By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Here is some news that may not exactly rock conservative
circles: Several versions of the Toyota Prius hybrid automobile have been
discontinued, and there are rumors that Toyota is considering the
discontinuation of the model as a whole. Prius sales have been in decline for
some time — down by 23 percent in 2018 — and the 2020 facelift may not be
enough to revive the O.G. mass-market hybrid, first sold in 1997.
The Prius is one of those cultural totems — right up
there with Birkenstocks, organic kale, and yoga classes — that conservatives
associate with a certain especially obnoxious brand of well-heeled consumerist
progressivism. In Texas, where I live, you don’t need a “Beto for Senate”
bumper sticker on your Prius: “Prius” may as well be Latin for “Beto for
Senate.” (The hardcore true believers in my very lefty neighborhood still have
“Beto for Senate” signs in their yards, not “Beto for President” signs. These
political hipsters were into Beto before he went mainstream.) You can recite
the litany of abuse: “Prius-drivin’, soy-latte-drinkin’, Sanders-votin’ wastes
of space.”
I share the contempt for Robert Francis O’Rourke. But the
Prius is a work of genius, a genuine landmark, and, almost inevitably, a victim
of its own success: The Prius has been so successful that its hybrid technology
has been mainstreamed. The Prius C will be replaced by an updated version of
the . . . Toyota Corolla, a car that has been with us since Lyndon Johnson was
in the White House. There are hybrid models up and down the lineups of Toyota
and Honda and other economy-minded marques, but also available from makers
ranging from Jaguar to BMW to Porsche, which offered a monster hybrid supercar
at a price of just under $1 million as well as hybrid versions of many of its
less exotic vehicles. A great many things are up in the air right now for
American businesses, but Ford is even planning to introduce a hybrid version of
the F-150 — the anti-Prius — using those electric motors to increase its torque
and towing capacity.
Hybrids are, in fact, a little passé. The real action now
is in all-electric vehicles: Here’s Ford’s prototype electric truck towing more than 1 million
pounds. My usual Home Depot haul could be towed pretty easily behind my
Harley-Davidson (if I had a trailer, which would be weird, although I’ve seen
it), and I cannot think of any reason I’d need that kind of power. But do I
want it? Allow me to quote Dick Cheney, who once was asked how many guns he
owned: “More than I need, fewer than I want.”
(I am confident that Dick Cheney, like Stannis Baratheon
in Game of Thrones, knew to say “fewer” rather than “less.”)
I don’t need to tow 1 million pounds. I don’t need
the fuel economy offered by the Prius, either — gasoline is pretty cheap. Nor
do I need much of the other high-techie-tech offered by the Prius. (In fact, I
kind of dislike some of that stuff: One of the things I like about the older
Mini Cooper I sometimes drive is that there is no center screen, no ersatz iPad
in the middle of the dash, just a big speedometer. I like uncomplicated
vehicles: One of the things I do not like about the current top-of-the-line
Harley-Davidsons is that they have everything from cruise control to GPS to
sound systems and are basically one toaster oven short of being a Winnebago on two
wheels. That’s no knock on Winnebagos, but that’s not what I’m looking for in a
motorcycle.) But if we all start limiting ourselves to what we need,
then we are going to see a bigger economic crash than the coronavirus downturn.
Many of the ordinary features of modern economy cars (automatic transmissions,
air conditioning, power windows) were once conveniences, indulgences, and toys
for the mega-rich. If you are driving a recent-model Honda Civic, you have a better
car than Howard Hughes ever did. You don’t need all that. (Howard
Hughes’s 1953 Buick had some nice custom touches, though, including an amped-up
electrical system that could be used to jump-start airplanes.)
It is beyond necessity, but, as anybody who has driven
one knows, the Prius is simply a terrific car — and, like many other
groundbreaking products, it is a car that made other cars better. If I were
Elon Musk, that would be my worry about Tesla, which proved that electric cars
could be simply awesome cars rather than virtue-signaling acts of
consumerist penance. Even with all that capital and the oodles of creativity to
which Tesla has access, it is easier to prove the concept than to compete with
Toyota and Volkswagen.
Yet we occasionally are blinded to great things because
we associate them with un-great things. Some conservatives associate Whole
Foods with the rich progressive snoots who lecture you about your privilege
rather than with, say, the first-rate ribeyes you can buy there. (If there is
any food item less progressive than a ribeye steak, I don’t know what it is:
The ribeye is the F-150 of dinners.) And many of us associate the Prius with
those rich progressive hectoring snoots at Whole Foods, and turn up our noses
at one of the great wonders of the wondrous time in which we live.
But this is America, where you are what you buy. And that
holds true for cars, too. Automobile preferences and political preferences are
predictably correlated: Hatchbacks are Democratic, pickup trucks are
Republican. Priuses are Democratic, though not as Democratic as a Subaru
Outback (NB: different researchers come up with slightly different numbers),
while the F-150 may as well come with a Ronald Reagan hood ornament. (Somebody
make some of those and I’ll buy one.) I suspect that lefties overlook the F-150
for the same reason conservatives sneer at the Prius. The F-150 really ought to
be considered a modern design icon, right up there with the Eames lounge chair
and the Rolex GMT. But its cultural resonance is not on the same frequency as
that of people who typically like Eames chairs and use the term “design icon.”
Yet surely the F-150 is one of the great examples of something that expresses
the thinghood of the thing itself, one of those rare collisions of aesthetics
and utility that make an object truly iconic. It wasn’t the first pickup truck
and it probably isn’t even the best one being made (in Texas, we like our
Texas-made Toyotas), but it is to pickups what the Levi’s 501 is to jeans.
As I was saying to Jay Nordlinger the other day, one of
the things that left me with a conservative sensibility rather than a
libertarian one (even though my politics are on the very libertarian end of
conservatism) was my desire to defend art and literature (and that great nearly
lost cause, education) from the relentless politicization that these fields
underwent in the 1980s and 1990s. There is a great deal of conservatism in
Shakespeare, and some of our great writers were consciously conservative (T. S.
Eliot comes to mind), but I do not want Brideshead Revisited to be
understood as a great conservative novel any more than I want the works of
Ernest Hemingway to be understood as the cultural property of the Left.
(Although with the hunting and the womanizing and such, Papa may no longer be
welcome in the faculty lounge.) Some of my favorite writers had good politics
(Tom Wolfe) and many of them (Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace) did
not. In some cases, I have made a point of not learning too much about the
lives of writers and artists I admire and whose work I enjoy. Moby-Dick
can speak for itself. (And Benito Cereno . . . ?) So can Dante and the
Chrysler Building.
And so can the Prius.
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