There were half a dozen men and women on the overpass. They waved Canadian flags and a banner that read “F**K TRUDEAU.” Traffic on the 401 appeared to be unaffected. It did not noticeably slow down. No horns sounded. The protesters were there when I drove into Toronto and still there, now on the other side of the overpass, when I was on my way out. Whatever they thought they were accomplishing, their dedication can’t be questioned. It must have been cold up there.
What I had witnessed (as I discovered later) was the return of the trucker convoy people, roused to fury once more against the carbon tax they believe, or pretend to believe, is costing them money. Their goal is less obvious than the spectacle of their performative anger. The felt injustice of the levy gives them, in their eyes, license not just to challenge government policy, but to utter hateful abuse at the prime minister, whom they accuse of oppressing them. They didn’t look oppressed. If anything, they appeared to be having a good time. The overpass was a stage on which they drew attention to themselves, acting out.
We’ve seen a lot of demonstrations in North America over the years, more often associated with left-wing or progressive movements than with the right. The March on Washington in 1963 galvanized public opinion in support of civil rights legislation. Some 30,000 anti-war protesters marched to the Pentagon in ‘67. There was a spate of anti-globalization protests in the 1990s and the early Noughts, including the tear-gas-heavy demonstration at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001. Of course, there have been many more: against Trump, for and against abortion, for Israel and the Palestinians, in support of environmental legislation and so on. The attack on Congress on January 6, 2021, falls into a different category. Protest in democratic society is legal. Insurrection is not.
There was a remarkable, informal get-together in January 1966 – the New York Times called it a “Talk-In.” Had a bomb been dropped on its precise location – 112 West 21st Street in New York – many of the most powerful and best-known intellectuals in America would have been wiped out at a stroke. Among the sixty or so writers, poets and academics who climbed the stairs to Shirley Broughton’s dance studio that night were editors and contributors to most of the major political and literary journals (Irving Kristol, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Elizabeth Hardwick), some heavyweight Ivy League profs (Michael Walzer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and the philosopher, Isiah Berlin, visiting from Britain), rising literary stars (Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer), and a historian and civil rights activist, Staughton Lynd, who had just returned from a visit to the enemy’s camp in Hanoi. They were there to talk about the Vietnam War.
The meeting itself was a sort of demonstration. Only one among them made any attempt to defend America’s intervention in Vietnam. This was Irving Kristol, remembered now as the godfather of Neoconservatism, who suggested mildly that the United States had long sought to keep any single power (meaning Japan, China, the USSR) from dominating Asia. He was so quiet throughout the discussion, however, that Susan Sontag called him out: “I don’t want to see Mr. Kristol submerged in some great left consensus,” she said. Schlesinger, the Harvard historian who had served in the Kennedy administration, did his best to steer a middle course. He managed this so adroitly, in fact, that Dwight Macdonald observed caustically: “Arthur, perhaps the trouble is that you think of yourself as a political figure now instead of a historian.” This counted, in the circumstances, as a deeply wounding observation.
It's worth pointing out with the benefit of hindsight that the arguments the war’s opponents brought to bear in the course of the Talk-In were more-or-less wrong-headed. Lynd insisted that the Vietcong were nationalists, fighting to free their country from outside domination, which was true, but that the North was providing only moral support and war materiel, not troops, which was demonstrably false. Walzer weighed in, saying that the war could only be understood as an instance of imperial expansion, a contention that seems rather quaint now. Neither Kennedy nor Johnson, nor even Nixon, had any interest in colonizing Vietnam. Mostly, they just wanted out. The critics, in other words, may well have occupied the moral high ground – in my view, they did – but their facts were debatable. It’s possible to be right for the wrong reasons. It happens all the time.
It didn’t pay to be a moderate in the room that night. Schlesinger was attacked from all sides – albeit politely: the mood was grad-student-common room; Macdonald’s remark was about as mean as it got. Schlesinger did, however, provoke a reaction when he asserted that most demonstrations were ineffective. He said that speeches by a handful of senators had more impact on the administration’s policy than any number of raucous, even passionate, sign-waving marches. “There is no question,” he said, “– I will repeat it – that on balance the opposition to the war has played a very useful role, but the form in which it has played a useful role is when the arguments are effective and not when the manifestations are hysterical.” Many in the room were offended. The poet, Muriel Rukheyser, demanded: “Mr. Schlesinger, are you suggesting that demonstrations are ‘hysterical’ and wars are not?”
It seems to me that most of the demonstrations I’ve cited have been organic: they’ve erupted from below rather than being organized from above. Organic protest often finds its beginnings in university classrooms as students, through their studies and encouraged by their teachers, discover wrongs that need to be set right, and then take to the streets where others join them. Top-down protest is different. It smacks of authoritarianism – Putin ordering up a mass show of support for his “special operation” in the Ukraine. Organic protest may be misguided but it’s never insincere. Authoritarian demonstrations are both. But the trucker convoy phenomenon seems to fall somewhere in between. The truckers are not knowingly responding to a despot’s instruction, but neither are their actions informed by study. They are wrong on the facts and don’t care.
Something has been set loose. The trucker convoy people are angry and resentful – they say as much to reporters – but also joyful. They’re having fun. They’ve been freed of the restraints – courtesy, consideration for others, respect for authority and expert opinion – that once defined acceptable behavior. Their joy stems precisely from their sense of liberation. They act as if permission has been granted through some mechanism, its source unclear, to break all rules and if the mood strikes them, beclown themselves.
Some politicians are finding it convenient to sidle up to the clowns. It’s not clear that the demonstrations actually change anything. Schlesinger was probably right about that: people in power are not much moved by marchers. And in any case, the trucker convoys seem to reflect a mood rather than a movement, a mood that may attach itself to anything from opposition to a tax to persecution of a vulnerable minority. But a mood can be destabilizing. And demagogues thrive in an unsettled environment, one in which the rules no longer apply.
Sources: Paul L. Montgomery, “Vietnam Debated by Intellectuals: Theater for Ideas Diverts Itself from the Arts,” New York Times, Sunday, January 16, 1966; “A Talk-In on Vietnam,” New York Times Magazine, February 6, 1966.
Nice one!