In London, a Toyota Prius is almost always a minicab - a taxi that is booked over the phone and not hailed on the street. There's nothing liberal, or Conservative about it, just commercial. And the driver is usually an immigrant, and I suspect, not the vehicle owner.
I wanted to buy a prius - great fuel economy, practical storage, reliable powertrain - but the prospect of drunk people trying to get into your car at every junction when you drive through the city at night put me right off.
Bought a Prius five years and it's been a great buy as a transportation appliance. It can get up to 1200 km/42L tank if you're just cruising at 90kph. Nobody here in Western Canada either wants to climb in to it or thinks its a car that a conservative (in the MAGA sense) would want to be found dead in.
I think you're describing a tipping point - where the association is so strong that it inhibits other uses. The association in this case is "a Prius is a minicab" - which seems to be mostly true in London. I'm sure it's a practical vehicle, since the choice of minicab vehicle is necessarily a very practical one, driven by factors such as Return on Investment, carrying capacity, and finding a vehicle that one can comfortably spend double-digit hours per day inside.
But now, we don't want one since it's going to be assumed to be a minicab.
The Prius is a reliable car that gets good gas mileage. Why can’t we just leave it at that?
I’ve noticed that there is a part of the culture war where certain consumer goods are aesthetically “liberal” and others are aesthetically “conservative”, not based on the running of the companies that make them, but on some loose association or fad (e.g. Goya beans).
They are just products - buying them or not buying them based on abstract political associations doesn’t do anything. It is a way to feel like you are taking political action when in reality you are just consuming things.
Because cars are status symbols. The car you drive says something deep and meaningful about you. If you drive a BMW or Audi you are successful and everyone understands that. If you drive a Prius you're a tree hugger and if you drive anything cheap you're a failure in life that obviously can't afford anything better.
nope, in reality a lot of consumption is implicitly political or cultural, it's just that a lot of people aren't used to looking at things that way because you swim in it like a fish in water. Pay attention to how things are advertised. Autonomy for trucks, freedom for cigarettes (formerly, now nasty cancer images on the package), happy animals and low carbon footprints for vegan beans, clean air and environmental protection for electric cars, patriotism for the newest Top Gun movie, happy diverse people in the newest Millennial Netflix show, and so on.
Short of toilet paper a lot of modern consumption is about symbolic exchange, what you signal by consuming. I recommend William Gibson's Blue Ant series, he had a good eye for this many years ago.
I think it is backwards. "Conservative" and "Liberal" are just labels, used in the context of traditional two party politics, and it is mostly a result of what happens naturally when you split the population into two similar sized groups based on their political ideas. One candidate will target "liberals", the other "conservatives". The definition isn't fixed, conservative ideas become liberal and vice versa all the time in order to maintain the roughly half/half two party system. There is no conspiracy here, it is emergent behavior that is seen in most democracies.
There are similar phenomena in marketing, which is not surprising since politics and marketing are essentially the same thing, but it doesn't mean the categories are the same. The Prius is not a "conservative", "woman", "white", "middle-aged" or whatever automobile, though there may be some correlations. In reality it is an automobile for Prius customers, and what Prius marketing thinks their potential customers are.
> in order to maintain the roughly half/half two party system
This is obviously untrue because, at least in the US, the conservative party has been the minority party since 1992.
> The Prius is not a "conservative", "woman", "white", "middle-aged" or whatever automobile, though there may be some correlations.
That's correct, but there is a subset of the right wing in the US that disagrees. They're the people who "roll coal" for example.
This article is clearly targeted at a conservative audience. There are no liberals who are concerned about whether the Prius is appropriate for conservatives or not. They want conservatives to drive hybrids and electric cars.
Why would I buy a truck that still required me to go through someone else to move large loads? Why would I buy vegan beans that required animal harm to be produced? Why would I buy an electric car that ruined the environment? That's not signaling by consumption, that is things serving their intended purpose. It's no more political than advertising toilet bowl cleaner with clean toilets. People consume what they value for the reason they value it. That what people financially value correlates with what people culturally value is hardly surprising. I'm not watching millennial targeted netflix shows alone in my living room to demonstrate to my furniture how much of a millennial I am. The fact we all consume things that others would consider weird or otherwise socially disapprove of only makes sense in a world where we are trying to satisfy internal desires despite the potential social signals they might send.
The ability some people have to make everything political never ceases to amaze me. It's a conservative car because you can checks notes fit a wheelchair in the back?
It's simply an appliance. It's no more political than a toaster. Maybe more liberals like toast, but that doesn't make the toaster liberal.
Choosing to not recognize that political labels, like all subcultures (punk, goth, cottagecore, vsco girl, suburban dad, tech bro, raver, lgbt), have “aesthetics” that affect huge cross-sections of people’s lives from fashion, interests, to purchases doesn’t make them go away, it only lowers your own predictive power.
It helps make them go away, over time, in the same way that refusing to use group statistics to make judgements about individuals (at a cost to your own predictive power) helps redress the inequalities that led to differences in groups in the first place.
Ohh don't get me wrong, I strongly agree with this. But I think it's okay to take the blinders off to answer "why do these seemingly unrelated groups of people not buy hybrid cars?"
I really think the distinction is whether you look at these labels in good faith, care, attention to their history, and always through the lens of intersectionalism.
If there were no discernible conservative/liberal divide, what reason would the National Review (or The New Republic or The Nation or...) have for existing? And this sort of piece requires no research and fills space.
I've been driving a Prius in one model or another since 2004. It's just a car and has no discernible opinions other than the mileage readout telling me that I'm hitting the gas pedal too much.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 19.1 ms ] threadBut now, we don't want one since it's going to be assumed to be a minicab.
Practical, cheap(ish) etc however, wouldnt want to be assumed to be an uber driver. Tesla Model 3, heading in the the same direction as well.
I’ve noticed that there is a part of the culture war where certain consumer goods are aesthetically “liberal” and others are aesthetically “conservative”, not based on the running of the companies that make them, but on some loose association or fad (e.g. Goya beans).
They are just products - buying them or not buying them based on abstract political associations doesn’t do anything. It is a way to feel like you are taking political action when in reality you are just consuming things.
(Sarcasm btw)
nope, in reality a lot of consumption is implicitly political or cultural, it's just that a lot of people aren't used to looking at things that way because you swim in it like a fish in water. Pay attention to how things are advertised. Autonomy for trucks, freedom for cigarettes (formerly, now nasty cancer images on the package), happy animals and low carbon footprints for vegan beans, clean air and environmental protection for electric cars, patriotism for the newest Top Gun movie, happy diverse people in the newest Millennial Netflix show, and so on.
Short of toilet paper a lot of modern consumption is about symbolic exchange, what you signal by consuming. I recommend William Gibson's Blue Ant series, he had a good eye for this many years ago.
There are similar phenomena in marketing, which is not surprising since politics and marketing are essentially the same thing, but it doesn't mean the categories are the same. The Prius is not a "conservative", "woman", "white", "middle-aged" or whatever automobile, though there may be some correlations. In reality it is an automobile for Prius customers, and what Prius marketing thinks their potential customers are.
This is obviously untrue because, at least in the US, the conservative party has been the minority party since 1992.
> The Prius is not a "conservative", "woman", "white", "middle-aged" or whatever automobile, though there may be some correlations.
That's correct, but there is a subset of the right wing in the US that disagrees. They're the people who "roll coal" for example.
This article is clearly targeted at a conservative audience. There are no liberals who are concerned about whether the Prius is appropriate for conservatives or not. They want conservatives to drive hybrids and electric cars.
It's simply an appliance. It's no more political than a toaster. Maybe more liberals like toast, but that doesn't make the toaster liberal.
I really think the distinction is whether you look at these labels in good faith, care, attention to their history, and always through the lens of intersectionalism.