The tyranny of high-status opinion. By Brendan O’Neill.
At first glance, it looked like one of the strangest, most incongruous moments of the great trucker uprising of 2022. There were the truckers and their working-class allies, in Ottawa, loudly agitating against Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates, when a bunch of hyper-woke, definitely not working-class counter-protesters rocked up to rail against this horn-honking throng.
And what did they chant, these painfully PC counter-protesters? ‘Trans rights are human rights’, that’s what.
As clear as anything, these supposed leftists, seemingly horrified by the sight of working-class men and women fighting for their rights, engaged in arguably the most striking non-sequitur of the 2020s so far – they brought transgenderism into an issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with transgenderism. …
At a deeper level, this weird, disjointed counter-revolt against the ‘revolting’ truckers actually makes sense. For what we had here was the shrill, noisy reassertion of high-status opinion against the supposedly low-status demands of the truckers for more freedom and better working conditions. This was the correct-thinking set staking its moral authority over the irritated truckers; the upper-middle-class guardians of approved ‘progressive’ thought pushing back against a pesky, old-fashioned, grassroots demand for liberty and respect. There was at least a semi-conscious element to this spectacular non-sequitur on the streets of Ottawa — the elite counter-revolters were essentially saying that identity is now more important than class, that issues like trans rights now thoroughly trump workers’ rights, and that being ‘left-wing’ no longer means supporting the masses against the state, but rather is about reprimanding the masses for their supposed wrongthink and siding with the state against the people.
In fact, it goes even further than this. These counter-protesters, whether wittingly or not, were marking out the truckers as ‘problematic’, as bigots, as real-life Emmanuel Goldsteins deserving of the most severe forms of condemnation and even punishment. They were putting a target sign on the heads of these unpersons, signalling that they are fair game for shame, censure and even police repression and assault. The counter-protesters, for all their self-indulgent fantasies of radicalism, were behaving as the running dogs of the Trudeau regime. Trudeau had already branded the truckers as ‘transphobic’ — and also Islamophobic, homophobic and anti-black — on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. And these ‘trans rights’ counter-protesters were essentially doing Trudeau’s bidding, obediently echoing the vile anti-working-class prejudices of the Canadian state, as they hollered at these working-class protesters: ‘Trans rights are human rights!’ They were publicly declaring that the truckers are thought criminals, possessors of dangerous, bigoted thoughts, and thus they may be crushed. And lo, they were.
In other words, that strange ‘trans rights’ counter-protest captured a larger truth about the truckers’ uprising. Which is that wokeness has enabled the Canadian state’s exceptionally intolerant and violent assault on this working-class uprising. …
The Canadian state’s crackdown on the truckers has been almost unbelievably severe. …
Today the way that ordinary people are buttered up for police battery, marked out as ‘suspect’, publicly branded as deserving of censure and punishment, is through being called ‘phobic’, insufficiently woke. The language might be more PC, a tad less McCarthyite, but the end result is the same: people are punished on the basis that they are beyond the pale, that they carry incorrect thoughts and beliefs that could potentially pollute the nation. Trudeau is the modern Joe McCarthy, essentially writing certain people off as enemies of wokeness, and fundamentally as enemies of Canada.
The woke have been at the forefront of depicting the truckers as scum, deserving of violent reprimand. Trudeau got in there early, updating McCarthyism by applying it to the ‘anti-woke’ rather than the anti-West. He tweeted that the Freedom Convoy was full of ‘anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia and transphobia’. …
The Washington Post, in one of the most batshit articles it has ever published, said the truckers’ cry for freedom is hard proof that they are white supremacists, because ‘the notion of “freedom” [has been] historically and remains intertwined with Whiteness’.
Actually, freedom does come from whiteness, the modern tradition of freedom, democracy, and human rights coming mostly from the British Isles.
