Just Get it Running to Get Past Trump

The best way to sort out a fuel smell on your 1993 Ford Ranger is to take off the truck bed. Do that and you see a rearward leaf spring mount rusted away and the spring lodged into the aforementioned truck bed. Then there are the snapped bolts that held down the truck bed that now need addressing. After time, you realize the leaf spring mount on the other side is about to give up the ghost and needs replacing. Of course, the leaf spring bushings need replacing. And you should sort out that leak from the differential. Probably should paint the frame to fight off the rust, since the truck bed is off. After that, you are still left with a fuel leak.

Welcome to today's democracy under Trump—crack open one problem, and the problems will just keep popping up. For my mental health after chasing to write on the cascade of Trumpian corruption for some years, I took refuge in a new hobby—puttering on beater cars. It is a low-stakes way to learn how to work on an automobile. And there is a charm in taking cars people have given up on and getting them to run, all while eliminating that strange odor in the cabin from god knows what died in it while waiting to be a barn find.

There is a whole internet genre of Car Revival, or, as a former cable channel more memorably branded it—Roadkill. Take an interesting car that has been abandoned, neglected, or forgotten, and see if you can get it to run and drive. These are often out in the field repairs, so if the gas tank is junk, ratchet-strap a gas can to the car and run a hose right to the engine.

This is not a Jay Leno collecting exercise. There is a fondness for the past, a need to see a car run that has been neglected, perhaps a chance to put some high-priced parts into an otherwise junk car just to send it down a drag strip. Folks in the genre have a near-spectrum grasp of which engine went into certain cars with a given trim level back in 1968. But they are not necessarily interested in making museum pieces. It is more goal-oriented. Can you daily-drive this car? What about drag racing or auto-crossing? Off-road? LeMons 24-hour endurance racing? What does the car say to you? It is the challenge of starting a car for the first time in decades that seems to be at the heart of this genre. Get something forgotten to run, then make it into something to enjoy.

There will be a great deal of our government post-Trump that will look like cars left out in the field behind the barn for quite some time. We will need to be creative to make things run—and develop a vision for it as we do so.

This Roadkill genre's elder statesman is David Freiburger. Having had an impressive career as a writer and editor of many car-enthusiast publications like the long-running Hot Rod magazine, he carved out a niche on YouTube and later the MotorTrend channel in this genre. Start with a clapped-out car and do something highly improbable with it. Take a Dodge Challenger off-road? Drive a newly re-animated Jeep across the country? Put a huge engine into a tiny car. Live by your wits with Google Maps for the nearest auto parts store and go.

Freiburger's mantra, a critique of people who keep project cars in their garage for a decade waiting for the right parts and the ideal moment to get a perfect car on the road, is "Don't get it right, just get it running." A car that is running and driving, however imperfectly, is much more motivating than a garage paperweight. And a person can only tell what is really wrong with a car by driving. Much of this genre is taking a Hero Car and dialing it in. First get it running, then fix the fuel system, suspension, etc. to make the car run better. It is often not a fun journey and so you may need to ratchet-strap that gas can onto your car, but keep moving and fixing as you go along.

Admittedly, this genre is mostly a middle-aged white guy one with a heavy rural presence and uncertain politics. (Freiburger, however, is very much a product of mid-late 20th-century SoCal.) And it sounds adolescent to some, the talk of burnouts and 60-foot times at the drag strip. However, car revival reduces and reuses and then recycles scrap—so while burning fossil fuel, Roadkill folks are scouring junkyards and repurposing waste and getting old cars to run once more. Progressive values turn up in unexpected ways.

Our democracy post-Trump will be a clapped-out car that many progressives would donate to their NPR station—if it were their car. As progressives, we cannot be so enamored with the ideal that we do not first just get the car started and moving. The coming years will not be perfect, and we will need to connect with people who do not appear, at first look, to be agreeable as we all rummage the political junkyard. Our government will need a great deal of work to run effectively once more—which will also take time and improvised repairs until it can be fixed properly. But the most important point is to get democracy running, then get it right.

As for my truck—well, I need a permanent fix to my hose-clamp workaround, but there is progress.

As for my newsletter, I have been guilty of waiting for it to be perfect before making this work a more established part of my life. More to follow on this point soon.