Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines the politics of the nascent grassroots campaign against Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) and their drivers. The anti-SUV campaign is another example of the politicization of private citizen behavior, a topic recently reviewed by Kersh and Morone (2002) in their analysis of the politics of obesity. The anti-SUV campaign shares some elements with the public health campaigns investigated by Kersh and Morone and with other moral reform movements. Like these other efforts, the anti-SUV campaign stigmatizes putatively private behavior using explicit and implicit moral appeals, it seeks to govern the self and others, and it demonizes both individuals and corporations. But it does not fit the typical mold of earlier crusades in two key ways. First, the anti-SUV campaign reverses the class, and to some extent the racial politics that underlies other efforts to control private behavior. Second, the SUV backlash relies to a great extent on humor and a sense of play, rather than the politics of fear.

I argue that while the movement has progressive roots, its critique is ultimately too limited in scope to have a significant policy impact. The limitations of the campaign stem from tensions in American political culture that the anti-SUV campaign confronts, the most significant of which is America’s ambivalence toward consumption. While institutional constraints, mobilization biases, and a lack of political leadership also pose challenges to policy reform, this paper focuses on the cultural and ideological challenges posed by America’s attitudes toward consumption.