as part of a cartel that profits from making Americans sick. But how far can he go in Making America Healthy again, when Big Ag is pulling in the other direction?

Across much of the world, farming is a low-profit sector. Producers often struggle to stay afloat; to do so they need to scale up or become more efficient, which gives them every incentive to adopt every technology that will help them do so — including polluting industrial processes, cost-saving chemical additives, and other efficiency measures.

The foremost casualty of this relentless pressure is what’s farmed: that is, plant life, soil quality, and livestock. No wonder, then, that Trump’s Department of Agriculture pick Brooke Rollins told Congress during her hearing that she will support farmers — including by repealing a measure that allows states to restrict the sale of factory farmed meat.

Is this going to Make America Healthy Again? The side-effects of such methods wouldn’t suggest so: for example, both America and Britain are currently afflicted by large-scale outbreaks of avian influenza, which have long been linked to the cramped and often insanitary conditions of factory farms. Similarly, antibiotic overuse and polluting runoff from intensive livestock compounds create further impediments to improved public health, by incubating superbugs, for example, and fuelling toxic algae blooms.

But the incipient tension between making America healthy, and keeping farmers afloat, signals more than a potential inter-departmental spat within the Trump administration. Sustainable and healthy food has long been associated with progressive politics — at least in the days when the Left was more unambiguously anti-capitalist — but has more recently been adopted on the Right as well. And yet the paradox of MAHA and factory-farming reveals, Trump’s coalition is far from unified on this issue. On the contrary, it’s split between instincts we might characterise as “organic” and “Promethean”: that is, defenders and disruptors of the natural order.

On one side, “organic” conservative advocates for place, belonging, and the natural order, such as the late Roger Scruton, jostle with more esoteric Right-wing advocates for animal welfare, and critics of junk food. In this view animal welfare is, properly understood, a conservative cause — and intensive livestock farming an atrocity. In the “organic” corner, American farmer and author Wendell Berry is beloved of the “post-liberal” faction, for his evocative writing against technological hubris and in favour of small-scale farming, and the embrace of natural limits. In this view, our relation to the natural world may be one of dominion, but this should be linked to“stewardship” — and certainly not merely a matter of tech-enabled exploitation.

The meme version of Wendell Berry percolates through the e-Right ecosystem, too, for example in one proposal for “Ice Cream Nationalism”: all cowboys, buxom milkmaids, and beekeeping monks. Translated out of this whimsical register, the argument is a meme-inflected case for re-enchanting food production as stewardship: an activity not separate from social, moral, and religious praxis, but integrated into them.

This very online radical Right abuts more conventional green conservatives on animal welfare as well. There is some debate as to whether Hitler really was a vegetarian; but the Greek-English Nazi mystic and writer Savitri Devi, perhaps the most influential continuer of Hitler’s postwar far-Right legacy as “esoteric Hitlerism”, was also a vocal animal rights activist. Devi denounced human exceptionalism, and emphasised the continuity of humans with other sentient creatures; her fictionalised autobiography is a truly surreal mix of Hindu-tinged race theory, animal welfare polemic, and loving depictions of favourite cats. Devi’s “esoteric” current on the radical Right flew below the radar for many years, but has resurfaced recently among its more colourful online proponents. The Right-wing poster and InfoWars author “Raw Egg Nationalist” is a vocal critic of chemical additives along RFK lines, for example, and has also denounced factory farming.

In the world of electoral politics, this Right-wing caucus for Making Agriculture Green Again is perhaps best embodied by the Romanian eco-nationalist Călin Georgescu, who advocates a “radical ecologism” critical of pesticide and antibiotic overuse, and argues that the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy should be re-ordered to supporting small-scale farming.

But there’s a Promethean counter-argument, also internal to the 21st-century Right, which dismisses such considerations in the name of efficiency and technological innovation. At best, as the “anti-woke” utilitarian Richard Hanania has argued, factory farming is cruel but unavoidable — at least until we can innovate our way to a lab-grown alternative. Others assert that factory farming is good, actually: any reform is politically impossible as it would make food more expensive, and never mind what the animals experience: innovation means human progress and should be embraced, not shunned.

This isn’t just about animals. It’s a whole worldview, as articulated by the ebullient ‘Tech Right’ end of the Trumpist coalition, which is as enthusiastically in favour of Promethean progress as it is indifferent to concerns such as small-scale land stewardship or nostalgic paeans to “rootedness”. Led by figures such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, this group broadly believes, in Andreessen’s own words, that “there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology”. Thus for this caucus, animal cruelty can be solved by lab-grown meat. Raw Egg Nationalist, meanwhile, is unconvinced.

This organic/Promethean dichotomy runs through the whole of the Western civilisational order dominated by America, at least as Berry sees it — but with the dice always loaded in favour of the metal spreadsheet and the “progress” it encodes. In Unsettling, he identified the conflict between organic and Promethean instincts as one that that has animated the American project since settler days: a fidgety and always-lopsided standoff between the urge to embrace a bounded, organic order, and the urge to keep pushing the frontier.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series provides a classic depiction of this tension: on one hand, the family’s day-to-day subsistence labours, a rough-and-ready home that slowly becomes more comfortable and homely. But on the other, throughout the series, Pa’s restless yearning to move on, to settle once more, to begin the whole process from scratch. And it’s not as though closing the frontier ended this habit of mind. Published four decades after Little House on the Prairie, Berry’s Unsettling homes in on the modern-day version of these competing instincts. As Berry sees it, the energy just moved from the literal to countless figurative frontiers: a dynamic in which those who “settled” found themselves repeatedly “dispossessed and driven out, or subverted and exploited where they were, by those who were carrying out some version of the search for El Dorado.”

Who is right? The pragmatists and tech-optimists alike will say it doesn’t much matter, as all real-world politics means balancing competing interests and ideologies. This suggests the dice will end up loaded the way they always have been: in favour of El Dorado. It’s surely better politics, from Trump’s perspective, to ensure that pork producers in Iowa don’t go bust, than to save Californian progressives from eating bacon that violates their welfare standards. (Even if some of those prok producers are Chinese-owned and not really “family farms” at all.)

Just as the balance of money and influence lies overall with Right-wing progressives, so in a face-off between the Rightists of Big Ag and those advocating clean food and animal welfare, we can expect the big metal spreadsheet to put up a hell of a fight.

And this will have knock-on effects beyond the Land of the Free. Trump’s recent Davos address made clear that any fiction of impartial international trade has been abandoned, in favour of a mercantilist “America First” trade policy. In due course, then, we can expect this to translate into renewed pressure on the UK and Europe, to open their markets to American produce, and with it America’s lower-welfare farming practices.

Nor should any incipient Right-wing defender of sustainable farming expect much support from the EU and its notorious Big Ag lobbyists. Faced with potential electoral victory by Călin Georgescu in Romania recently, for instance, the apparatchiks of Brussels simply ensured the election was cancelled. I doubt this was because of his views on beekeeping, but it surely indicates that simply being a keen environmentalist is not enough to cancel out otherwise unacceptably Right-wing views.

Britain’s younger rightists, many of whom are entirely unsentimental about Britain’s agrarian heritage, may not particularly care if our outdoor farms are obliterated by the American spreadsheet variety. And Starmer’s inheritance tax raid suggests he isn’t particularly bothered either what happens to British producers. But those on the Right with any residual concern for animal welfare, or scruples about submitting our country wholesale to the resurgent Prometheanism of a Trumpian New Right, may soon find their erstwhile Left-wing hippie opponents suddenly looking more like allies.

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