The Great Driving Right Show: Cars, Crisis, and the Rise of Fossil Fascism
by William Callison, George Edwards, Jacob McLean and Tatjana Söding (2026)
How the far right rises through climate conspiracism and pro-car politics.
Apocalypse is in the air. And the far right knows it. Since the pandemic, it has successfully cultivated crises, conspiracy theories, and coalitions to fight a green energy transition. Mobilising online and in the streets, far-right actors cast decarbonisation measures as a ‘war on cars’ endangering individual liberty, the nuclear family, the nation, and western civilisation. In The Great Driving Right Show, the Zetkin Collective traces the evolution of these conflicts and shows how, as the climate crisis worsens, the political right constructs an ‘inverted crisis’ in which climate action – not climate change – represents the gravest existential threat. Rising through this shared strategy are movements and parties from anti-road-pricing saboteurs, ‘freedom’ convoys and farmers’ protests, to the Trump-led opposition to electric vehicles. Powering such actors are not only fossil-fuel and automobile interests, but an ever-expanding cycle of moral panics about climate and racial justice protesters, trans people, and migrants. With the planet at stake, we must confront the new climate denialism and the violent mobility regime fuelling the rise of fossil fascism.
Verso Books
Reviews
In this rigorous and riveting book, the Zetkin Collective traces how the oil-powered automobile has come to serve as both material condition and symbolic condensation of contemporary fossil fascism. Despite right-wing panics, there is no “war on cars”—but we may need one if we are to save the planet from the intertwined forces of climate crisis and political reaction.
Thea Riofrancos
Author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism
The car is no longer just a source of missions. Today it is the sensuous form taken by the fusion of a century of nationalist and petromodernist fantasy. To protect their fantasy, the new right doesn’t simply deny climate change, but fabricates alternative emergencies in its place: the globalist elites, the woke mobs, the green technocrats are coming to take our freedoms. This is the inverted crisis that the book anatomises with characteristic panache, and shrewdness. No one is better at this than the Zetkin Collective, and their latest book is an essential, sober and furious guide to our political future
Richard Seymour
Author of Disaster Nationalism
This is an indispensable chronicle, cartography and critique of the virulent far-Right backlash against even the most timid efforts at energy transition. What Henri Lefebvre once called capitalism’s ‘object-king’, the car, is revealed here as the nexus of racist moral panics, authoritarian anti-statism and fossil capital’s lucrative impunity. The Great Right Driving Show shows how we are motoring toward the fascist future on a highway of climate denialism and why any genuine anti-fascism must put decarbonisation at the top of its agenda.
Alberto Toscano
Author of Late Fascism
