The Left’s Elon Musk Dilemma

Special to The Washington Post / Matt Bai

12:24 JST, October 9, 2024

You can’t walk very far in my Bethesda neighborhood without seeing lawn signs for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Nor can you fail to notice signs that say “Hate has no home here” or “In this house we believe …” followed by a collection of social justice slogans. Public statements of virtue proliferate faster than the ubiquitous rabbits around here.

Lately, though, it’s been hard not to notice the proliferation of something else – Elon Musk’s Teslas. They’re on every block, in all available models. So maybe hate has a little bit of a home here – if the battery range is good enough.

Nothing I can think of has plunged liberal friends of mine into a kind of moral anguish quite like Musk and his Tesla. I mean, it’s hard to espouse political convictions of any kind without abiding a few minor hypocrisies. We all love to talk about our devotion to small businesses, for instance, even as we trip over the packages from box stores and Amazon piled high on our porches.

But these Teslas represent a conflict that their owners can no longer overlook. They bought their cars in large part because it gave them the sense they were having a positive impact on the world. Here was a way – albeit an expensive one that most Americans couldn’t afford – to actually do something about runaway carbon emissions, even if it meant a little extra inconvenience on road trips.

It wasn’t incidental that you were also making a very public statement about your values; now you could go from zero to 60 in under three seconds and demonstrate your liberal bona fides at the same time. Even when Musk decided to waste a chunk of his fortune on buying Twitter, so that he could restore accounts belonging to right-wing dissemblers such as Donald Trump and Alex Jones, Tesla-lovers managed to feel pretty good about themselves.

Since then, however, Musk has gone full MAGA. Among the highlights: he has endorsed the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, wondered why no one tries to assassinate the Democratic nominee for president, and pledged to give Trump’s campaign $45 million a month (although he seems to have hedged). This past weekend, Musk showed up at a Trump rally and reiterated his belief that the country and its Constitution could not continue to exist if Trump weren’t reelected.

Among my friends who drive Teslas, Musk’s name comes up a lot in conversation, like an embarrassing skin condition you wish you could ignore. Some manage ably to compartmentalize. A neighbor I see at the dog park rails against Trump voters but raves about his self-driving Model S. One woman I know, who recently bought a Model 3, knocked on doors for Harris twice last month.

Other Tesla drivers feel stigmatized and vacillate about selling their cars. One friend affixed a magnet to her Tesla that says: “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy.”

I have friends who were reluctant to buy a German car when they were shopping a few years ago because of the troubled history of German automakers profiting from the Third Reich. They ended up buying a Tesla. Now the husband finds himself questioned by work colleagues for supporting fascism at home. (Imagine how fun that holiday party must be.)

As it happens, I’ve lately entered the market for an electric vehicle myself, and of course the Tesla still ranks at the top of those best-rated lists. (That range!) Here’s how I look at it.

If you already drive a Tesla, and someone gives you a hard time about it, tell them to keep it to themselves, or maybe just drive the car over their azaleas. We buy all kinds of things from companies whose owners would probably appall us if we had them over for dinner. Volvos are made by a Chinese company; I’m not sure how buying one of those is a statement for democratic values, either.

If you’re thinking about trading in your Tesla for something less offensive to your values, or everybody else’s, I’d say don’t bother. You’ve already paid for the car; selling it to someone else won’t help or hurt Musk or his quarterly goals.

But if you are deciding whether to buy a Tesla, and you care about basic democratic values, then I think the choice is simple: don’t. I don’t care how cool it is that the car can pick up your grocery bags while you wait at the curb.

Musk has made it clear that he isn’t just another self-satisfied entrepreneur with some ignorant ideas. He is the richest man on the planet and a malevolent force in society – someone who not only supports the ugliest kind of nativism and nationalist paranoia, but who’s apparently bent on using his power to manipulate political dialogue and magnify damaging lies. I don’t know if his end goal is to create a more culturally homogenous country, or whether he’s just making a cynical play to protect his business interests, but either makes him plenty dangerous.

If hate has no home in our neighborhoods, then neither does that brand new Tesla. Even the rabbits have to know that by now.