‘Rolling Coal’ and America’s Class War

Earlier this summer, progressive journalists in the United States discovered a new trend among blue-collar Whites, that of “rolling coal”: diesel truck owners customizing their rigs (sometimes to the tune of thousands of dollars) to emit huge clouds of black diesel smoke. Originally, the trend grew out of truck pulls and similar ‘Vaisya’ or ‘Antyaja’ entertainments, but has now moved out of the stadium and onto the street.

Progressives are, as one might imagine, not at all happy about this, as evidenced by a number of responses found at Slate, Daily Kos and elsewhere. According to our enlightened upper-middle-class, coal-rolling is simply motivated by a distrust of President Barack Obama and amounts to a “fuck you” towards the enviromentalist Left.

“The coal rollers are actively polluting the environment, wasting fossil fuels that directly contribute to global warming, making the planet more painful for everyone,” whines Kos blogger Paul Hogarth. “All to make a stupid political statement, because they hate that damn Kenyan Socialist in the White House.”

How relevant to the economic concerns of this class of people might such a political statement be? According to some sources, 150 coal plants were shutdown between 2010 and 2013. The working-class lifestyle of the American coal country, and throughout the United States, is being destroyed by ‘green’ or progressive policies and neoliberal shifts in the market. In light of this, symbolic practices like coal-rolling could perhaps be compared to the Ghost Dance of American Indians in the late 19th century. It is a response to the economic and social demotion of ways of life which have existed for generations. It remains to be seen whether or not trends like coal-rolling represent a collective will that can rally any successful efforts to save or revitalize working-class and lower-middle-class cultural and economic norms, but they can be seen in a positive sense.

The great irony of all of this is the fact our contemporary upper-middle class, who never shut up about multiculturalism and its inherent goodness, are more than happy to destroy a unique culture native to their own country and eager to interpret that culture’s signals of socioeconomic distress as mere political statements, if not as threats. Coal-rolling is indicative of an implicitly White and nonprogressive cultural mindset, which provokes too much status anxiety for upper-middle-class Whites to countenance, and thus they mock it and decry it for the same reason they discriminate against rural and working-class Whites in university admissions. As we’ve discussed before here at Theden, rednecks are to present-day America what the kulaks were to the early USSR, and the liquidation of their culture and socioeconomic station is something significant swathes of America’s political and financial classes have been attempting since the 19th century.