Ryan Grimm offers some caution for the left in how it to respond to the Ottawa Canadian trucker protests (that in Windsor and elsewhere are not so much truckers).
Polling from Ipsos shows a generational and economic split between those with more sympathy for the protests and those with less:
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%.
Polling suggests, Grimm believes, young, working-class Canadians, at least, are up for grabs politically. It would be a mistake for the left to dismiss the protesters simply as “right wing reactionaries [when] the right wing is all too happy to tell them that yes, that’s exactly what they are, and welcome them in.”
What is driving populist movements worldwide is a deep sense that the system is rigged against Average Janes and Joes. Right and left disagree about how to deal with it, but not about the rigging itself, Emma Jackson wrote at The Breach.
That became clear when she came face-to-face with an angry trucker from another Canadian convoy three years ago:
My story tells me we should punch up. The corporate elite and their political allies in government, from where I stand, are knowingly torching my generation’s future to continue lining the pockets of a billionaire class.
His story points to hardened borders, low taxes, and “small government” as solutions. Mine turns to universal public programs, repatriating land to Indigenous peoples, and worker control over all aspects of our economy.
Same complaints about government failures. Different solutions. Perhaps we should look for common ground, Lincoln Project style.
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.
One of the outcomes of living through late-stage capitalism and COVID-19 has been an overwhelming breakdown of community and social fabric. People desperately want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and the anti-mandate movement is openly extending them that opportunity without requiring that they belong to an activist subculture.
In fact, I’d venture a guess that if you had walked around Parliament Hill last Saturday and asked those with the convoy whether they considered themselves to be “activists,” the vast majority would have shrugged and said, “I’m a regular person fighting for my freedom.”
I don’t know if either Grimm and Jackson are right about these protests. The fringe right, like the fringe left, has elements more than happy to hijack protests for their own more-extreme ends. But the activist subculture’s tendency to adopt jargon as signifiers of political insiderness comes off as elitist to those looking in from the outside. Perhaps as much as “Have a blessed day” and “covered by the blood” on the Christian right.
At a time when the right actively radicalizes the disaffected online, the left probably needs a “mass on-ramp” of its own.
(h/t ML)
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