Mother Jones illustration; Barry Williams/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service/Getty
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.
When you start walking around a city with a small child you notice two things about cars. One is that a lot of drivers suddenly seem a lot more considerate. They yield at crosswalks. They stop at stop signs. They lay off the horn. People are fully capable of driving normally, in other words—when they want to. But the other thing that jumps out is that a significant number of drivers don’t seem affected at all: They just keep rolling through those stop signs; they inch forward as you cross; they honk when the car in front of them has stopped, like an absolute dipshit, to yield for some guy pushing a stroller.
It is always a little jarring to know how little you matter. A few centimeters of metal and plastic is enough to reduce anyone outside of it to nothing. Driving, whatever the commercials say, isn’t very good for the soul. It’s not all that great for democracy either.
The 2024 election was full-on car-brained. “Pain at the pump” is an old standby at this point, and Trump’s campaign was all too eager to add gas to the long list of necessities that had gotten more expensive while Democrats controlled the White House. But it seeped into the ether in other ways.
After falsely asserting that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats, JD Vance also tried to link them to rising auto insurance rates. He argued that the newcomers’ inability to drive responsibly was harming the community and making car ownership more difficult for working people. This narrative got so out of hand on the right that at one point, the New York Post even sent a reporter to stand at an intersection in Springfield to watch traffic for a while—eventually producing a breathless dispatch about a minor fender-bender.
Vance also tapped into genuine fears about the risk traffic violence poses to kids. In 2023, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus in Springfield, killing one child and injuring more than 20 others. Republicans talked about the incident so often that the victim’s family pleaded with them to stop. But this was not a Haitian problem. NBC News reported that there were 6,089 crashes involving a school bus over a recent four-year period in Ohio alone. Traffic violence, like gun violence, is something that the United States excels at by design. In any given year upwards of 40,000 Americans will die in a car crash, and the only time I’ve ever heard a candidate for higher office acknowledge it is either to downplay the roughly equal toll of gun violence, or as justification for mass deportation.
“Haitians” are not the reason car insurance rates have gone up across the country in recent years, either. As Marin Cogan explained at Vox, that rise is attributable to inflation, the increasing amount of tech in cars (another thing that sucks!), and a shift for the worse in driving behavior that dates to the pandemic. But that narrative fit into the broader story Vance and Trump told, about how the things that make you identifiably American were getting harder and harder to attain.
For all the talk of the freedom of the open road, Vance and his allies were seizing on the latent anxiety that a car-dependent culture imposes on citizens, and the real damage it causes. One of the biggest drags on household finances is a machine that might someday kill you—and you’re surrounded all the time by other people who might do the same. That stress lends itself to reactionary politics. When you are driving, you are constantly pathologizing other drivers.
The primacy of car culture shaped how Democrats campaigned and governed too. In June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused New York City’s long-awaited “congestion pricing” toll on car traffic in the southern half of Manhattan, days before the policy was set to go into effect. Hochul has denied that there was any political calculation to the decision (which she reversed almost immediately after the election was over), but the electoral subtext was obvious—the toll would affect a small minority of commuters in a few key suburban districts that Democrats were targeting in their effort to win back the House.
It was a bad electoral calculation—in the end, Democrats barely flipped one seat in the New York City area—but I’m sympathetic, at least, with one aspect of the analysis: There was no telling how vengeful car owners would become. After this year’s election, one angry real-estate broker told the San Francisco Standard that the practice of daylighting—that is, requiring cars to leave a buffer before a crosswalk so that pedestrians can see oncoming traffic—was why Democrats lose. I don’t know if it’s true with that degree of specificity (daylighting? really?); but car-brain feeds into the sort of social erosion that does. Driving makes us angrier, poorer, less healthy, and more isolated. Of course, it makes people resentful too.
One of the most striking Republican ads I saw this year was a spot from a group called “Election Freedom Inc.” It starts with a Latino man clutching a hard hat. “You worked hard,” a narrator says. “You bought your truck.” While you toiled, Sen. Jacky Rosen and Kamala Harris, the ads said, were giving away millions of dollars to illegal immigrants in benefits and funding sex change operations in prisons:
This is a damn good ad guys. This is really good creative. pic.twitter.com/QEZQbRIRTz
— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) October 24, 2024
It was jarring to see the dynamic laid out like that. It was like someone made the Jesse Helms “Hands” ad about a Ford-250. But that was what the election was all about, in a way; Trump asked people to choose between their immediate material circumstances and their neighbors. Anyone who’s tried crossing a busy intersection on foot recently knows how that one goes.