The Culture War Is Coming for Your Car As the green left’s hostility to the automobile grows, voters notice their own values are at stake. By Joseph C. Sternberg
Forget race. Forget sex. Forget immigration. The mother of all culture wars is breaking out, and its subject is the car.
The automobile has long been a policy flashpoint, with the paramount issue being where it should be able to roam. This was the heart of the brutal urban-planning battles of the mid-20th century, which were fought over the need for and placement of new highways.
Yet it’s hard to describe those earlier policy fights as a culture war. Liberal urban activists such as Jane Jacobs—who famously fought off Robert Moses’ plan to build a highway interchange over Washington Square Park in New York City—didn’t hate cars or the people who drove them. In her magisterial “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” Jacobs repeatedly observed that resorting to the personal car was an entirely rational response to the failures of government urban planners to encourage smarter development.
Such humane common sense seems quaint in the context of today’s car wars. For a growing portion of the left, the automobile has become a moral ill in its own right rather than the symptomatic inconvenience of Jacobs’s telling. Partly this has to do with pollution, which was barely emerging as an issue when Jacobs was at her peak in the early 1960s but has also improved dramatically since. Much more so it has to do with carbon emissions—which are distinct from the smoggy pollution of the 20th century, despite constant efforts to conflate the two.
When I say “carbon emissions,” note that I mean it in a general sense. The problem with the personal car isn’t its direct climate impact. Road transport, including trucking, accounts for 12% of global carbon emissions. Electric vehicles aren’t an obvious means of reducing overall emissions, especially once you factor in their dirty supply chains and the coal-fired power that often charges them.
Rather, the car is a focus for the war on carbon because it’s so visible. An electric vehicle is the most conspicuous, although perhaps not the most effective, thing a household can do in service of reducing global emissions. The corollary, however, is that if a household insists on buying and driving a gasoline or diesel car, it signifies that some concern other than climate is more important—cost and convenience often at the top of the list.
The car is becoming a cultural flashpoint because it is where climate-apocalypse proselytizing meets antielitist
The left has received several warnings already about the resulting culture-war dangers. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s administration was derailed in 2018 by yellow-vest protests in rural areas occasioned by a tax increase on diesel fuel. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s rickety coalition government was shaken in 2022 by a fierce debate over speed limits on the autobahn proposed partially for climate reasons. The U.K.’s Labour Party this summer narrowly lost a parliamentary by-election it was expected to win, when voters lodged a protest against a Labour-imposed tax on older cars in greater London.
An oddity is that up to now the right hasn’t treated the car as a culture issue, more often debating electric vehicles in economic or scientific terms. That may be starting to change, with Britain’s Conservative Party leading the way.
The Tories under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are widely expected to lose an election next year. Desperate for a wedge issue to wield against Labour, Mr. Sunak has embraced the internal-combustion engine. He recently scaled back the government’s previous mandate that all new cars sold after 2030 be electric. Notably, he cast this policy decision as a values judgment—that it wouldn’t be right to force British households to pay for London’s climate pieties.
At this week’s annual party convention, Mr. Sunak canceled a high-profile high-speed rail line that was to have connected London to Birmingham and Manchester. Backers often hyped the line’s low-carbon potential, despite doubts about the project’s overall carbon efficiency. No matter, Mr. Sunak now suggests the government’s priority should be fixing potholes for the many people who must drive in the course of their daily lives.
Them’s culture-war fightin’ words. The green left hates investment in road building because it hates the car. Mr. Sunak is attempting to put himself on the side of households and businesses that value the freedom of cheap mobility more—and for whom cheap mobility is a matter of economic survival.
The car wars may be the last chance the Tories have to turn around their electoral fortunes. And as that London by-election showed, it might avert an electoral wipe-out if not deliver a victory. One suspects other politicians on the right will be observing the results closely.
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