Here comes (Varoom! Varoom!) the candy-colored streamlined dream of American democracy. Punch it!
Our columnist photographed this red hot rod in downtown Emporia, back in 2021. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
I wrote this in a dream.
Well, it wasn’t a dream exactly, but it was the closest thing you can experience while keeping fingers on the keyboard. I suppose there is a technical name for it, a somnambular cultural trance or political fugue state or something, but what I know is that after doomscrolling since the first of January (and we thought 2026 was going to be better!) looking for signs that American democracy would survive The Moment, I experienced a hypnogogic epiphany: The enduring power of our 250-year-experiment in self-governance is our ability to create.
I’m not talking about making money, but about the freedom to express ourselves in the things we love to do. For some it might be painting or poetry, for others it could be sculpture or symphonies, but for a great many of us it is a hands-on endeavor in which you customize something to make it your own. Bands do this all the time with cover songs, and sometimes these outshine the originals. Think of Jimi Hendrix and his version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” or Brandi Carlisle’s take on “Hallelujah.” This reinterpretation happens all the time in fashion, too. What teenager hasn’t strategically ripped a pair of jeans as a cri de coeur? Another example is car culture. A restomod 1967 fastback Mustang says more about the owner than of Ford’s ambitions when the car left the assembly line at Dearborn. Turn an otherwise tame Jeep Wrangler TJ into an absolute rock crawler and you’ve announcing your priorities, good or bad, by the world.
In 1963 Tom Wolfe was assigned by Esquire magazine to cover a custom car show at Burbank, California. He attended the show, which celebrated youth and electric guitar music and custom cars painted in science fiction metal flake colors, but then suffered one of the most famous cases of writers’ block since Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1797, Coleridge was attempting to set down “Kubla Kahn,” a poem he had composed in an opium-induced dream, when he was interrupted by a “person on business from Porlock.” When Coleridge returned to his work, the poem had left his mind. He would suffer long bouts of block for the rest of his life.
When Wolfe got back to New York with all his notes from interviewing car gods George Barris and Ed Roth, he found he could not write the story. In the introduction to his nonfiction anthology, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” Wolfe describes just sitting around his apartment worrying. He didn’t know what kind of story he had.
“By this time Esquire practically had a gun at my head because they had a two-page-wide color picture for the story locked into the printing presses and no story,” Wolfe recalls. “Finally, I told (the managing editor) that I couldn’t pull the thing together. O.K., he tells me, just type out my notes and send them over and he will get somebody else to write it.”
So Wolfe spends the next 12 hours or so pounding out a 49-page stream-of-consciousness memo of everything he had seen and all the people he had talked to while in California. Of course, the magazine publishes it as written, with the exception of deleting the dear editor salutation at the top. And — bang! — Wolfe single-handedly creates a new art form, which he will later call New Journalism, just as those kids in California were creating something new out of the Model A Fords and small block Chevy engines and all the other symbols of 20th Century mobility.
“The details themselves, when I wrote them down, suddenly made me see what was happening,” Wolfe says. “Here was this incredible combination of form plus money in a place nobody ever thought about finding it.”
What he had identified was a seismic cultural shift made possible by the relative peace, prosperity and leisure time following the end of World War II. Not all classes enjoyed the same level of freedom, and if you were Black or brown or queer or female or non-Christian you were mostly excluded and the challenge was not self-expression but existence.
Wolfe made a specialty of immersive reporting on subcultures in his subsequent essays, and his subjects ranged from Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to the composer Leonard Bernstein and his circle of liberal activists for the Black Panthers and other causes. Wolfe sometimes misfired, especially when his prime directive of observation was clouded by satire, and his essays could hurt people. But in the main Wolfe got things right, until he decided he was mistaken when he declared New Journalism would kill novels — and ended up contradicting himself by writing blockbuster novels like 1987’s “Bonfire of the Vanities.” Tom Wolfe, who died in 2018, shouldn’t be confused with the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who came before.
My point in exhuming a writer who has been dead eight years now is not to indulge in some silly nostalgia for magazines, although a good magazine will still bring the world to you in a way no other medium can, but to create a waypoint. What Tom Wolfe observed about culture in 1963, as it related to hot rods, was the evolution of the American psyche. He did it again in 1965 with another Esquire story, “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” about a former moonshiner and stock car driver. The latter story is remarkable in that it anticipates the rise of NASCAR from a largely Southern spectator sport to a national obsession. I’m reminded of that story every time I pass the Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kansas, which opened in 2001 and is now owned by NASCAR.
What Wolfe identified in these car essays and other stories is a uniquely American desire for self-expression within the sometimes-limiting confines of a particular group or subculture. Often, particularly in youth culture, the form eclipses the expression and you’re left with dogma, as when the car culture girls all had to have a certain style of bouffant or be left out. But the driving force was still expression. Wolfe didn’t say that, but that’s what I understand. And this was key to my epiphany about the way we live now (apologies, Anthony Trollope).
Attempting to define a turbulent cultural moment while one is living through it is like trying to determine the origin of the low pressure system that spawned a tornado while clinging for dear life strapped to a water pipe where the pump house once stood.
There is no need to recount the events that have buffeted us in the first 46 days of 2026. But anybody who thinks of this period as normal is, frankly, deceiving themselves, perhaps to keep the cognitive dissonance from ripping the tops of their tiny heads off. Their arguments usually take one of two forms, the first being that it’s politics as usual and the partisan fury will pass with the next election cycle. The other is to decry alarmism and to chide others for saying the next election is existential for American democracy.
I have a couple of responses here.
The first is that we are in the early stages of an authoritarian government and the fight isn’t so much partisan as it is a test of whether a nation dedicated to the proposition that all persons are created equal can long endure. Some persons — see the list above — are unequal and treated increasingly harshly in America. My other thought is that every election, from local school board races to the campaigns for the White House, is a referendum on democracy. Every time we vote — or especially when we choose not to — is an existential test of the republic.
It is also a test of stamina.
How much can we endure for the sake of the American experiment in self-government? The answer is as much as we have to give, and more. Once lost, democracy cannot easily be restored. But we have been scared so badly by the thought of losing our democracy, made so weary by fighting torrents of misinformation, and felt so powerless in the face of unchecked presidential power, that we have failed to identify why democracy is worth saving.
A while ago I was walking down the sidewalk in my hometown of Emporia and was drawn to a candy-apple red hot rod parked on the street in front of a coffee shop. I didn’t know who owned it, but it was like I knew them already. The engine bay of the 1930s coupe was open so you could admire the chromed valve covers on the Chevy small block, the headers snaking from the cylinder heads, the yellow spark plug wires in tidy looms. In my youth I was obsessed with fast cars, worked on them constantly, and raced them illegally at night on a quarter mile section of old Highway 66 outside Baxter Springs. I know the satisfaction of snapping a plug wire into place or changing the jets in a carburetor. The brand names of aftermarket accessories flitted through my mind: Accel, Holley, Edelbrock, Hooker, Thrush, Hurst. There is no more liberating feeling than hearing the crack of an exhaust bolt when it finally yields to the wrench.
What fascinates us about hot rods and electric guitars, watercolors and writing, fashion design and weight lifting and saddle making and disc golf and a thousand other pursuits is the amount of ourselves we can put into them. It is a kind of small free expression for which we have been the envy of the world for most of the last century. The Ford Mustang was America’s best-selling car since the Model A, and it inspired the design of the 1970s Toyota Celica. This expression doesn’t thrive in authoritarian states, because existence in autocracies must conform to the demands of the state and not the wishes of the individual. Under fascism, self-expression can get you killed. The gay Spanish poet and playwright Garcia Lorca was shot to death in 1936 by fascist goons.
There was a time when I looked at the artistic expression of others — whether it was the structure of a self-published novel or a painting hanging at the local coffee shop — with a certain smugness. This is lazy plotting, I would tell myself, or that is unfettered by an understanding of technique. But in the age of Trump I have come to regard creative works with wiser eyes. That’s not the way I would have done it, I tell myself now, but at least the work got done, there is evidence of effort and thought, and in the new gig economy most of us are, in a way, self-published. I was asked the other day how I manage a column every week and the answer is I don’t know, that the more I write the less I understand how it really works. Now I suspect the hard work is done in a subconscious, dream-like level that transforms information and experience into essay. Mix in the need for an audience and an unhealthy quest for validation and there you have it.
There’s something else I have come to admire, and that is the courage to create. Self-expression is an increasingly radical act, and while it won’t end as badly as it did for Lorca, at least not yet, those expressing opinions contrary to the current regime are likely to see some professional avenues closed to them.
It has been such for most of the history of the world.
But not in our lifetimes, at least not in America.
Let me turn to a Canadian, the novelist Margaret Atwood, author of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” who explains it thusly:
“You can’t exist as a writer for very long without learning that something you write is going to upset someone, sometime, somewhere,” she said in her 2022 acceptance speech for the Hitchens Prize. “Whether you end up with a bullet in your neck will depend on many factors — there are lots of bullets, and some necks are thicker than others — but let us pause to remember that the most important meaning of freedom of expression is not that you can say anything you like without any consequences whatsoever but that the bullet should not be your government’s.”
It may seem a stretch to compare a writer of Atwood’s stature to those who proclaim themselves through hot rods, but that’s the great thing about creativity. It can be encouraged, but it can’t be bought. No amount of gilding will turn the White House into an American Versailles. What frees our self-expression from the futurist void of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti are the democratic ideals Marinetti and Mussolini and Hitler scorned — popular sovereignty, civil liberties, and a social contract that benefits all.
Fierce individualism has long been an American cliche, but joyful individualism is perhaps a more authentic value. The widespread freedom to create needs democracy to support it with a guarantee of free expression enshrined in law. It also requires an economy that works for all people, and not just for the richest. Most importantly, it must recognize the basic humanity in all of us, to encourage all of us to express ourselves no matter the color of our skin or our lifestyles or our allegiance to a leader who has more in common with third-world despots than other American presidents.
In the last year of the current administration, we have seen the arts under attack, from the renaming and eventual closing of the Kennedy Center to new policies that restrict funding for equity and inclusion programming for federal organizations like the National Endowment for the Humanities. The chilling effect of the presidential directives is felt in every state and local community in the land.
If the American home is the seat of democracy, as I’ve argued in the past, then the automobile is the ego. It balances our basic need for transportation with a primal cry for freedom and expression. Sometimes our cars are loud and flashy, at other times muted and mundane, but always the choice is ours. In a democracy, that’s how it should be.
Varoom, Varoom.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.