What the left can learn from the trucker protest
We learned the wrong lesson from the yellow vests
In France, one of the traffic laws on the books requires motorists to have a yellow vest with them, so that if they get a flat tire or have an emergency they’re visible to other drivers. It’s one of those perfectly sensible laws European countries have that everybody follows because why not.
In the fall of 2018, the French government, under Emmanuel Macron, tried to do something else it also thought was perfectly sensible. The planet is warming in dangerous ways, and fossil fuels are the primary cause. It’s particularly bad for France, as the grape harvest is being tortured by hotter weather, and if the gulf stream collapses, Europe, which is much higher north on the map than people realize, could become downright frigid. And so Macron instituted a gas tax – it was shared sacrifice, he said, and it was for the good of everybody.
Higher gas prices would encourage people to move toward electric vehicles, hybrids, more efficient cars, or push them to drive less. The price signal would inspire the market to shift off of fossil fuels and more toward clean energy.
It all made perfect sense, except to the people who were being asked to bear the brunt of it. Protests started small, and slowly grew, and on November 17 of that year, people angry about the gas tax blocked traffic throughout Paris, donning the yellow vests that were in their cars. The media was confused at first at what to make of the protest. These were regular, working-class people protesting to improve their material economic circumstances. The word for that has always been left wing. Yet these people were protesting a law aimed at combating climate change, and they didn’t seem much versed in their Foucault, so could they really be left wing? Eventually, the media slotted them into the populist right, lumping them in with supporters of the Trump campaign and Brexit.
Canada had its own attempt at a copycat yellow vest protest movement, led by truckers there at the time, but it fizzled out quickly before it left a mark.
This time, the truckers are back, and this time they’ve definitely left a mark.
After the yellow vest protests, liberal governments learned a very, very narrow lesson: Don’t do a carbon tax unless somehow you’re making it up to working people so they don’t pay anything extra. That lesson, translated to Biden’s Build Back Better Act, made it heavy on investments in clean energy rather than policies that would purposely raise gas prices.
But the lesson elites drew from Paris was way too narrow. The real takeaway is that people have been so driven into the ground by 40 years of neoliberalism and austerity – a system that smashes communities into little individual pieces – that they’re simply not willing to take any more crap for any reason. During the pandemic, instead of calibrating restrictions with a cost-benefit analysis, many governments went as far as they thought they could take it, and were enthusiastically cheered on by many of the upper and upper-middle class people who form the backbone of center left coalitions around the world.
This anti-mandate trucker protest is the backlash. The media has zeroed in on the white supremacists who have inserted themselves into it, but taking a closer look at public opinion toward it should be sobering for the left. In recent polling done by Ipsos, Canadians were given two statements to agree with:
One: “I may not agree with everything the people who have taken part in the truck protests in Ottawa have said, but their frustration is legitimate and worthy of our sympathy.”
Two: “What the people taking part in the truck protests in Ottawa have said and done is wrong and does not deserve any of our sympathy.”
What the poll does is take out somebody’s opinion on the tactic of shutting down Ottawa or jamming up the Ambassador Bridge and asks directly about the grievances.
Overall, 54% of Canadians said the protesters do not deserve any of our sympathy. That might be a comforting number for Canadian progressives, but the trouble lies deeper in the numbers. For people 55 and up, only 37% sympathized with the protesters. But among people 18-34, that number was 61%.
Meanwhile, people who made less than $40,000 a year were supportive of the protesters, 54-46%. People who make over 100k are the least supportive.
Ipsos also asked whether people agree with the statement, “The truck protest is mostly economically disadvantaged Canadians letting governments know that they are struggling.”
51% of People making less than 40k agreed with that assessment. For those making over 100k, only 32% agreed. Now, who would you say is more plugged into the feelings of working-class Canadians – those making less than 40k a year, or those making more than $100,000?
Ipsos also asked folks if they support the Black Lives Matter movement. Overall, Canadians say they support BLM by a 68-32 margin. Among Gen Z, the support was 86%, which is practically universal. Among 18-34 year olds, it was 77%. Ipsos doesn’t offer economic crosstabs for this one, but they do have a category for people with only a high school degree, and among those, support for Black Lives Matter is 64%.
Now of course no poll is perfect, and none of this is precise, but the general picture is clear: The people in Canada most likely to sympathize with the truckers are young and working class. And most of those people also support Black Lives Matter. This is a frustrated group of people who are up for grabs politically. If progressives simply write them off as right wing reactionaries, the right wing is all too happy to tell them that yes, that’s exactly what they are, and welcome them in.
Emma Jackson, a lefty writing in the Canadian publication The Breach, has grasped this intuitively, and has a new piece reaching out to her northern comrades, urging them to take what’s going on seriously. If the left is being out organized by the right among the working class, it’s not the left anymore. I recommend the full piece, but Jackson writes:
What we’re currently witnessing is a troubling sign that COVID-19 could become a generational-defining moment of politicization for the Right— radicalizing tens of thousands who are disaffected by the system and directing them straight into the welcoming arms of the far-right.
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Instead of building an insular movement restricted to people who agree with each other 93 per cent of the time, the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views. It’s why the Freedom Convoy isn’t just being ardently defended by white supremacists on Rebel News, but also by anti-vaccine Green Party supporters in the inboxes of mainstream environmental organizations.
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Perhaps the most troubling response has been the speed at which people have unfriended, unfollowed, or blocked their friends and family who have expressed even the shallowest support for the convoy. While people are under absolutely no obligation to be on the receiving end of hate and vitriol, we’re never going to out-organize the far-right by cutting ourselves off from the same social base they’re actively recruiting from.
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Labour’s institutional heft is unparalleled, but those of us belonging to other movement threads—climate justice, anti-racism, Indigenous solidarity— must also reflect on how it is that the far-right is doing a better job of recruiting our own family, friends, and co-workers into their movements, than we are into our own.
This week’s Deconstructed podcast, if you haven’t listened yet, is on the intersection of gas prices and the spiraling war in Yemen. Interesting stuff here from Ken Klippenstein and Shireen Al-Adeimi.
With the exception of elected progressives - and some will argue with me on that -, both the Democratic and Republican parties have put the great unwashed (everyone who doesn't have b/millions or a "golden parachute" as their fail-safe escape) into a box marked "use whenever you feel like it." Their answer to criticism of them is to occasionally throw a bone to the masses or, conversely, to distract by exploiting differences between groups within the masses. It never occurs to the pols that we may be smarter than they think.
I am sorry about those who are groaning under all the limitations imposed by governments, while the rich can sail above all this.
But I am afraid that the idea that political parties should make everyone comfortable when civilization's survival is tottering on the edge of a volcano in full fiery rage, is not a very practical or timely one. There is a time for marching orders being given and people liking or lumping it and following them, and we are dangerously close to that point. Of course, it matters if the orders so given make sense, but that is another discussion and not what I think that fits here and now in the context of the article being commented.
I rather comment on what people like Greta Thunberg are saying, because that is what is at the heart of what is here and what is coming soon and will stay with whatever remains of us for a number of definitely inconvenient, unpopular and uncomfortable centuries.