All the major automakers and the federal government have decided that when it comes to cars, the future is electric. Every manufacturer now plans to phase out traditional gas-powered cars, and the Biden administration has said that by 2035 the federal government will stop buying them entirely.
But as Emily Portecorvo writes at Heatmap News, Republicans are fighting the future tooth and nail. Current EV purchases are heavily slanted towards liberal regions like California, while conservative states like Texas have imposed egregious new fees on electric cars. To be fair, it will be necessary to replace the road maintenance money currently provided by the gas tax, but as Politico reports, “the fee is nearly double what an average driver would pay in taxes at the pump, according to consumer advocates.”
All this is going to be a major obstacle to fighting climate change. Cars and trucks are responsible for something like one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions; decarbonizing them is absolutely necessary for reaching America’s climate goals.
At first glance, conservative hatred of EVs is baffling. Anyone who has driven one can tell you the experience is straight-up better than a gas-powered car in most respects. They’re cheaper to run, require little maintenance, and provide exhilarating instant acceleration. (You’d think being able to blow the doors off any car on the road would be attractive to muscle-car devotees.) Above all, the randomly gyrating price of fuel, where your transportation expenses might double overnight out of nowhere, simply doesn’t affect EV drivers.
The sole major downside—the fact that charging is much slower than visiting a gas station—isn’t an issue for most commuters who don’t drive long distances daily and can charge at home or the office. Road trips are getting easier with today’s longer-range EVs, and will continue to do so as America’s charging network is built out.
But for someone familiar with the conservative mindset, it makes more sense. EVs have long been associated with guilty liberal consciences—something that NPR listeners buy to do their part to protect the environment—and a big part of conservative politics is compulsively doing the opposite of what liberals want. That holds double when doing that thing makes liberals upset.
Some years ago, the big trend in conservative social media was “rolling coal,” where right-wingers with huge diesel trucks would rig up the fueling system so they could belch plumes of choking black smoke at the press of a button, like some portable asthma inducer. There was a brief genre of gleeful social media posts featuring smoke-bombs unleashed on Toyota Prius owners in particular. (Incidentally, Ebay is facing potentially billions in fines for allowing the sale of hundreds of thousands of these things, because they egregiously violate the Clean Air Act.) If crushing your own foot with a power hammer made earnest librarians with seven adopted cats cry, it would become a meme on conservative social media tomorrow.
A related factor is the conservative culture of anti-social grievance. If something is framed as being broadly socially beneficial, then conservatives will often refuse to do it even if it is personally beneficial too. Heather McGhee wrote an entire book about this called The Sum of Us, the chief metaphor of which is conservative whites shutting down public pools that admitted Black residents, thereby robbing everyone of a refreshing summer leisure location.
One thing worth trying is for liberals to stop buying Teslas.
A more recent and particularly nightmarish example of this could be seen in 2021, when a half-dozen conservative regional radio hosts proudly boasted on the air about their refusal to get vaccinated, got COVID-19, and died. The GOP lost the 2022 Arizona attorney general race by the margin of Republican voters who killed themselves by refusing to get a safe, free vaccine developed with their own tax dollars under their own party’s president.
A final factor is the influence of car dealership owners. These are politically powerful as a rule, but they have gained new influence under the GOP of Donald Trump, which relies on the petty bourgeoisie far more than in previous decades. EVs are a major threat to the dealership industry because they require little maintenance, which is the main source of dealership revenue. Every year they can drag out the transition is another year of fat profits for America’s regional gentry. Drowning Florida is just a small price to pay.
It’s hard to say what could be done about this attitude. The rise of Tesla and other high-performance EV companies have dented the association between EVs and totebagger liberalism, but it remains. Manufacturers have started coming out with massive trucks that are more conservative-coded, but they are already having trouble selling them.
One thing worth trying is for liberals to stop buying Teslas. Elon Musk is a noxious right-wing union-buster whose cars are poorly manufactured, and unlike a decade ago when Tesla was one of the only EV options around, plenty of other manufacturers are making competitive cars. Even for the cash-constrained there is always the good old Chevy Bolt, which is both cheaper than a Tesla and made with American union labor.
If liberals start performatively hating Teslas, that might trigger a backlash reaction from conservatives, and they’ll start buying Cybertrucks to own the libs. Perhaps if Musk goes full fascist—he recently posted on Twitter that melting down statues of Confederate generals means “they absolutely want your extinction,” an obvious reference to a white supremacist conspiracy theory—that could help too. Maybe if your Tesla could be emblazoned with the Rhodesian flag, conservatives would buy them.
But reverse psychology aside, there is one strategy that will definitely work: banning the sale of carbon-fueled automobiles. Cars wear out sooner or later, and if there’s nothing else to buy, then even conservatives with the most severe case of oppositional defiant disorder will have no choice.
I suspect this is what it will take. As usual, if America is going to be brought into a brighter, cleaner, healthier future, Republicans are going to have be dragged along kicking and screaming.
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October 30, 2023 at 04:18PM
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The Republican Electric Vehicle Tantrum - The American Prospect
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