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economy driven by consumption, a politics that equates citizenship with consumption, and a
culture that encourages individuals to create their identities through the purchase of consumer
products. The anti-SUV campaign does not resolve or overcome the tensions it confronts; rather,
it tries to walk a thin line between these ambiguous traditions.
The Anxieties and Assurances of Affluence
American unease with consumption has a long history, evident in early American
religious, political-cultural, and economic thought. Puritan thinkers in the 18
th
century shunned
gratuitous consumption and luxury goods for their incompatibility with Christian teachings about
modesty and about humility before God. Secular anxieties about consumption revolved around
themes of the virtuous citizen, whose time should be spent doing hard work and pursuing
meaningful activities that enhanced the self and the community. Conspicuous consumption and
the pursuit of luxury items were seen as threatening one’s personal virtues and a society’s public
spirit (Horowitz 2004). The economic arguments against consumption were voiced in classic
American liberal thought, which considered excessive consumption to be detrimental to the
economy because it took capital away from production (Donohue 2003). Most people in the
nineteenth century shared this producerist worldview; the consumer and consumption was
treated as a necessary evil, something to control so that production—the chief driver of the
economy—would not suffer. In the late nineteenth century, Yale sociologist William Graham
Sumner epitomized this thinking, denying the consumer a legitimate political identity by
equating “consumer” with a non-productive citizen (Donohue 2003, 15-16.).
These anti-consumerist themes were echoed in the twentieth century. During the World
Wars, limited consumption was once again considered a civic duty and the sign of a virtuous
citizen. One government campaign urged citizens to “Produce & Conserve, Share & Play
Convention