There is an incredible amount of conspiracy theories surrounding cars and whenever the discussion or analysis of how in gods name did we get to so many people believing in them so many smart people do a lot of thinking and just entirely blank what, to me, is the most obvious entrypoint for this sort of thing.
I'm not talking about the crank shit that is also car, like the idea that the jewish lizard people are hiding the water based engine that can drive around the earth on 500ml of liquid here, but the explicitly carbrained ones that never seem to be called out as conspiracy theories despite hitting all the marks.
How many people do you know that think whatever the authority on traffic light timings is just making them bad on purpose to annoy every car driver? Like there's a big red "make car traffic flow good" button in the central control unit everybody involved just refuses to press or even talk about despite literally every document around this topic clearly lining out how they're optimizing all this shit for optimal car throughput at every turn?
The idea that there isn't enough parking that goes full steam into being aggrieved about not being able to park in the 4th dimension because you can't park 5 cars directly infront of a storefront that's about one car wide and somehow this is again the doing of the shadowy cabal that runs the municipality to annoy every car driver.
The idea that for some unbeknownst reason every western government is in cahoots to build roads like shit so they deterioate within a year or two, on purpose, to...annoy car drivers, again.
The idea that one more lane will fix it, where there is a magic solution to congestion, despite that having never worked, decades of scientific evidence that it doesn't and also again begs the question as how do you figure every level of government everywhere just refuses to do the one magic thing that fixes it all.
Your average carbrain sits at a traffic light, see's people go the other way and figures the government is gangstalking him, specifically. The reasons entirely unclear, but some sort of entity out there is dead set on making you miserable by making you wait. That's the common thread here, it's being annoyed and then figuring out this is targeting you, specifically, completely ignoring how much the built enviroment you're using is made to serve the cars despite all the very much published evidence around it and instead believing there's some conspiracy going on that hides the magic solution that would make it all better. It's all conspiracy theories, except enough people believe in them that it's just mainstream politics now. Wonder where else we might find this phenomenon.
There’s a pretty lib documentary, The Brainwashing of My Dad, that aligns with some of the things you’re saying. Basically the filmmaker’s father used to be an apolitical democrat until he took a job that required a much longer commute. Now he’s fascist. There’s a lot of missing dominoes in that transformation, but the longer commute was one of the biggest factors.
might've started listening to right wing radio stations during the commute
That was what the bulk of documentary was about.