Suffocating in the Liberal Longhouse

What the Air-Cooled Porsche 911 can teach us about life under American communism.

The open road calls me.

Ever so often I feel the urge to get up, get out, get away. I feel it now: the urge to go fast, to see the American steppe again stretched out before me as I race across the heartland.

I need windy roads through valleys and over mountain peaks. I need to see the stars.

I want to drive across the country and I want to do it in a Luftgekühlt (“air-cooled”) Porschs. I don’t care which model year or make.Maybe this GT2:

…or perhaps a 1973 911 Turbo, doesn’t matter:

I am not the only one whose had this idea, however. Since the COVID lockdowns, the price of classic sports cars has gone through the roof. Nowhere is this clearer than in the classic Porsche 911 market. A good pre-1998 911 goes for at least $75,000. These cars are more expensive now adjusted for inflation, than they were when they first went on sale.

The reasons for the price explosion are simple. The classic Porsche 911 is an elegant, minimalist sports car. Manual transmission. Manual steering. Very little electronic bullshit. Some don’t even come with radios.

The old Porsche’s came with Luftgekühlt engines—German for “air-cooled.” Unlike the engines in every gasoline powered car in America now—the old Porsches don’t have radiators, water pumps, or anti-freeze.

Instead, the Porsche 911s used engines that were cooled simply with air and oil. There are advantages to this method. Compared to liquid-cooled engines, the Luftgekühlt motors are less mechanically complex and therefore smaller. Porsche’s six cylinder boxer engines (in which the pistons are opposed and move horizontally) could be placed lower in the vehicle, improving handling and performance in the rear-wheel drive 911s.

They’re also louder, with a distinctive rumble. There are no water jackets in the engine block to help absorb the sound. Air cooled Porsches are simply a different animal than the SUV sitting in your driveway.

The classic Porsche 911 isn’t simply a means to get from point A to point B—they were meant to be piloted. They are mobile works of art. Light, elegant, and well built, the classic Porsche 911 is simply a joy to drive.

At least, that’s what I’ve been told. I’ve never actually driven one. In fact, I’ve never seen one in real life. I almost certainly will never own one.

That’s because it is illegal to make more. The Luftgekühlt engine that made the Porsche 911 famous doesn’t meet modern emissions regulations. The last air cooled Porsche was sold in 1998.

Modern safety standards have had a similar effect on the 911. The modern car needs a whole panoply of electronics and protective features just to be allowed on the road.

There is less and less room for the pure driving experience in the car market every year, at least for ordinary Americans. The “EV revolution” threatens to end it for all time.

California and New York, among others, have passed laws that will ban the sale of new gasoline powered cars by 2035. The air-cooled Porsche belongs to a different age—to an entirely different spiritual horizon.

American cars now are most indistinguishable cookie cutter clones. They’re appliances. The equivalent of a dishwasher on wheels. You need one. It has to be practical.

America’s car culture reflects its deeper spiritual culture: it is centralized, bland, relentlessly utilitarian, and increasingly expensive. In a word, it is suffocating.

This is the world liberals have given us. The homogenization of our culture—everything beige—this is the final aim of our particular brand of American communism.

Safetyism and “caring for the planet” as the liberal expresses them are womanly instincts in the worst way. We live in a world of Human Resources harpies bashing us over the heads with paperwork in order to enforce compliance with “community values.” Make no mistake—this is communism.

Marx and his followers do not represent something radically new in human history but rather a return to the natural human mode of being. Communism is a spiritual return to the longhouse of Neolithic Europe—in which human beings crammed together in communal dwellings with their animals and relatives.

The longhouse represents the destruction of privacy and the squelching of the longing for excellence and beauty. It is especially an attack on young men, with their sense of adventure. Feminism and socialism are old impulses.

Modern liberal America is exactly like the longhouse. We are constantly under surveillance from nagging schoolmarms: “Use the correct pronouns!” “Respect diversity!” “Renounce your white privilege!” “Drive a shitty SUV!”

It all comes to the same thing. The air-cooled Porsche 911 represents a different path. That’s why I want one: as a way of flipping the moralizing liberal longhouse the bird. Owning a sports car is like voting for Trump or lifting weights or telling a politically incorrect joke—it is a rejection of our stultifying moral climate.

America won’t be saved by buying sports cars, of course. But the life of freedom and excellence they represent is the antithesis to soul-crushing liberalism. The American Right isn’t so much a political orientation as a biological and spiritual phenomenon. Some human beings simply want more.

The call of the open road is like that. It is the call of the life of adventure and purpose in a world of vulgar utilitarianism and screeching hall monitors.