What's With People Driving Cars Into Crowds?

A driver plows into a Seattle BLM protest, summer 2020 (source)

This Monday, a Tennessee woman was arrested after driving her car into a COVID-19 vaccine kiosk at the local mall. Though nobody was injured, reports indicate she narrowly missed seven workers. Witnesses report she screamed “No vaccine!” while swerving around orange road cones set up to prevent actions like hers. Police charged her with seven counts of reckless endangerment, though I can’t figure how she escaped attempted murder charges.

The Tennessee event (I won’t honor the assailant by sharing her name) fits a pattern we’ve become sadly accustomed to over the last five years. At the notorious Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally, an Ohio White supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotestors, injuring nineteen, and killing Heather Heyer. During the BLM protests following George Floyd’s murder, police and civilian drivers repeatedly struck crowds on camera.

American conservatives have apparently developed a sense of entitlement that permits them to deliberately, even maliciously, attack others using their cars. The specific attachment of antiprogressive sentiment with cars seems curious. I know even other conservatives notice, because several Republican-controlled state legislatures have proposed or passed laws which functionally legalize driving cars into protestors. They basically admit they’re doing it on purpose.

Why cars, though? Why this specific affinity for resisting calls for change by deliberately attacking massed populations with motor vehicles? These attackers must realize that, like the photos of Bull Connor releasing the dogs, or the weeping girl at Kent State, these images of willful, deliberate carnage will only embolden protestors. Some other motivating force must apparently motivate their eagerness to drive cars into crowds… but what?

When mass-market cars first hit the American market, the general populace distrusted them. Consider Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in which narrator Nick Carraway uses Jordan Baker’s reckless driving to indicate her general disdain for others, and Myrtle Wilson is killed by Jay Gatsby’s car. Or Action Comics #1, which features Superman destroying a car, symbol of the gangsters’ destructive style. Cars, once, belonged to innately bad people.

A century of advertising and PR have amended that perception. Images of SUVs winding through picturesque mountain roads, or overbuilt family sedans doing figure-8s on the Bonneville Salt Flats, have persuaded Americans that cars represent the pinnacle of independence. Locked inside your car, serenaded by your favorite tunes, with your hands on the wheel and your feet on the pedals, you’ve taken ultimate control of your destiny. Congratulations.

NYPD vehicles striking BLM protesters, apparently deliberately, summer 2020 (source)

Recent American myth-makers, including Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, and Ayn Rand, preach that America’s great destiny is complete, atomized self-control. Entrepreneurs and billionaires are lauded as champions of individuality. Activities like wilderness camping or hiking the Appalachian Trail have become symbols of accomplishment: disconnecting oneself from society and living like a truly autonomous individual. Few people actually do these things, but we celebrate that we could.

Cars have become the apotheosis of American radical individualism. We completely disconnect from others, steer ourselves to our destinations, and captain our destiny, for a few minutes anyway. Would-be leaders, like Elon Musk, openly disparage public transportation, which leaves us dependent on others’ equipment and schedules. Cars, more than houses, more than entrepreneurship, embody American ideals of individualism and self-reliance.

We know this belief is untrue if we consider more than five minutes. Most roads aren’t as empty as test roads or salt flats; especially in cities, car dependency yokes us to long commutes for even routine errands. American car culture leaves us dependent on OPEC oil and imported car parts. If we blow a gasket or lose a spark plug, we’re stranded, especially in most bedroom suburbs, where relief can take hours to arrive.

As a myth, though, car-based independence remains remarkably persistent, evidence be damned. We feel independent while driving. For people who perceive independence and individualism as paramount values, preserving that independence comes first. And when the world tells them that they have to change, that they need to not breathe pathogens on strangers, or that they need to pay a little money to offset the damage from centuries of racism, basically, that threatens their cars.

If Freud lived today, and analyzed the influences driving American society, he might forget the phallus altogether. In certain circles, sex is subordinate to the ethos of independence. (Which might be why the ostentatiously independent keep having inappropriate sex, Matt Gaetz.) And our cars have become the public embodiment of that independence. So a Tennessee woman has to value others and their health, and she lashes out with the natural weapon: her car.