by Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” started three weeks ago, with truckers converging on Ottawa to protest a law requiring that they be vaccinated to come back into their own country. Given that well over 80 percent of the truckers are vaccinated, what exactly are they protesting? As one reporter who talked to dozens of demonstrators put it, it’s less about mandates per se and more about “a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.” Truckers complain about inflation and about being demonized as dumb and irrational. They feel underappreciated by elites who depend on them to literally deliver the goods but then tell them what to do without giving them any say in their own lives. One protester gave
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Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” started three weeks ago, with truckers converging on Ottawa to protest a law requiring that they be vaccinated to come back into their own country.
Given that well over 80 percent of the truckers are vaccinated, what exactly are they protesting? As one reporter who talked to dozens of demonstrators put it, it’s less about mandates per se and more about “a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.”
Truckers complain about inflation and about being demonized as dumb and irrational. They feel underappreciated by elites who depend on them to literally deliver the goods but then tell them what to do without giving them any say in their own lives. One protester gave eloquent voice to populist resentment, saying, “There’s a group in power that always manages to create panic among the masses and siphon off public funds.”
The trucker protests remind me of the Tea Party in 2009, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the Women’s March in 2017, and Black Lives Matter protests after the police killings of Michael Brown in 2014 and George Floyd in 2020. Whatever specific event ignited each of those movements, they all quickly took on greater proportions and expressed a vast, generalized anger not simply at overspending, bailouts, income inequality, sexism, and police brutality but at governments and cultural elites that seems at best indifferent to ordinary people’s lives and at worst downright malevolent.
That’s Nick Gillespie and Regan Taylor writing in Reason, a few days before the dispersal of the main body of people and trucks.
Another thing that reminds me of these earlier movements: the way that ideological opponents (in this case, most of my social circle) react with a mix of dismissiveness and scorn. And underestimation.
It’s easy to frame them as a bunch of extremists—closet Nazis and Canadians who are bizarrely fans of the Confederacy. Some of those people showed up. But confusing a movement with its extraordinary members is a classic mistake. So is pointing to the incoherence of demands, or the protesters’ seeming inexperience and amateurishness. This is how many in the center and left reacted to Occupy Wall Street and other early movements of the radical left. I think it was a strategic error.
I have not seen recent polls, but about a week in to the blockades and protests, one polling firm found that a third of Canadians were sympathetic with the protesters and their methods. That’s a lot. At first I worried this might be a conservative polling firm, but if anything their history suggests that they under-survey conservatives.
Most of the news reports turned this around and said “a majority of Canadian oppose the protests”. And it’s surely true–I’m fairly confident more and more opposed the illegal blockade, especially as time went on. But to me the insight is that, far from a fringe movement, the protests tapped into a well of anti-establishment disaffection.
I’m reminded how, during the Occupy Wall Street movement, I made some of the same mistakes. Speaking to one of the leaders, a longtime friend, I pointed out the seeming inexperience, incoherence, and wacky extremism. I still remember his reply.
First, he said, this is a relatively early stage of the movement. You expect too much.
Second, this is a giant exercise in trial and error. Expect the protesters to learn from this experience, and improve their message and their tactics with time. Also, their fundraising.
Third, you should also anticipate more and better leaders and networks. Indeed, he said, to the extent that Occupy Wall Street was being assisted and organized from the sidelines, it was by a group of older people who had been at the Battle for Seattle in the late 1990s. Like him. These old folks were “coming out of the woodwork” with skills and ideas and guidance. This would make the movement more effective. The Occupy activities would, in turn, generate more people like him. They would strengthen their social networks and bonds too. All this would focus and propel the movement.
All this came to pass.
Adam Tooze had a nice piece on the trucks over the weekend. He thinks we can expect trucks to become a routine tool of disruption.
A modern, North American semi-truck is a substantial physical object. On average they stand 13.5 feet tall, 8.5 feet wide. With trailer attached, a truck is 72 feet long and weighs up to 80,000 pounds. It takes 400 to 600 hp to move at speed and 1000-2000 lb-ft of torque to pull it from a standing start. When the airbrakes are locked, it becomes an immense, immovable dead weight.
Even though labor unions have disavowed the protest, Tooze still sees parallels to the ways that social movements of the past used their critical role in national industry to gain bargaining power:
In the age of coal, the power of the Triple Alliance – the coalition of miner workers, railway workers and dock workers – lay in their ability to comprehensively paralyze energy and logistical systems. Through the early 20th century coal supplied 80 percent of the energy needs of many industrial societies. Coal was hard to mine and hard to move. If you stopped coal. You stopped everything else. And thanks to the indispensable role of coal in electricity generation, that veto power continued to operate in many societies down to the 1980s.
The Triple Alliance was what made a general strike such an awesome prospect.
Trucks and truckers have never displayed that kind of comprehensive power to paralyze society. But they can cause considerable disruption.
In my mind, this is the most visible innovation we can expect to persist. Smart cities and police forces are already starting to develop and share tactics for countering it. We will see if they outpace the abilities and innovation of the movement.
For protesters, the smart strategy may be to identify the cities least prepared and target them. Especially the ones that are likely to respond most repressively, generating public sympathy. I’m no expert on the US civil rights movement, but I believe that was exactly their approach: carefully choose the time and place of every march to generate the most spectacular strategic missteps by their opponents.
I already see a huge number of progressives in my social media feed pushing for aggressive policing and even the military to be brought out, using all means necessary. Even though I expected that reaction a little, I’m genuinely surprised at people’s newfound enthusiasm for our institutions of domestic coercion.
As with many social movements, I think the best weapon they will discover is that they can rely on being misunderstood, and their support underestimated. If they are smart, the leaders will turn this into an advantage.