There is something bleakly revealing that the NYTimes tell us pollsters are wondering whether petrol at more than US$4 a gallon will finally dent Donald Trump’s support. In the United States, the national average has just moved above that mark for the first time since 2022, driven by war with Iran and the disruption of oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Reuters reported the shift this week.
Think about what that says.
A president can help drag the world into another ruinous conflict. Thousands can die. Billions can be burned. The White House can be treated like a developer’s vanity project. Washington’s cultural and historic institutions can be pushed around as if they are items on a personal mood board. Yet the thing that may finally make the rusted on pause is the cost of filling the car.
This is hedonism. It is a form of citizenship so narrowed by self interest that mass suffering, public waste and institutional vandalism barely register until the pain arrives at the petrol bowser.
This week a federal judge halted Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom project, finding he lacked authority to push ahead without congressional approval. The project had already involved demolition of the East Wing and formed part of a broader push to remake Washington landmarks, including the Kennedy Center.
So this is the picture. A leader can preside over war abroad and grandiosity at home, and for many supporters the real test still comes down to whether the weekly drive costs a bit more.
In any rational world pollsters would focus on food prices. Food hits every household, whether they drive or not. But petrol has always had unusual political power because people see it in giant numbers on roadside signs. It is immediate, public and emotional. Pollsters know that. Politicians know that. It becomes shorthand for pain, even when far greater harms are unfolding in plain sight.
What if we put the weekly cost of bread, milk, fruit, school lunches and basic groceries on billboards the way we do petrol, and people might start talking about cost of living in a way that reflects actual life.
It would expose the absurdity, wouldn’t it.
So yes, there is something in that.
Petrol has political power partly because it is turned into public theatre. Food, even though it is more fundamental, stays tucked inside receipts, shopping trolleys and household stress.
If petrol prices are what finally cracks the rusted on, it will not be because they have reflected deeply on leadership, democracy or human suffering. It will be because the consequences have at last reached their own windscreen.
I wish everyone the world over, including, of course, all we Aussies, could read this exquisite, remarkably accurate, insightful and very timely comment by the inimitable Lynne Strong.
It brings home how we humans as the most numerous and destructive, but supposedly, intelligent, species on Earth have overblown our natural resources and our self-importance through ignorance and greed, undermining the the cultures and thinking that gave us things like democracy, now on a fatal downward spiral in the quest for continuing greed and to protect the minority of the few incredibly materially wealthy at a dreadful cost to the overwhelmingly powerless majority. Now, where did I leave that guillotine…?
Graham Pike
Jamberoo
This is exactly the conversation I hoped the piece might open up, one that looks past the surface drama and asks what kind of society we are building, and who it is being built for. Your final line belongs in a locked drawer marked use only in emergencies.