The truckers’ protest in Ottawa is the latest barrage from the world’s disaffected in the revolt that found expression in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the 2017 Unite the Right march on Charlottesville, the rise of QAnon, and the Jan. 6 insurrection in the halls of Congress.
One thing that stands out in the Canadian truckers’ protests against vaccination requirements specifically and the Trudeau government generally is the strong support they are getting from conservative political leaders and media figures in this country.
“We want those great Canadian truckers to know that we are with them all the way,” Trump told rally-goers in Conroe, Texas on Jan. 29.
“I see they have Trump signs all over the place and I’m proud that they do,” he added.
On Feb. 12, Trump brought it home to America during a Fox News appearance: “That’s what happens, you can push people so far and our country is a tinderbox too, don’t kid yourself.”
The former president is not alone.
“I hope the truckers do come to America,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, told The Daily Signal, a conservative website. “Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights, you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.”
Nor was all this confined to North America. “Ottawa truckers’ convoy galvanizes far right worldwide,” an article in Politico on Feb. 6 declared: “Leading Republicans, right-wing influencers and white supremacist groups have jumped at the chance to promote the standoff in Ottawa to a global audience.”
In “Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party,” by Shanker Satyanath of N.Y.U., Nico Voigtländer of U.C.L.A. and Hans-Joachim Voth of the University of Zurich offer a counterintuitive perspective on the spread of right-wing organizing in Canada, Hungary, Brazil, India, Poland, Austria and in the United States.
The three authors argue that in the 1930s in Europe
Dense networks of civic associations such as bowling clubs, choirs, and animal breeders went hand-in-hand with a more rapid rise of the Nazi Party. Towns with one standard deviation higher association density saw at least one-third faster entry. All types of associations — veteran associations and nonmilitary clubs, “bridging” and “bonding” associations — positively predict National Socialist Party entry. Party membership, in turn, predicts electoral success. These results suggest that social capital aided the rise of the Nazi movement that ultimately destroyed Germany’s first democracy.
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Neil Lee and Cornelius Lipp, all of the London School of Economics, pick up this argument in a November 2021 paper on the paradoxical role of social capital in fostering far right movements. Noting that the “positive view of social capital has, more recently, been challenged,” the three economic geographers write:
The rise in votes for Trump was the result of long-term economic and population decline in areas with strong social capital. This hypothesis is confirmed by the econometric analysis conducted for US counties. Long-term declines in employment and population — rather than in earnings, salaries, or wages — in places with relatively strong social capital propelled Donald Trump to the presidency and almost secured his re-election.
It is, the three authors continue,
precisely the long-term economic and demographic decline of the places that still rely on a relatively strong social capital that is behind the rise of populism in the U.S. Strong, but declining communities in parts of the American Rustbelt, the Great Plains, and elsewhere, reacted at the ballot box to being ignored, neglected and being left behind.
Translated to the present, in economic and culturally besieged communities, the remnants of social capital have been crucial to the mobilization of men and women — mostly men — who chanted “You will not replace us” and “blood and soil” in Charlottesville, who shot bear spray at police officers on Jan. 6 and who brought Ottawa to its knees for more than two weeks.
In a separate paper, “The Rise of Populism and the Revenge of the Places,” Rodríguez-Pose argued:
Populism is not the result of persistent poverty. Places that have been chronically poor are not the ones rebelling.” Instead, he continued, “the rise of populism is a tale of how the long-term decline of formerly prosperous places, disadvantaged by processes that have rendered them exposed and almost expendable, has triggered frustration and anger. In turn, voters in these so-called ‘places that don’t matter’ have sought their revenge at the ballot box.
In an email, Rodríguez-Pose wrote:
Social capital in the U.S. has been declining for a long time. Associationism and the feeling of community are no longer what they used to be and this has been documented many times. What my co-authors and I are saying is that in those places (counties) where social capital has declined less, long-term demographic and employment decline triggered a switch to Donald Trump. These communities have said “enough is enough” of a system that they feel bypasses them and voted for an anti-system candidate, who is willing to shake the foundations of the system.
In a separate email, Lee noted that while most analysts view higher social capital as a healthy development in communities, it can also foster negative ethnic and racial solidarity: “Social capital can be a great thing when it is open and inclusive. But when everyone knows each other, this can result in in-group dynamics — particularly when people are led to be concerned about other groups.”
The accompanying graphic, produced by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, shows the geographic distribution of social capital by county in the United States as of 2018. Social capital is highest in yellow areas and lowest in dark blue regions. The variables used to measure social capital included levels of family unity, collective efficacy, institutional health and community health.
Social capital correlated positively with the volunteer rate, the share of adults who made charitable contributions, the share married and the share who trust their neighbors. It correlated negatively with heavy television watching by children, the share of children living with a single parent and the share of births that were to unwed mothers.
Regina Anne Bateson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, wrote me in a Feb. 14 email: “The situation in Canada is often described as a truckers’ protest. However, it’s not just truckers who are participating, and this is not just a protest.”
The situation in Ottawa quickly devolved, Bateson argues,
into an illegal occupation, with heavy elements of extortion. Many people here describe it as a hostage situation. The convoy has deployed tactics intended to harm local residents, such as deafening horn-blowing, in an attempt to extract concessions from the government. More than 400 hate incidents have been reported to police, and there have been coordinated attacks on the 9-1-1 system, flooding it with calls so residents cannot get through.
The occupation of Ottawa has become a “militia-like activity,” Bateson writes. “The convoy has resupply bases on the outskirts of town, as well as mobile squads of pickup trucks that rove around the city, delivering supplies and harassing local residents.” The protest organizers have “even been experimenting with governance, including providing services like snow and trash removal. Remarkably, they recently inaugurated a cohort of ‘peace officers,’ who are authorized to detain people if needed. Justin Ling, a journalist, reports that some of the convoy’s peace officers have subsequently tried to arrest Ottawa police.”
Perhaps most important, Bateson described the
significant international involvement, including political support, media coverage, and crowdfunding dollars from the United States. We are also seeing evidence of social media manipulation designed to increase polarization. The includes the use of fake and hijacked social media accounts, troll farms and bots, and inflammatory photos and messages being pumped out en masse.
Asked what the potential consequences of the protests are, Bateson replied:
There are many medium- and long-term consequences, including emboldened populist and extremist movements within Canada, increased international visibility for those groups (particularly in U.S. media outlets), new recruits to those movements, and the use of crowdfunding as a new form of grassroots foreign intervention. In areas directly affected by the convoy, such as Ottawa, there is also a profound sense of abandonment and loss of trust in the authorities, particularly the police. The convoy has undermined the rule of law in Canada, and they have upended the norms that govern social and political life here.
In this context, I asked Rodríguez-Pose whether the truck protests in Canada are a harbinger of future right-wing populist protests, and he pointed to developments in France in his emailed reply:
In France, the phenomenon of the “gilets jaunes” (or yellow vests) is clearly an example of the “revenge of the places that don’t matter.” This is a movement that emerged as a result of a severe hike in diesel taxes in order to pay for the green transition. But this was a decision that many people in small town and rural France felt imposed significant costs on them. These are people who had been encouraged just over a decade before to buy diesel cars and, in the meantime, had seen their public transport — mainly buses and rail lines — decline and/or disappear. Most of them felt this was a decision taken by what they consider an aloof Parisian elite that is, on average, far wealthier than they were and enjoys a world-class public transport system.
The pitting of a populist rural America against a cosmopolitan urban America has deep economic and cultural roots, and this divide has become a staple of contemporary polarization.
“Urban residents are much more likely to have progressive values. This result applies across three categories of values: family values, gender equality, and immigration attitudes,” Davide Luca of Cambridge University, Javier Terrero-Davila and Neil Lee, both of the London School of Economics, and Jonas Stein of the Arctic University of Norway write in their January 2022 article, “Progressive Cities: Urban-rural polarization of social values and economic development around the world.”
Luca and his colleagues emphasize the divisive role of what Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who died last year, called the “silent revolution” and what Ron Lesthaeghe of the Free University of Brussels describes as the “second demographic transition.”
Citing Inglehart, Luca and his co-authors write:
when people are secure, they focus on postmaterialist goals such as “belonging, esteem and free choice.” The possibility of taking survival for granted “brings cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely, giving rise to a new type of society that promotes human emancipation on many fronts.”
The urban-rural conflict between post-materialistic values (shorthand for autonomy, environmental protection, sexual freedom, gender equality) and more traditional values (family obligation, sexual restraint, church, community) is most acute in “high income countries,” they write. This suggests, they continue, “that only more advanced economies can provide cities with the material comfort, and probably the right institutional environment, to make progressive values relevant.”
In an email, Luca elaborated:
There is a strong correlation between my analyses (and similar lines of research) and trends highlighted in Second Demographic Transition theories. Some of the factors driving the second demographic transition are definitely linked to the development of “self-expression” values, especially among women.
Cities, Luca argued, “are the catalysts for these changes to occur. In other words, cities are the loci where self-expression values can develop, in turn affecting reproductive behaviors and, hence, demographic patterns.”
Social capital is by no means the only glue that holds right-wing movements together.
The Rodríguez-Pose and Luca papers suggest that cultural conflict and regional economic discrepancies also generate powerful political momentum for those seeking to build a “coalition of resentment.” Since the 2016 election of Trump, the Republican Party has focused on that just that kind of Election Day alliance.
Shannon M. Monnat and David L. Brown, sociologists at Syracuse and Cornell, have analyzed the economic and demographic characteristics of counties that sharply increased their vote for Trump in 2016 compared with their support for Mitt Romney in 2012.
In their October 2017 paper “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election,” Monnat and Brown found that “Trump performed better in counties with more economic distress, worse health, higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates, lower educational attainment, and higher marital separation/divorce rates.”
The accompanying graphic demonstrates the pattern of Trump’s strength compared with Romney’s, the red bars showing characteristics of areas that voted more for Trump than Romney, the blue bars showing the characteristics of communities that cast more votes for Romney than for Trump.
Trump’s populist message, Monnat and Brown write in their conclusion,
may have been attractive to many long-term Democratic voters in these places who felt abandoned by a Democratic Party that has failed to articulate a strong pro-working class message, whose agendas often emphasize policies and programs to help the poor at what seems like the expense of the working-class, and who evidently believed it did not have to work very hard to earn votes from behind the “big blue wall.”
In “Social Capital, Religion, Wal-Mart, and Hate Groups in America” a 2012 paper, Stephan J. Goetz of Penn State, Anil Rupasingha, a research economist at the Department of Agriculture, and Scott Loveridge of Michigan State University found that “Higher incomes, more income inequality, higher crime rates, and the presence of more Wal-Mart Stores and foreign-born populations are each associated with a more likely presence of one or more hate groups in the county.”
The Wal-Mart effect, they wrote, likely results from the “economic turmoil” as communities “experience steep decline in their traditional downtown shopping districts.”
Two factors work to lower the likelihood of hate group formation, they write: “a higher stock of social capital is associated with fewer hate groups” and “a greater share of mainline Protestant adherents is associated with fewer hate groups.”
The opposite is true, Goetz, Rupasingha and Loveridge found, “for evangelical Protestant adherents,” writing that “for every 10 percent additional evangelical in a county, the number of hate groups in that county increases by 17 percent.”
Regardless of the sources of discontent and regardless of the characteristic of those leading the assault on the liberal democratic state, there is no question that the trucker’s insurgency in Canada is catching fire abroad — currently in France, Britain, Belgium, New Zealand and Australia.
“Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests go global: Australia to Austria witness anti-COVID vaccine agitations,” read the Feb. 11 FirstPost headline on a story that described the following developments: “Police and anti-vaccine protesters clashed on the grounds of New Zealand’s parliament, with dozens arrested after demonstrators who laid siege to the legislature for three days were ordered to move on.”
And: “Brussels authorities have banned an upcoming ‘freedom convoy’ protest from entering the Belgian capital.”
And: “French police warned Thursday they would prevent so-called ‘Freedom Convoys’ from blockading Paris, as protesters against Covid rules began to drive towards the capital.”
And: “Austria also announced a ban on any motor protests as several hundred vehicles were set to converge Friday in central Vienna, as well as near a major public park in the Austrian capital.”
There will also be a test of the vitality of the trucker protest movement in the United States. “The People’s Convoy” has issued a call to “truckers and all freedom loving Americans” to join together at a rally March 4 and 5 at Coachella Valley in Indio, Calif, which is expected to then aim for Washington D.C.
The organizers claim they will provide “fuel reimbursement upon arrival for all attending this event” and “the convoy will roll out of California following the rally. Convoy details will be forthcoming.”
There are risks and opportunities on both sides. For Joe Biden, a protest that brings traffic and commerce to a standstill in the nation’s capital would test his skill as the country’s commander in chief, a test that could restore his faltering public image or send him on the road to defeat in 2024. For Trump and his allies on the right, such a protest could mobilize core voters going into the coming elections or it could reinforce the Jan. 6 image of unconstrained chaos, severely damaging Republican prospects.
Non-college whites in the United States, like the protesting truckers in Canada, continue to face grim prospects, subordinated by meritocratic competition that rewards what they lack: advanced education and top scores on aptitude tests — accomplishments that feed the resource allocation, the status contests and the employment hierarchies that dominate contemporary life and leave those who cannot prevail out in the cold.
As long as these voters remain on a downward trajectory, they will continue to be a disruptive force, not only in the political arena but in society at large.
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