The Great Driving Right Show: Cars, Crisis, and the Rise of Fossil Fascism(Salvage Editions)

Since the pandemic, there has been a growth of conspiracies that centre on the so-called 'war on cars'. The far right argue that government measures to reduce fossil fuels are a stealth attack on ordinary people's individual liberty, the nuclear family, the ‘energy-secure’ nation, and ‘the people’. And they have come out both online and the streets, in opposition to urbanist policies such as the '15-Minute City', ULEZ [Ultra Low Emission Zones] and LTN [Low Traffic Neighbourhoods], alongside rural movements across Europe that feel that they have been ignored in favour of the city. Such protests also fold in attacks on the family, gender and reinforce paranoia around 'the Great Replacement'.

In The Great Driving Right Show, the Zetkin Collective unpacks the origins of these conflicts and shows how, as the climate crisis worsens, the political right has inverted the narrative, treating solutions as more threatening than the crisis itself. This eventually evolves in attacks on Electric Vehicles, increased oil production and attacks on minorities.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
The Inverted Crisis
Motor of History
Lockdown City
Metabolism of the Nation
American Auto Apocalypse
Remigration Industrial Complex

About the Author :
The Zetkin Collective is a ecosocialist group of scholars and activists. Their first book was White Skin Black Fuel: On the Dangers of Fossil Facism, coauthored with Andreas Malm. Four of the collective's current members are the authors for this book: William Callison is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. George Edwards is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick. Jacob McLean is a PhD candidate at York University in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Tatjana Soding is a human ecologist and climate justice activist based in Berlin.

Review :
The car is no longer just a source of emissions. Today it is the sensuous form taken by the fusion of a century of nationalist and petromodernist fantasy. To protect their fantasy, the new right doesn't simply deny climate change, but fabricates alternative emergencies in its place: the globalist elites, the woke mobs, the green technocrats are coming to take our freedoms. This is the inverted crisis that the book anatomises with characteristic panache, and shrewdness. No one is better at this than the Zetkin Collective, and their latest book is an essential, sober and furious guide to our political future This is an indispensable chronicle, cartography and critique of the virulent far-Right backlash against even the most timid efforts at energy transition. What Henri Lefebvre once called capitalism's 'object-king', the car, is revealed here as the nexus of racist moral panics, authoritarian anti-statism and fossil capital's lucrative impunity. The Great Right Driving Show shows how we are motoring toward the fascist future on a highway of climate denialism and why any genuine anti-fascism must put decarbonisation at the top of its agenda. In this rigorous and riveting book, the Zetkin Collective traces how the oil-powered automobile has come to serve as both material condition and symbolic condensation of contemporary fossil fascism. Despite right-wing panics, there is no "war on cars"-but we may need one if we are to save the planet from the intertwined forces of climate crisis and political reaction. The far right has successfully seized on a strategy of 'inverting' the climate crisis to shift blame onto everyone except the automobile, finance, and fossil fuel industries driving it. This is just one of The Great Driving Right Show's many revelatory insights. In both identifying and analysing the strategies of the contemporary far right, and unearthing the longer lineages between this new fascist right and the ecological, social, psychic lifeworlds and crises created by automobility, the Zetkin Collective provide us the much needed historical and analytical tools to understand the terrain on which the war of position for decarbonisation and a liveable future is being fought.