On Jan. 28, a convoy of Canadian truckers arrived in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, from British Columbia, and have been protesting ever since. Their blockade has placed the city in a gridlock, and their continued honking has caused disruption for the city’s residents. They have the support of the People’s Party of Canada, a far-right political organization. Their demands: the removal of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the end of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions they feel have been unjustly imposed on Canadian citizens, including vaccine mandates. The narrative put forth was that they were working-class people rising up against a tyrannical elite run by the likes of Trudeau.
In addition to the support of Canada’s far right, American conservatives have also come out in support of the protests. American donors have given the Canadian movement nearly $10 million, and prominent conservative figures, including U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, have referred to the protestors as “patriots” and “heroes.” In retaliation, Trudeau issued a national public emergency order that allows Canadian police to arrest protestors and banks to freeze protestors’ accounts.
It is worth noting that the protest is representative of a minority of the Canadian working class, and even of the Canadian right. Around 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, and according to The Detroit News, there has been concern among Canadian conservatives that this display will “alienate more moderate voters” of the Canadian right. In America, however, support for the protestors seems to be prominent among the more mainstream portion of the conservative movement. Tucker Carlson has praised them outright, referring to them as “working-class people who are really sick of being pushed around and told what to inject into their bodies,” and to Trudeau as “Fidel Castro’s illegitimate son.”
It is very interesting to me to hear populist, working-class-oriented rhetoric from conservative pundits. Besides the irony of Carlson, who has a net worth of approximately $30 million and whose stepmother was the “heiress to the wealth generated by the Swanson TV dinner” frozen foods empire according to snopes.com, condemning the “elites,” American and Canadian conservative policy has proven time and time again to be detrimental to the interests of both the American and Canadian working class.
The working class, understood here as members of society who work for a wage and do not control any capital, contains more people than white truck drivers. Within the working class are also the Black and Hispanic Americans who are harmed by the “tough-on-crime,” pro-police attitude that American conservatives like Carlson espouse, which is evidenced by the much higher rate at which Black and Hispanic Americans are killed by police officers. The People’s Party of Canada has continuously advocated the building of oil and gas pipelines. One such pipeline was protested against by the Indigenous Wet’suwet’en population, who objected to the building of the pipeline across land traditionally belonging to them. Do Indigenous people not count as working class? Why does the opposition to a vaccine mandate that most truckers have followed take precedence over the concerns of Canada’s Indigenous population? Trudeau has certainly not shown opposition to the expansion of Canadian oil pipelines — why is this a less valid demand to a movement that is supposedly concerned with the benefit of the “working class?”
These protests have proven that for the Canadian and American right, the “working class” is an invention of political convenience. The primary support base for the right-wing protestors of both countries is working-class, white Americans. The conservative wings of both countries’ political establishments clearly do not have the best interests of working-class people as a whole at heart. All they have to offer is a played-out aesthetic. In an essay for the Hampton Institute, Matt Nguyen-Ngo described this phenomenon via “politicians like Lindsey Graham wearing a cowboy hat to evoke the ranchers of the ‘Old West,’ or New York real estate investor and [former] U.S. President Donald Trump using laypeople’s language to appeal to the rural white working class.” There is a long-standing tradition among prominent conservative figures of co-opting white “redneck” aesthetics in order to enact policies that will not benefit the working class at all. It is worth noting that the word “redneck” was initially used to describe white, southern coal miners who sided with a coal miners’ union, even as the federal government came to the aid of the mining industry.
The greatest threat to working-class America is by no means the spread of a vaccine against a deadly disease. But by co-opting working-class aesthetics and incorporating the vaccine into a capitalistic narrative centered around “freedom,” the American and Canadian right are able to divert the attention of the American working class away from issues that truly affect them — issues that would be inconvenient to the interests of the corporations that always have, and will always, benefit from the implementation of conservative policies. The truckers’ protest is not a working-class uprising against a powerful elite, but a wealthy elite taking advantage of an unexamined dissatisfaction to direct the frustrations of working people away from themselves.
Desmond Keuper is a sophomore majoring in philosophy.