In their 1979 hit “You Need Wheels”, mod revival band the Merton Parkas sang, “A man ain’t a man with a ticket in his hand”. It’s often claimed that Margaret Thatcher, elected the UK’s first female prime minister in the same year, was of the same mindset. A remark often attributed to her, probably wrongly, is that “If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of 26, he can count himself a failure in life”.
Nearly half a century on, such proto-manospheric injunctions found their most eloquent expression when one-man toxic emission and self-confessed misogynist Andrew Tate made Greta Thunberg an offer she could readily refuse: “I have 33 cars… Please provide your email address so I can send you a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.” It’s because I not only own no car but do have a 60+ Oyster card, a bicycle and what Maya Angelou called “travelling shoes” that I so enjoyed Thunberg’s symbolic castration of that great impotentate: “yes, please enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”
While such pitiful petrolheadery is never far from the Zetkin Collective’s analysis of “how the dethroned entitlements of white masculinity embedded in the Fordist family easily pair up with those of the driver”, their gripping and topical new book has broader concerns. Cars are a battleground of the culture wars; far-right populists have planted flags on their bonnets.
What the authors call an “inverted crisis” is a tactic I recognise by the acronym “Darvo”—deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. The Zetkin Collective, an association of academics and activists that was founded at Sweden’s Lund University in 2018, doesn’t call Darvo by its name, but they know how it works. They write: “It is not climate change but other climate mitigation policies and their proponents that present an existential threat to society. Through strategies of inversion, forms of denial directed at the climate crisis are stitched together with ‘crises’ of migration, race, gender, the family and the nation.”
Once you understand Darvo you see it everywhere—in everyday life, certainly, but also in the essential rhetorical moves of the populist far right. Hence the Dulwich College-educated millionaire ex-commodities broker Nigel Farage claiming to represent the people against the establishment. Hence billionaire daddy’s boy Donald Trump’s droll claim to drain the swamp when, in many respects, he is the swamp (the algae poisoning the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington DC is emblematic of that truth).
The inverted crisis has nonetheless found eloquent expression in resistance to the alleged war on cars. Three years ago, during protests against Liberal Democrat-led Oxfordshire county council’s plans to reduce urban traffic, King Arthur Pendragon, arguably Britain’s leading druid, told reporters: “For many people in the 21st century, freedom is a set of keys, and basically any assault on the vehicle is an assault on the person. If they say you can’t go out of Oxford, how are you going to get to Stonehenge for the Solstice?”
King Arthur’s sense was that, following lockdown, the “big Other”—consisting of woke climate campaigners, Lib Dem councillors and the rest of the bureaucracy—was, by attempting to institute low-traffic neighbourhoods to limit pollution, destroying one of the few remaining freedoms ordinary working people have: namely, to sit in gridlock on the Oxford ring road.
No protester, be they druid or white van man, grasped the irony of a “freedom” protest taking place in Oxford, where philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguished positive from negative liberties, and where undergraduates routinely write essays separating freedom from licence—the latter no freedom at all, since it involves no corresponding responsibility. The irony reminded me of the years I walked my daughter to primary school up north London’s Hornsey Road, worrying that her little lungs were at exhaust-pipe height as other parents drove their kids to class, expressing their inalienable freedoms while increasing childhood asthma rates.
And yet, any curbs on such sociopathic licence provoke outrage. The book begins in the summer of 2023 in London, when a group calling themselves “Blade Runners” smashed cameras installed to scan number plates to determine whether cars complied with minimum environmental standards. “It might take you blokes half a day to put one up,” posted one Blade Runner on social media. “It takes me less than one minute to take one down. So fuck your fucking ULEZ, shit cunts. This is our country and we’re taking it back.” To which the obvious question, apart from asking why these outlaws need to express themselves so coarsely, is taking it back from whom?
A clue comes in reflecting on how such nativist rhetoric mobilises the language of Joseph Goebbels and other racist demagogues. Certainly, the Zetkin Collective recognises how violent scapegoating blames the wrong people for the permacrisis that encompasses low living standards, endless wars and populism’s witting destruction of democracy. Hence nativist thugs putting bricks through the windows of a Tamworth hotel presumed to contain asylum seekers and their little children and attacks on a Southport mosque on the grounds that the murder of three little girls at a nearby dance class was perpetrated by a Muslim (a lie that found a ready audience on the far right).
That said, one element of the Zetkin Collective’s analysis gave even me, an Islingtonian adhering to the two-wheels-good-four-wheels-bad philosophy, pause—and that is social class. One reason the imposition of constraints on car use has provoked such engagement and enragement is because, in the absence of decent public transport, the car symbolises not just freedom but one’s very identity. This is especially the case if, unlike one’s fathers, one has no marketable manual skills, but instead numbers among one’s most precious possessions a leased SUV that one worships on Sunday by giving it a crypto-erotic wax buffing.
In the absence of decent public transport, the car symbolises not just freedom but one’s very identity
The role of the privately owned car in thwarting proletarian revolution has been a source of disappointment for Marxists ever since the doyen of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, wrote in his classic 1964 One-Dimensional Man that the proletariat had been diverted from their historic role of overthrowing the bourgeoisie by Cadillacs, refrigerators, the fatuities of sexual disinhibition (what he called “repressive desublimation”) and the entertainment industry. His Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno put it pithily: “[T]he proletarians today genuinely have more to lose than their chains, namely their small car and motorcycle as well.”
In 1965, the year after Marcuse’s radical bestseller was published, the United States produced a record 11.1m motor vehicles, and one job in six was tied to the automobile industry. Those jobs were “typically male, formally employed and territorially anchored in the infrastructure,” the Zetkin Collective tell us. Not only is our era one of precarity and post-industrialisation, but it is one in which, since 1971, the proportion of women in the UK workforce has been steadily rising while that of men has been steadily falling. The very industries that car-ownership-venerating Thatcher and her cabinet henchmen destroyed—steel, coal, cars—had given many working-class men their sense of identity. Today, descendants of the industrial proletariat are left with a powerful sense of nostalgia for what has been lost—from which Farage, Trump, Tommy Robinson and others seek to capitalise.
The collective describes how the postwar era’s so-called Great Acceleration in material wellbeing massively increased car ownership among skilled workers. In the new millennium, car production “found an extra gear”, with carbon emissions accelerating at pace. In living memory, SUVs have become the second-biggest contributor to the growth in global emissions, behind only the power sector and ahead of shipping, aviation and heavy industry. The heavier these cars get, the more damage they do. Indeed, were I to be taking my daughter to primary school today, I might be less concerned about carbon emissions than about another form of pollution: over the course of its life, a tyre loses one tenth of its mass due to abrasion, and the weightier cars become the more plastic particulates find their way into soil, water, air—and, presumably, schoolkids’ lungs.
The defence, that many of these SUVs are now electric vehicles, is rubbished by the Zetkin Collective. One estimate has it that each EV produced in China requires two and a half tonnes of coal to build. The electrification of private mobility boosts overall electricity demand, “which, alongside the massive build-out of AI server infrastructure, threatens to overpower outdated national power grids”. The rise of EVs involves “often violent supply chains for lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite”, which may well explain why Trump and Putin want a piece of Ukraine.
Simultaneously, the US president seeks to defend his national auto industry’s dependence on the internal combustion engine. China has, as the authors suggest, outmanoeuvred the rest of the world’s leading car makers by building cheap EVs, thereby threatening the fossilised, masculinist self-images of countries such as Germany and the US. It is in this context that Trump’s defence of oil drilling, coal mining and his attempt to revive the American car giants makes electoral sense; even if from another perspective (that of the planet and human wellbeing) it is an utterly calamitous policy.
The title of the Zetkin Collective’s book is a clumsy riff on Stuart Hall’s 1979 essay “The Great Moving Right Show”, in which the late British-Jamaican sociologist undertook a Gramscian pathology of Thatcherism. The crisis of Keynesian social democracy in 1970s Britain, Hall supposed, which involved Labour chancellor Denis Healey appealing in 1976 to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout and culminated in the 1978–79 Winter of Discontent, was exploited by Thatcher’s incoming Conservative administration to build a new ideological consensus around neoliberalism.
Hall wrote that Thatcherism “takes the elements which are already constituted into place, dismantles them, reconstitutes them into a new logic, and articulates the space in a new way, polarising it to the right”. It’s unlikely that Trump and Farage have read Hall, but this inverted-crisis logic is very much part of their playbook. It plays out on our roads—from the mini-roundabouts where nativists paint their St George’s flags to millionaire farmers clogging London’s already clogged streets with their tractors to Laurence Fox telling anti-LTN protesters in Oxford’s Broad Street that, since the coronavirus pandemic, “the powers that be—the government—have got this desire to control our movement, our speech, everything. And I think it’s really dangerous”.
This terrible logic reaches its nadir with Jordan Peterson’s poetry, in which the Canadian psychologist ventriloquises bureaucrats who seek not just to take ordinary people’s car keys but also—the why is unclear—exterminate them:
Starve in the dark
Peasants
You and your swarming hordes
of carbon-emitting children
Cluttering up the planet.
In this, one sees how the fears that produced the Great Replacement Theory (the debunked notion that there is a plot to replace white Europeans and Americans with non-white immigrants) collide with the licence to drive anywhere, anyhow and with utter disregard for the rest of humanity. It’s bad enough that this is Darvo mobilised to the max, worse still that such conspiracy theories get electoral traction—but, most unacceptably, it demonstrates how pseudo-intellectuals shilling for the automobile-industrial complex are emboldened to write execrable verse.
Such, though, is the inverted crisis: those who mobilise it affect to make things better only by making them much, much worse.
