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/241/ Three Articles: Peace & Social War in North America (Patreon)

Published:
2022-02-15 13:18:18
Edited:
2022-04-05 11:03:04
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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[Patreon Exclusive]

On dovish conservatives, Trumpist coup-mongers and Canadian truckers.

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Live debate/book launch in NYC, Feb 22nd: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-debate-book-launch-the-end-of-the-end-of-history-tickets-261000468427

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We examine what arguments 'pro-worker conservatives' are making in an aim to rid the GOP of warmongers and what this says about their vision of politics. In that light we also look at the Trumpist wing and ask what they might have in common, if anything, with the former. And we debate the Canadian protests against vaccine mandates and the left's response to it so far.

Three Articles:

Hawks Are Standing in the Way of a New Republican Party, Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, NYT (attached)

The second coming of Donald Trump, The Economist (attached)

As Workers Resist, the Left Recoils, Edwin Aponte, The Bellows

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Comments

Davka Smolah Collective

Man, which anti-imps has Phil been following all these years? I can only name two countries Left anti-imps have ever wanted to declare war on in my lifetime, and one of them is America. 27:00 the real stolen election was 2000

Gary

Thank you for once again reinforcing my position in various spats I’ve bravely partaken in on the internet in recent days. I am so honored.

Kenneth Smith

The left doesn’t hate Canadian truckers, 90% of them don’t agree with the protests lol

Gabo Goff

You guys seem to buy bs of trucker protest in that it was small group of truckers and has been defeated by counter protest.

Van Penner

The coherence (or lack thereof) of the Canadian trucker protests can be clearly seen in some of Jordan Peterson's recent videos decrying the Canadian covid response. Being the ideological figurehead of that movement Peterson only offers the same kind of neoliberal PMC whining (return to normal except the banks are a little nicer and I don't have to wear a mask) seen on the liberal left. Even many of the trucker movement tactics mirror those of woke political movements, with truckers contacting the workplaces of counter-protestors in efforts to get them fired in my city as an example. It seems to me that the trucker protest is more of a petit bourgeois whinefest LARP like the capitol riot in Washington than a worker-led collective action, I know that many trucking firms have payed their staff to drive company vehicles to Ottawa and join the protests. This may change with the insane new financial controls which were just announced but as of the recording I think there were some oversights.

Carson H

George and Phil are over-optimistic about "conservative working-class revolt." It's fake in the US and it's fake in Canada. The position articulated in the NYT piece is indeed far more critical and coherent than what most right-wing thinkers are saying these days, but where is the social and political basis for a project like this? I just can't buy into the idea of a functional alliance between socially conservative workers and those sections of American capital which are opposed to Silicon Valley/high finance/globalists, etc. The Republican Party can't reconcile its interests or those of its backers with the interests of labour, regardless of how anyone feels about wokeness. It seems to me that both the truckers (i.e., a subset of truckers plus various other non-trucker elements) and the Trump restorationists are involved with something as politically vacuous as anything liberals have been up to lately. It's fair to criticize left populism for attempting to do "mass politics without the masses" and so on, but how is this stuff any different? I'm not at all convinced that its "working-class character" is any more pronounced than those of the Bernie or Corbyn campaigns.

M Young

I haven't followed these Canadian protests too closely so I may be off base, but is there a substantial difference between what these truckers are doing and what groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain have done to further their agendas? One could argue that opposing vaccine mandates is a more sympathetic concern compared with the concerns of these other groups. One could also argue that the Canadian protests are more legitimate by dint of them being directly related to the protestor's livelihoods, as opposed to what could be perceived as an affectation (albeit that those criticising Insulate Britain etc. rarely attack the group's views on climate action, but rather they focus on how its members are privileged PMC types and how blocking roads is bad). However I do find it suspect that most people's views on these different protests neatly maps onto whichever side of the "Woke blue-haired privileged PMC vs fascist white male labourer" discourse they are on, especially given the similarity of the tactics used by both protest groups (as I understand it, the truckers aren't protesting by withdrawing their labour but rather by blocking roads and causing a nuisance; they happen to be using their trucks to achieve this but they could equally have used human chains, people gluing themselves to buildings, whatever). Is the discourse about which protests are good and which are bad really just a matter of aesthetic preference?

J P 3

I am tempted to give this episode a four Peter Thiel Fellowship rating, but for now I will settle on three. On a more serious note, I think Patrick Wyman's piece on Trump and the American Gentry is a much more useful lens for understanding the U.S. and to a lesser degree, I suspect Canada. The Canadian anti-vax protests had some strong echoes of the 2010 Tea Party -- even in terms of the way that Rupert Murdoch's media companies amplified, championed, and publicized the protests. I disagree with George too that an owner operator of a $150,000 to $200,000 semi is a "worker" in the traditional sense. These are more like small business owners. I'm sure there may have even been culturally conservative working class people who participated in the protests, but the protest demands were not rooted in any kind of working class demands. The unifying thread was a kind of cultural conservatism. What ultimately ended the protest was that a group of small capitalists, interfered with the profits of much wealthier capitalists, and the wealthier capitalists have a lot more influence and leverage with government officials. As soon as the Trudeau government threatened to confiscate the small business owners' property, the protests effectively ended. This wasn't exactly the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike.

Red Shmoo

Maybe after these defiant truckers beat the Pfizer Moderna Regime they’ll “FREE 🇺🇸 “ themselves from having to ingest loads of Adderall or Crystal Meth just to fulfill their industry’s unrealistic schedule demands?

Josh Hafford

I’m just catching up but Phil precisely described how the Republicans stole the 2000 election. “Trumpians in strategic locations within the electoral apparatus mount a soft coup, manipulate counts of votes, etc”. Then says it’s a genuine but not realistic fear.

Ghost Runner

I’m in Canada and while the truckers are not Nazis or fascists , they are not a left working class phenomenon. It’s mixed and lots of libertarianism there. Aponte keeps it very short and sweet because he cannot claim it’s left-wing. No class consciousness.

Atticus Canham-Clyne

I enjoy your guys' work quite a bit but I think your hostility toward the PMC and neoliberal technocracy clouds your judgement about the class nature of right-populism and the 'trucker' protests in particular. In what way is the Freedom Convoy a working class movement? Only one of its primary organizers was actually a trucker and he was an avowed white supremacist. The rest were classical economic liberals, evangelical Christians, and western Canadian secessionists connected to the oil and gas industries. It was in no way a mass movement: at its peak in Ottawa it was at most 2,000 people with 400 vehicles, only half of which were actual trucks. It seems to be a classic manifestation of petit bourgeois right-populism: demands for less regulation, a hostility by small capital against big capital. The majority of the protestors seem to be small business owners and other assorted petty bourgeois types. In the US, statistically, the wealthier a county, the more it donated to the Freedom Convoy. And as a member of the North American working class, and someone who has lived and worked with many truck drivers, I can say the Freedom Convoy was not representative of them. Just bc the corporate media is opposed to something does not automatically make it good or "working-class", You are allowed to take a nuanced stance on things. I wonder if, as PMC academics, you are afraid of being seen as effete or un-manly so you identify with this conception of the working class, shared by both major parties in the US at least, as a bunch of racist white guys in hard hats and trucks? Of course, the North American working class is not like that at all. By your logic why aren't Q-Anon or the Bolsonarist truck protests last year in Brazil also working class movements? Where do you draw the line? You seem to take the claims of the Hawley-ite right far too seriously.

Atticus Canham-Clyne

If you're looking for manifestations of working class radicalism in anglophone North America forget the Freedom Convoy. There are many recent actual examples: the Kellogg's strike, the current Amazon organizing drive, the votes on Starbucks unionization, Strike-tober, etc. Those are actual working people, not petit bourgeois populists.

Paul Brewer

This might have been the worst episode in the history of Bungacast, including the one with John McAfee.