If Americans increasingly derive their senses of identity from partisan politics, and research suggests they do, it’s reasonable to infer that more and more public acts will be colored by politics over time. This thesis may explain the strange spectacle from July 2014, in which the Environmental Protection Agency felt compelled to comment on an online video craze featuring drivers who’d modified their vehicles to make them visibly more polluting.

The practice is “rolling coal,” so called because it involves rigging diesel engines to bypass pollution controls for the purposes of emitting ostentatious clouds of soot, and per an EPA spokeswoman, it is “illegal.”

It is also extremely stupid. Like “truck nuts,” but more toxic, antisocial, and costly. There is no punchline to the joke, beyond imagining environmentalists getting mad. Coal rollers pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a pop for the sole purpose of harassing people who think cars should be cleaner.

At the time, the online rolling coal trend—like many Obama-era protest trends—struck critics and observers as a kind of obnoxious primal scream, indulged by an increasingly powerless subset of the population. What was less obvious was that the impulse behind rolling coal, if not rolling coal per se, had become the intellectual bedrock of conservatism as practiced in America. It is now the key animating ethos in the decision-making process of America’s ruling political party.



The question of whether a policy or personnel choice would piss off liberals has become a disturbingly reliable indicator of what President Donald Trump is likely to do and how Republicans in Congress are likely to defend it.