Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t exactly predict the politics of electric cars in America, but he kind of did.

Democratic people in an age of equality will develop an instinct of demanding uniformity, Tocqueville explained. Uniformity means not merely equality but the idea that if something is good for someone, it must be good for everyone. The next step is that if something is best for someone, it must be mandatory for everyone.

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That’s where our electric car-obsessed environmentalists have landed.

Start with this piece from the Atlantic. This isn’t a right-wing writer or some petroleum lobbyist:

“The best way to cap a weekend road trip, I can assure you, is not by jostling for an EV charger outside a Sheetz gas station in Scranton,” writer and editor Saahil Desai noted.

Desai rented a car for a vacation and was stuck with a plug-in electric. “What was supposed to be a restful trip upstate was anything but. Just a few hours of highway driving would sap the battery, leaving me and my friends scrounging for public chargers in desolate parking lots, the top floors of garages, and hotels with plugs marked for guests only.”

Desai loves EVs. His point is that they are often terrible for renters, depending on the renters’ needs:

“EVs may work great for the business traveler who is taking their Tesla from the airport to the hotel and to a client meeting across town, but things are way more complicated for road-trippers," he said. "What makes an EV rental such a struggle is that it is a rental: The overwhelming majority of EV owners charge their cars at home, waking up to a full charge every morning.”

But this isn’t just about road-trippers with rental cars. There are a thousand reasons why an EV might not be right for some people.

If you live in a city or a dense suburb, you might not have a driveway or a predictable place to park, which could make charging while at home impossible. If you have multiple cars, keeping them both charged could be really tough. If you regularly drive 250 miles with a few children — I live in the Washington, D.C., area and my parents live north of New York City — then the range on an electric car could be a huge problem.

The obvious answer here is that “EVs aren’t for everyone.” But that thought doesn’t seem to register in some brains that demand uniformity.

Some folks think the problem is simply “rookie drivers” or that it can be fixed by President Joe Biden’s network of slow chargers.

But the problem is that many uses of cars don’t lend themselves to EVs.

Nevertheless, California and Maryland state governments are trying to ban the sale of gasoline cars. They believe every car should be electric.

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Pushing every driver toward electric cars makes even less sense at a time when local governments are trying to electrify our heating, cooking, and hot water through natural gas bans. If we really are in the middle of a massive decarbonization and electrification push, as environmentalists hope, then we should want a very slow and steady electrification of our automobiles.

Different people have different circumstances and different needs. It offends the sensibilities of the levelers that different people should live different lives and drive different cars that run on different fuels.