Francis Curzon, born in 1884 and later named the fifth Earl Howe, loved a souped-up Bugatti. And he loved to drive fast. He was famous for his “great skill and daring” on the racetrack, and also, eventually, for crashing into pedestrians—knocking down a boy in Belfast, Northern Ireland; slamming into a horse-drawn cart and killing a peasant in Pesaro, Italy.

These incidents (and 10 more) were recounted in a 1947 polemic by J. S. Dean, chair of the Pedestrians’ Association in England. Dean took particular issue with an assertion the earl had once made that the “recklessness” of pedestrians was the main safety problem on Britain’s roads. People who drive cars, Dean pointed out, do consider themselves to be “pedestrians” in other situations—that is, when they themselves are walking—and they agree that safety laws are important. Still, no matter what they may say, they continue to do whatever they want. Dean asked: “What are we to do with these people with their split minds?”

If the term had been available to him, he might have used the pejorative car brain to describe the conundrum he was observing. In the past five years or so, the term has become a common joke in left-leaning online spaces devoted to public transportation and urban planning, including the Facebook group “New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens.” Car brain also appears daily in the even more explicit Reddit forum r/fuckcars (404,000 members). It describes both a state of mind (“you’re car-brained”) and a type of person (“she is a car brain”). Obviously, the term is rude and very smug—in the same vein as the guys who wear One Less Car T-shirts while riding their bike. But there is also something true about it: Reason is failing in the face of the majestic automobile. People make excuses for cars and remain devoted to them, despite the incontrovertible evidence that they’re extremely dangerous.

This is an unresolvable tension of life in the United States. It’s been that way as long as there have been cars to drive and crash, and it’s especially notable now. An estimated 46,270 people were killed by cars last year. In 2019, deaths numbered 39,107. Car deaths drastically started to spike in 2020, a phenomenon that at first some ascribed to one of the many riddling consequences of the pandemic. Americans were driving much less than usual in the early days of COVID, but those who did take their cars out were found to be driving more recklessly and even faster than they were before, perhaps because everyone was simply more anxious, or perhaps because the roads were more open and people felt free to speed, or perhaps the threat of a deadly virus made other threats seem less consequential. Those explanations became less convincing, however, as pandemic restrictions faded yet car fatalities continued to rise. The number of people killed by cars in 2022 is 9 percent higher than in 2020.

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Of course, one problem with these numbers is the simple fact that cars are necessary. Americans have to get places, and in much of the country there is no other way to do that. Sometimes, becoming “car-brained” is just what you have to do to get through the day without constant dread. I grew up in a rural area, and was happily car-brained as I commuted to my job at the mall. Now I’ve been living in New York City for the better part of a decade and am rarely in a car. I find myself acutely terrified by the idea; I feel sharp, pit-in-the-stomach anxiety whenever a phone call to a family member produces the knowledge that they will soon be driving somewhere. Yet I still love cars. I plan imaginary road trips as I fall asleep. I sigh with envy when I see someone pull into a Wegmans parking lot. I used to have a red Hyundai Elantra; when I say Hyundai Elantra, I say it like I am saying the name of the one who got away.  

A new study attempts to model the confusion I’m feeling. Co-authored by Ian Walker, an environmental-psychology professor at Swansea University, in Wales, the preprint is titled “Motonormativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard.” It was based on survey data collected in the U.K., but nonetheless has some relevance: Walker and his team created pairs of questions designed to suss out the existence of a pro-car bias in society. The questions range from clever to somewhat chin-scratching. For instance, should people smoke cigarettes in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the smoke? Forty-eight percent of respondents strongly agreed that they should not. Should people drive cars in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the exhaust fumes? Only 4 percent strongly agreed that they should not. If you leave your car in the street and it gets stolen, is it your fault? Eighty-seven percent said no. If you leave anything else in the street and it gets stolen, is that your fault? Forty percent said yes.

Walker did not attempt to hide his bias. He was already familiar with the idea of car brain, he told me, and the term motonormativity was his “technical attempt” at expressing the same idea. “The harms of motoring are very much just seen as an aspect of life,” he said. “We’ve lost the ability to look at it objectively.” When I reasoned that some people in the U.S. have to drive, he suggested they could move—it’s not “as if we’re in Soviet Russia and the government allocates us to houses,” he protested. I pushed him on the survey questions; it makes more sense to leave a car in the street than it does $50. He countered that I was only proving his point. “That’s what streets are being used for at the moment, but I don’t think they’re intended to store property,” he said. “The paper is essentially suggesting that we make special pleading.” And that’s what I was doing: treating cars as an exceptional category.

Walker’s perspective may seem extreme, but there has been resistance to the “pro-car narrative” from the very beginning. In the first decades of the mass-produced automobile, but before the Eisenhower era of rapid-fire highway construction, screeds against cars were somewhat common. In 1931, The Atlantic published “Our Delightful Man Killer,” an impassioned essay about pending motor-safety regulations that emphasized the absurdity of the 33,000 fatalities counted the year before. (This number is even worse than it sounds, because the country’s population was about 123 million at the time, compared with 335 million today.) “The trouble lies deeper than in bad driving,” the essay concluded. “It lies in the fundamental incompatibility of machines and men, steel and flesh, in a running mix-up on the highways. Nothing on earth can make their intimacy safe.” A similar, gorier essay appeared in Reader’s Digest a few years later—this one suggesting that “if ghosts could be put to a useful purpose, every bad stretch of road in the United States would greet the oncoming motorist with groans and screams and the educational spectacle of ten or a dozen corpses, all sizes, sexes and ages, lying horribly still on the bloody grass.”

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Almost 100 years later, the cognitive dissonance has become, if anything, more pronounced. Motor vehicles are a leading cause of death in the United States, according to the CDC. They’re in the top 10 for all age groups from 1 to 54 years old, Matthew Raifman, a researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health, pointed out when I reached him for comment. Many other top causes of death—cancer, heart disease—are talked about all the time as serious public-health problems that need radical solutions. “Why are we not doing that for motor vehicles?” Raifman asked. “It’s weird to me that we’re okay with this top-10 cause of death that’s sitting there year after year.”  

Some believe that new technology will help solve this problem. But as the first self-driving vehicles arrive on our roads, they’ve only underscored the hubris of car culture. Earlier this year, The New York Times’ Christopher Cox interviewed Tesla owners who had been in accidents caused directly by malfunctions of Tesla’s $15,000 Full Self-Driving feature, and found that many were willing to explain the car’s dramatic errors away. They weren’t skittish about getting back (as human observers) behind the (autonomous) wheel. One man was still using “Mad Max mode,” in which his Tesla would aggressively pass slower moving cars on the highway. Tesla did not respond to my requests for comment.

More recently, The Washington Post reported that Tesla’s autopilot features had been involved in at least 736 crashes since 2019, far more than had been previously known. While the meaning of the number is still obscured by some missing information about how Tesla’s software was being used and how it might have failed, what’s obvious is a surprising level of comfort with danger: In one crash described in the report, the driver had affixed small weights to his steering wheel to get around the system’s requirement that a human always be hands-on, ready to take over for the robot.

The strangeness of “car brain” will persist well into the future. Driving is dangerous. Driving is terrifying. Still, I want to be going 80 miles an hour through a desert. I want to turn a radio dial! I want to keep personal items in a glove compartment and hit the open road with a huge fountain soda. (Can I have next week off?) I’m lucky to be healthy and young—if suddenly I were to die, it’s statistically most likely that it would be because I was in a car crash. I know this. My car brain doesn’t.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a man of many misguided ideas. He thinks that vaccinations are harmful, that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer, and that chemicals in the water supply are producing gender dysphoria. Most political commentators do not share these ideas, but they have implicitly adopted another of the presidential hopeful’s questionable notions: that Kennedy’s voters care about Kennedy’s ideas and are supporting him because of them.

“RFK Jr. says things—whether about vaccines causing autism, SSRIs leading to school shootings, or the CIA killing his dad and uncle—that are described by mainstream media as disinformation and ideas that are simply beyond the pale,” the political commentator Bari Weiss wrote. “But his high polling suggests that many Americans are tuning in to what he has to say. And perhaps they think that we have drawn the lines of debate too narrowly.”

Other analysts have adopted this reading in making the case for experts to publicly debate Kennedy and his proposed policies. “If a large chunk of the public is in the grip of mistaken ideas about these issues, part of the job of experts is to wade in and correct those ideas,” the leftist writer Ben Burgis argued. “If you don’t think he should be publicly debated, you need some other theory of how the curious can be persuaded away from his ideas,” the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote.

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All of these arguments assume that Kennedy is polling in double digits because his personal positions are resonating with the electorate. But this is a mistake. Although some voters do share Kennedy’s skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccines, they are predominantly Republicans; few Americans of either party oppose all childhood vaccinations, as he does. In reality, Kennedy’s popularity comes not from his odd ideas, but from his anti-establishment affect. He has not unearthed a new constituency for banning wireless internet and immunizations; he has tapped into a very old one that fundamentally repudiates the American political system and its official options. Kennedy’s campaign is a protest movement, not an intellectual argument, and seeking to rebut his specific stances misunderstands his appeal and dignifies his fringe fantasies with respect they do not command among voters.

Presidential-primary polling this century tells a clear story: About a quarter of voters reject their party’s political establishment and resent its attempts to anoint a presidential nominee. These voters want no part of a coronation, whether the chosen candidate is Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, and when the opportunity presents itself, they readily rally behind other contenders who echo their anger at the political class. For decades, this bloc has boosted candidates of deeply divergent backgrounds who share little in common besides their anti-establishment outlook.

In 2004, the beneficiary of this energy was former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, whose campaign declared that he was running against the Democratic “establishment” and regularly denounced the “Washington Democrats in power.” In the early primary races, Dean garnered around a fifth of votes, but he ultimately flamed out, unable to expand beyond this showing. In 2008, first-term Senator Barack Obama captured the same constituency with his pointed critique of the Iraq War, which doubled as a critique of those who had supported the ill-fated military action—not just Clinton, Obama’s primary opponent, but many others among his party’s elites. By combining this insurgent support with a commanding majority of Black voters, Obama was able to dethrone the front-runner and nab the nomination.

In 2016, as Obama was departing the scene, another Vermont politician picked up the anti-establishment torch. In his own words, Senator Bernie Sanders was not merely a progressive calling for reform but a “socialist” calling for “revolution.” In interviews and public appearances, he attacked the Democratic Party, even as he sought to lead it. And he repeatedly assailed the “corporate media,” by which he meant not simply conservative channels such as Fox News but also mainstream outlets including CNN, ABC, and NBC. If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it should—and not just when it comes from Kennedy’s campaign. After all, on the other side of the aisle, another candidate rode similar sentiment to victory against a divided GOP field.

Few remember today, but the slate of candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential primary was reputed to be one of the strongest in recent memory, brimming with electorally successful Republican politicians including Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio. On paper, these men represented their party’s best and brightest. Then Donald Trump crashed that party. He dismissed Bush as a low-energy establishment lackey, mocked past presidential nominee John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War, and brushed off a public denunciation from the party’s prior standard-bearer, Mitt Romney.

That Trump had previously explored running for president as a third-party candidate and once told CNN, “In many cases, I probably identify more as a Democrat” did not hinder his campaign. If anything, it burnished his outsider credentials, much as Sanders’s previous registration as an independent had bolstered his insurgent bona fides, and Kennedy’s famous last name now grants him credibility as a critic of his class. Again and again, Trump told his supporters that he was being persecuted on their behalf, and that those in power did not want anyone to hear what he had to say.

The point here is not that Trump, Sanders, Obama, and Dean propounded similar positions or worldviews. They obviously did not. But each of them played the same symbolic role for primary voters: as protest candidates against an ossified and corrupt elite. Their personal affect, rather than their policy aspirations, was a key source of their electoral appeal. And the same is true for Kennedy today.

The notion that some voters choose their candidates based on vibes rather than a careful examination of their specific stances is anathema to many pundits and professional politicians, who invest a tremendous amount of time in parsing such positions. But the historical record is clear. Just listen to Kennedy himself.

In an interview with Weiss, Kennedy noted that his slain father “was also a populist leader” who challenged a sitting Democratic president. He then offered a telling anecdote about what this meant. Kennedy recalled how he’d accompanied his father’s body by train from New York to Washington, D.C., after his assassination, and was met on the tracks by thousands of supporters—Black Americans in cities such as Trenton and Baltimore, and white Americans in the countryside. “There were hippies, there were people in uniform, there were Boy Scouts,” Kennedy recounted. “Many people, white men and women, holding signs that said Goodbye, Bobby, holding American flags, holding up children.”

But four years later, the younger Kennedy had a rude awakening about these same people. Examining demographic data from the 1972 presidential campaign, he discovered that “the predominant numbers of white people” who had supported his father had not voted for George McGovern, “who was aligned with my father on almost every issue,” but rather “ended up supporting George Wallace, who was antithetical to my father in every way—he was a fierce, rampant segregationist and racist.”

In the interview, Kennedy casts this about-face as an illustration of how populist energy can be channeled for good or ill. But he can’t quite bring himself to acknowledge the obvious implication: For backers of Kennedy Sr., as for those of Kennedy Jr., the choice was never about policies but about a posture, which is why the same voters were willing to support outsider candidates with seemingly opposite ideals.

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This is a consistent pattern. At the 2016 Democratic national convention, two prominent Sanders supporters officially put forward his candidacy for the nomination: then-Representative Tulsi Gabbard and former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner. The two women could not have been more different. Gabbard went on to become a right-wing critic of the Democratic Party, and now serves as a commentator on Fox News. Turner, by contrast, is a socialist firebrand who has repeatedly challenged the Democrats from the left. And yet, both supported Sanders against Clinton in 2016; today, Gabbard is defending Kennedy on Fox News and Turner is demanding that Biden debate him. Persona over policy, affect over aspiration.

What does all of this mean for Kennedy’s presidential prospects? In most cases, an anti-establishment approach puts a ceiling on a politician’s appeal. In a democracy, the establishment is the establishment for a reason: It retains power because most voters like what it is selling. For this reason, running against the party you seek to lead is generally a recipe for frustration, as Sanders discovered, first with Hillary Clinton and then with Joe Biden. It’s hard to beat a defined establishment alternative when your base is capped at roughly a quarter of the primary electorate.

But an anti-establishment insurgent can win when a clear alternative doesn’t exist, which is how Trump managed to succeed in 2016. Facing a divided primary field filled with candidates more interested in attacking one another than him, Trump rode his minority faction to victory, executing a hostile takeover of the Republican Party in the process. Unfortunately for Kennedy, he faces a clear establishment favorite in the incumbent president. Having consolidated the anti-establishment vote, the eccentric activist has nowhere else to go, and unlike Obama in 2008, he has no other natural constituency. As the Semafor reporter David Weigel recently noted, “When [Kennedy] entered the race, public polling put his support in the teens. Two months later, after copious earned media, those numbers haven’t budged, and the share of primary voters who say they won’t vote for him is rising.”

Populist insurgents like Kennedy point to their polling as evidence of the popularity of their ideas. But in actuality, those numbers reflect the real but limited popularity of their anti-establishment posture. In American politics, there is always a market for someone calling to burn down the entire edifice; the specific kindling is beside the point.