Is America foreclosing on its dream of the open road?
The closed petrostate and the end of driving as the ultimate symbol of American freedom
There is a slow and mysterious process through which industrial dominance became cultural dominance for the US. Macro-economic leaps led to material transformations, these created their own cultural narratives, which became internalised aspiration. It is at the heart of how we understand brands and the desire they embody. The car is the supreme example. And is once again becoming the battleground for our dreams of the future.
In From the American System to Mass Production, David Hounshell describes how Henry Ford’s assembly line didn’t just solve a manufacturing problem - it reshaped the American psyche. The Model T, he argues, represented a democratisation of technology that allowed ordinary citizens to participate in the Machine Age. But Ford went further than building cars, he colonised the desires of the working class, making the possession of mass-produced goods the primary benchmark of a successful American life. The production technology came first. The aspiration followed.
Then came the roads. Mark H. Rose, in Interstate: Express Highway Politics, traces how the highway system was built as a technical solution to problems of flow and durability but was culturally transformed into something else entirely. For the engineers it was infrastructure. For everyone else it became, in Rose’s terms, a vehicle for freedom and possibility. The highways were the primary stage for the American drama of mobility - but it wasn’t the builders who wrote the script. It was novelists, filmmakers and advertisers who designed what those roads meant.
In a word, freedom.
From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans derived a form of collective unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale technological achievement. The automobile and the highway were the democratic expression of this: mobility as a sublime experience available to all, mythologised through advertising, film and literature until the machine became a shared symbol of freedom that bound society together.
Model T to Route 66 to Kerouac. Production technology to infrastructure to mythology. The automobile didn’t just carry Americans around - it carried the idea of America around the world. For decades, the rest of the world looked at American roads and saw modernity itself.
Edward Hopper’s painting, Gas, arrived in 1940 - before the highway system existed, before the postwar boom made the car the democratic property of every American household. There are no cars in the image, just the expectation of them. Like so many of Hopper’s paintings it resounds with loneliness. It is the road John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom takes to escape his mistakes back home. Or a night scene driven by Richard Ford’s character Frank Bascombe, in awkward silence while his son sits alongside him in the great American novel, Independence Day. We can feel the cars coming, bringing freedom and loneliness, so much more than just a feat of engineering.
Today, China is dominant in EV manufacturing, solar, battery technology, ultra-high-speed rail competing with domestic aviation. And electrification is fast becoming, in the words of Gonzalo Escribano of the Elcano Royal Institute, “an energy security tool, no longer only a way to combat pollution and climate change, but a geopolitical asset supported by pragmatism rather than idealism.” The Iran shock has done in weeks what years of climate advocacy struggled to accomplish and reframed electrification.
Using Adam Tooze’s qualification in a piece from this week’s Chartbook newsletter, America is not strictly a petrostate in the economic sense - oil and gas account for only 7-8% of GDP. But it is, under the current administration, choosing politically to anchor a late-20th-century hydrocarbon model:
“If the United States chooses to use its endowment of fossil fuels and the size of its economy to freeze in place the early 20th-century status quo and thus to fall more and more out of step with global electrotech development, that will not be a natural fact, but a matter of political choice. The US would be the pioneer of a novel form of ‘closed petrostate’.”
America produces 13 million barrels of oil a day but consumes 19-20 million. It is uniquely large enough and rich enough to decouple from the electrified future to which the rest of the world is heading.
Nostalgists for the combustion engine will persist. But just as nostalgists for the arena bands of the 70s or collectors of fringe disco releases may be plentiful but have little influence over the cultural narrative, so those who prefer combustion become collectors rather than drivers - enthusiasts of something the culture has moved past.
At this point, the EV is quite obviously an advance in driving experience. Not a compromise. A quiet step that accelerates into the future.
If the US locks itself into ageing hydrocarbon infrastructure while China, the EU and others build the next generation of transport, energy and urban systems, the arc that Hounshell and Rose traced goes into decay.
The country that turned mass production into democratic aspiration, that turned concrete into mythology, that turned the highway into a shared experience of the sublime… becomes the one clinging to its past.
American roads and bridges are already in visible decline. Layer onto that a transport fleet that looks and feels a generation behind what’s available in Shenzhen or Oslo and you have a slow-motion cultural repositioning that no amount of soft power spending can easily reverse.
The dynamic remains the same: macro-economic leaps lead to material transformations, material transformations reshape cultural narratives. Same process, different place.
For America, Adam Tooze identifies this as a choice. To organise its self-image around a technology that the rest of the world is leaving behind is as much a cultural choice as an economic one. It is a nostalgic dream of the future.
Links
Adam Tooze, Chartbook 439: Electrostates vs Petrostates - Chartbook Substack
Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939-1989 - University of Tennessee Press
David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime - MIT Press
Bloomberg Zero podcast, Climate Tech Is Making Europe More Resilient to Energy Shocks - Bloomberg
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