The excellent Danish television series, Borgen, which chronicles the career of an avowedly centre-left female politician, has an excellent episode in its third and final season (available on Netflix) which chronicles one of the biggest problems with setting up a new political party.
The protagonist of the show, Brigitte Nyborg, has recently been exiled from her own party, and announces that she will set up a new one. People flock to her from across Danish society. She attracts socialists convinced that the left has sold them out. She attracts people concerned about immigration. She attracts pro-lifers, and people who want to further liberalise abortion laws. She attracts gay rights activists, as well as conservative Christians. All of them are convinced that they see what they want to see: A new party which will deliver for them. And of course, most of them are wrong, because a party cannot be all those things at one time and survive. In the end, many of the people who join the party walk away disappointed. When you have to be for something, you start to lose people.
The thing about protest movements, by contrast, is that they can do all the things that a political party cannot: Protest movements do not necessarily need to produce a policy platform. They don’t have to be for anything. They can just be against things.
And on that subject, a poll published two days ago in Canada should be sending shivers down the spine of the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau:
An Ipsos poll published Thursday and conducted exclusively for Global News showed that nearly 46 per cent of Canadians say they “may not agree with everything” the trucker convoy says or does, but the frustration of protesters is “legitimate and worthy” of sympathy.
This sympathy has risen to 61 per cent particularly among Canadians aged 18 to 34, according to the poll.
On the other hand, 54 per cent of Canadians who participated in this poll believe that people taking part in the protests do not “deserve any of our sympathy” and that what they “have said and done is wrong.”
“It’s not that people are tired. They’re very frustrated,” Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos public affairs told Global News. “And what’s happened is that this protest has become a lightning rod for that frustration.”
Those numbers should put the fear of God into Canadian politicians: Yes, on the one hand, a majority agree that the protests are terrible and without any legitimacy. But on the other hand, almost half of Canadians, and a clear majority of younger Canadians (who traditionally vote for Trudeau’s Liberals, by the way) sympathise with the Trucker protests. When 46% of the public are sympathising with people who are shutting down the capital city and interrupting trade across the US-Canadian border, something very dangerous is happening, from the perspective of those in power.
What’s more interesting again, though, is that the sympathy for the protests does not match up with the opinion polling on the stated reason for the protests: The Truckers, remember, are protesting vaccine mandates, and expressing a desire to work without having to take a vaccine. On that issue, they are, according to polls, in a minority: Some 67% of Canadians, in January, said they actually wanted to see more restrictions on the unvaccinated, not fewer. If these protests were simply being viewed by the public as being about vaccines alone, then they would not be garnering as much support as they are.
What’s happening here, then, is the Borgen phenomenon, and it is very dangerous for Trudeau, and for other western Governments: The Truckers are becoming an avatar of wider discontent – drawing in people concerned about inflation, immigration, crime, globalisation, and every other issue under the sun where the establishment in the west has a very clear consensus view. The protests are becoming a revolt not simply against vaccine mandates, but against the established political consensus. That is the thing, perhaps, that is making them particularly terrifying to establishment types watching Canada from overseas.
Across the west, there is an increasing desperation to write off growing expressions of dissent as “extremism” and “fringe movements” and, of course, “far right”. Some people, like my colleague Thade Andy, writing here last week, consider such statements to be “organised smears”. The truth is that they are something much closer to a form of denial. “It’s only a fringe”. “It’s only the far right”, and so on, and so forth.
The problem, of course, is that it’s not. “Trump and Brexit” are cited so often as to be a cliché, but those two events, almost six years ago now, spoke to a widespread discontent with the liberal political consensus which has never been meaningfully addressed in the years that followed. What we are seeing, now, in Canada, is another expression of that discontent. It is not simply a protest about vaccine mandates: it is a protest about a political settlement which has grown to benefit a managerial middle class in society: Academics, Tech company managers, government officials, and so on, and leave a great many others behind. Many traditionally working class people are being pressed by inflation, having their wages eroded by immigration, and having their cultural traditions discarded as discrimination. Meanwhile the young, though avowedly progressive in their social views, are increasingly locked out of access to wealth, and housing, and the ability to start a family. These two groups may have very differing priorities, but their anger is no different. Across the west, then, there is a growing sense of this anger, and loss, and resentment, and it is not limited to simply the fringes. But that class that benefits from all of this remains in power, and they will not give that power up until it is taken from them.
What we are seeing in Canada is a tremor. In the years to come, an earthquake will follow, unless the establishment stops deluding itself about the nature of the problem.