Whoa. Breaking News. Dolly is actually going to be here.

I gawked at the little green text bubble and shifted restlessly in the driver’s seat. “There’s no way,” I muttered. An hour behind schedule already, I could see the endless chain of brake lights ahead of me curving around the neck of the mountain like a piece of flashy costume jewelry. The midsummer sun was moving westward, its rays glinting off hood ornaments shaped like flying pigs and angry rubber ducks. 

I too was headed west, traveling some 500 miles to Cornersville, Tennessee for the grand opening of Dolly Parton’s Tennessean Travel Stop. For months, there’d been buzz online about the Queen of Country Music joining forces with one of the South’s most iconic truck stop brands. It never occurred to me that Dolly might actually show up. 

Ryan Schefsky, a trucker based in Texas, had agreed to meet me at the exit. He beat me there by a few hours. When I received his text, I was angry that the highway couldn’t get me to my destination any sooner. I looked around at the road crews rebuilding whole stretches of I-40 ravaged by Hurricane Helene. Then there were the miles and miles of semi-trucks bottlenecked in the gorge. A minor inconvenience for most travelers is a daily battle for truck drivers. The highway doesn’t care about clocks or calendars. Truckers know that instinctively.

“Trucking can make a liar out of you when you didn’t want to lie,” explains longtime driver, troubadour, and storyteller “Long Haul Paul” Marhoefer. Graduations, weddings, anniversaries. Commit with the best of intentions. Then, “some knucklehead has got two pallets of cheddar that you’re waiting on and he’s still in Kenosha”. All of a sudden, you’re a liar.

A few hours later, my phone lit up again. Dolly was there. Waiting in my inbox was video footage of her arrival. For the ribbon cutting the songbird wore a blue sequin dress and her signature six-inch platform high heels. “I’m sure some of you are wondering why I wanted a truck stop,” she suggested. “Well, I couldn’t just leave it to beavers. I had to throw my squirrely little self in there.” 

The remark was a jab at Buc-ee’s, the Texas-based chain of travel centers known for its buck-toothed beaver mascot. The roadside megastores, with their chopped brisket sandwiches and whole walls of beef jerky, have gained a cult following among some road-trippers. Even so, the company’s longstanding policy prohibiting semi-trucks, 18-wheelers, and commercial trailers has been a source of some controversy. In 2023, a couple reported being thrown out of a store in Texas for parking a semi-truck — without a trailer — in the lot. The company’s general counsel explained that the parking areas are not designed to accommodate commercial vehicles. 

Dolly and her business partners have taken a markedly different approach. Their flagship location, an expanded version of the existing Tennessean truck stop, welcomes all travelers and caters specifically to long haul truckers. It offers free overnight parking and a Southern-style restaurant with a steady lineup of live country music acts. 

When I pulled into the parking lot, there were a couple of guys haggling over parts for a 1968 Pontiac GTO under a sign featuring a busty silhouette of Dolly, a homage to the mudflap girl of the Seventies. Neither of them knew that Dolly had been there, but they figured it out when they stumbled into piles of brightly colored confetti at the entrance. “I do think,” one of them volunteered reflexively, “that this is a good thing for truckers. Dolly… she’s done a lot of good for Tennessee… and I think she really does care about working people.” That’s a common sentiment across the South. The daughter of an East Tennessee sharecropper, Dolly is as beloved for her charity as she is for her mountain lilt. 

What makes Dolly relatable to truck drivers, though, is her career as a touring musician. “I have spent the bulk of my life on the road,” she said in a statement. “All the years spent visiting greasy spoon cafes, truck stops, and roadside pit stops have given me an understanding of what travelers desire… I believe we will fill a void out there on the highways, all while bringing the heart and soul of Tennessee.” 

For truckers, the void Dolly is talking about is palpable. Mounting economic pressures, corporate consolidation, and strict federal regulation are forcing many of America’s beloved truck stops — along with their cafeterias and 24-hour diners — to sell or close their doors. On a BigMackTruck.com forum, one driver laments: “I miss the old Shenandoah truckstop in Mount Jackson, VA. True Southern hospitality. With every fuel-up, you were given three free chicken wings and a coffee.” Another reminisces about Kelly’s Truck Terminal, Inc. in Greenwood, Louisiana, where attractive women in orange jumpsuits would fuel the truck, check the oil, and clean the windshield and mirrors.

By contrast, drivers complain that the corporate chains dominating the industry prioritize efficiency over service, shuttling customers in and out with as little ceremony as possible. “Truck stops have always played an important role in the industry, and not merely as a place to park, get something to eat, and then go to bed,” trucker-philosopher Gord Magill explains in his book End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, “though that strictly utilitarian vibe is becoming the norm.” 

Magill paints a picture of the truck stop not as a liminal space, but as a kind of town square for the highway set. “Truck stops comprised a combination of what sociologists call second and third places,” he writes. “The first place is home, the second is work, and the third is where people gather — bars, churches, or anywhere else — for convivial human connection. The particular kind of third place formed by truck stops was imbued with a type of working-class aesthetic that shares something in common with military mess halls and perhaps a more masculine approach to the classic American diner.” 

Dolly’s Tennessean Travel Stop seems to be trying to recapture (and perhaps reimagine) some of the sense of togetherness that the old haunts created, absent the hyper-masculine sensibility, while also making the service station a destination experience for other travelers. It’s too early to tell how the experiment will turn out, but if the opening is any indication, things are looking up. “I work with an old timer who used to drive [Dolly’s] tour bus, and he says she’s a sweetheart,” one trucker wrote in a Reddit thread. Another chimed in: “The epitome of ‘making the right person famous’.” 

Inside the service station, a clerk who introduced herself as Angel Rose pointed to a cylindrical Tupperware container filled with lemon water. “That’s Dolly’s cup,” she whispered. “I know because that is exactly where Dolly sat for her TV interview.” Angel playfully acted out the scene. “I want you to have it,” she squealed, pressing the plastic cup into my hand. Something about her felt familiar, like she could have been an old friend or even a first cousin. “That is exactly the kind of person you would want to meet coming off the road,” I whispered to Ryan. “Oh, absolutely,” he agreed. 

Truck driving is an increasingly isolating gig. Drivers face grueling hours of operation: federal rules allow most truckers to work about 70 hours each week which has, in a cruel twist of fate, become the standard expectation for many employers. Then there’s the mandatory electronic logging that undermines driver autonomy and flexibility, and long stretches of time away from home. According to a recent survey, 28% of drivers report struggling with extreme loneliness on the road. 

On the back patio, Ryan and I were approached by a trucker from Kansas who told us that his grandmother used to joke, “You can go anywhere in the world from Wichita, and most people do.” He asked Ryan for route advice and then settled in for a good long chat. “You know,” he said after a while, “my daddy was a truck driver. He always said he had three rules: (1) you can always be late, (2) if the company doesn’t get that, get a new company, (3) you only die once. Order of importance is flexible.” He reminisced about his mother and father, their deep love for one another. “Sometimes, I think they’d fight just so they could make up,” he said. I wonder if there are other places along the interstate where these kinds of conversations can still unfold.

In trucking, there is a cautious optimism that celebrity involvement in the industry could transform the perception of interstate infrastructure among the public and policymakers. Things that most people take for granted — a hot meal, a clean shower, and a good night’s sleep — can be hard to come by for truckers, who spend almost every night away from home. Truck parking, meanwhile, has become a hot-button issue. With just one parking spot available for every 11 trucks on the road, drivers often stop driving early to make sure they get safe parking. Still, it’s become commonplace in recent years to see truckers forced to park illegally in dangerous places — along highways, on exit ramps, or in vacant and abandoned lots. According to a survey conducted by the Federal Highway Administration, 98% of truckers struggle to secure parking each week, costing drivers something like $5,500 each in annual income. When drivers have to pay for parking, it comes out of pocket, and they generally aren’t reimbursed. The shortage has even given rise to new businesses, like Truck Parking Club, a sort of Airbnb for overnight parking that opens trucker access to more properties.

As lawmakers work to address the problem, including by securing some funding in the annual budget to build free truck parking spaces, drivers continue to rely on places like the Tennessean for their parking needs. There were rumors, ahead of the opening, that the revamped truck stop might switch to a paid model, but those turned out to be unfounded. Instead, the once-dirt lot was paved, parking lines were striped, and truck capacity was added. 

The lot was starting to fill up when Ryan and I made our way through the shop, past the aisles of Dolly-themed hats and jackets, and into the night. “It’s already expensive to live on the road,” Ryan told me, “so being able to park for free is a huge relief. “There’s also just a humanizing aspect to it,” he went on. “If you’re forced to park illegally, you have to go without bathrooms or food or water for the night.” 

Ryan and I navigated the maze of parked trucks arriving finally in front of my Chevrolet. He must have sensed my anxiety about taking up a spot. “You’re ok,” he said. “The lot’s not full yet.” He pulled a t-shirt out of his truck and handed it to me. “I thought you’d want one of these.” I unfolded it and examined the logo — mudflap Dolly. 

They say charity starts at home, but there’s still a place for it out on the road. Dolly herself will tell you that. 

Ten years on, the West is undergoing a furious period of labour militancy. Farmers are protesting in the Netherlands, in Germany, and in France. Rail workers are threatening the US economy with shutdowns over pay increases and a lack of paid sick leave. In Canada, truckers shut down several border crossings and occupied Ottawa for the better part of a month. British nurses and Canadian teachers are on the verge of mass walk-outs. In France, nuclear industry workers threaten strike action, while a strike among refinery workers earlier this year led to acute fuel shortages, with hour-long queues and rationing at petrol stations.

This wave of militancy displays no signs of cresting soon. If anything, given the general economic situation, things are likely to get worse: inflation is exploding, energy is in short supply, and the cost of living is rising. Workers will get angrier, and they have the ability to make their anger felt in painful ways.

Intriguingly, this revival of labour militancy has done nothing to alter the fortunes of the radical or populist Left. It has only revealed that the rift between them and the working class across the West has become more or less permanent. Six years after Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn saw their stock soar, legitimate worker anger often finds itself being dismissed as a tool of the “far-Right”, and labour militancy is feared and despised.

It’s easy to laugh at the Left in this situation — but its arc from enthusiasm to horror in the face of actual protests and labour struggles out in the street is fairly rational. The Left’s fear speaks to one of our era’s central political conflicts: a growing consciousness among working people that the biggest dividing line runs between the people employed in the “real” economy and those working in the “virtual” one.

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Over the last decade, a number of terms have been invented to describe this divide, from “Professional Managerial Class” to “the email caste”. None of these labels are perfect, but their growing popularity speaks to the fact that more and more people can now see that there really is a conflict at play here. The man driving a truck or a tractor and the revolutionary working for a billionaire-backed NGO are not only not natural allies, but their different roles in the economy increasingly make them real enemies.

It is no surprise that farmers end up on this struggle’s frontline. One absurd illustration of the deep contradictions in our debt-laden, de-industrialised Western economies can be seen — where else? — on Twitter and TikTok, where you can watch clips of young, radical climate protesters who want to “abolish farming”. Farming, as it turns out, is so very damaging to the planet in terms of CO2 pollution that we must do away with the industry altogether.

Put aside the ludicrousness of this wish, which if implemented would doom us all to starvation. Rather, consider the fact that we live in a society where having this position — fighting against farming for the sake of climate change — is not only possible but also admired. For young people in college towns, the question of where the food comes from is completely abstract; and as they plod along their chosen life path, from university radicalism to an NGO to government service and then back again, they need not encounter anything to make them change their opinion of the world. Their disconnect from material reality — from the farmers working hard to grow their crops, and from the truckers who make sure the food shows up on the shelves — is nearly complete. Student climate protestors do not seem to realise that food does not grow inside the supermarket.

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More perniciously, a growing crisis of over-regulation created, then driven, by “the email caste” is also taking shape. This ever-growing body of ordinances only creates frustration and anger among the material workers who have to live by them. It is not that these rules are necessarily malicious. To take one example, the idea that we should make the internal combustion engine redundant by the mid-2030s is probably motivated by genuine concerns for the environment. The problem is that these laws are completely disconnected from reality.

Last year, the Canadian trucker Gord Magill asked a simple, radical question: “How essential are the ’email job’ caste?” Magill’s essay was one early example of a new class consciousness, slowly brewing in the West. It was an open acknowledgement that there is an “us vs them” divide that refuses to fit into the Left’s conception of the “99% vs the 1%”. For Magill, it is the farmers, the truckers, and the aeroplane mechanics who comprise the “us”. And it is the NGO employees, the activist regulators, and the managers who make up the more immediate foe.

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Whether you’re watching a farmer protest in the Netherlands or a trucker occupation in Canada, or even a wildcat airline pilot strike in Florida, there are growing echoes of this analysis everywhere. The figure of the enemy today is increasingly no longer the capitalist in the top hat. It is Klaus Schwab; it is the manager and the regulator. They hope to close down your farm, digitise your currency, and abolish private ownership. At one point during the 20th century, the figure of the “social engineer” was popular inside the worker-dominated social democratic parties of the West. In 2022, that same social engineer has now become a hated enemy. He is no longer seen as having any good intentions towards ordinary working people, nor can he even be trusted to understand how the real world works.

The 2020s, then, promise to be a decade filled with discontent and increasingly dramatic shows of worker militancy. Beyond inflation, beyond anger at the rising cost of fuel, heating and food, there is now a simmering political rage motivating people to take to the streets and the pickets. Like Gord Magill, workers are deciding that they’ve had enough of being ruled by an “email caste”. If email workers no longer care about the real economy they’ve left behind, why should workers care about them?

In many ways, these divisions are unique: they are not draped in the usual identitarian focus on race, gender and sexuality that has come to define the West. Rather, they are between those minority groups which embrace a sense of victimhood and those which reject it; between the strong, self-determining subject capable of rational judgement and between the vulnerable subject who demands protection. Nowhere is this clearer than in the contentious case of indigenous participation in the Freedom Convoy.

Even in my own family, the truckers’ protest sparked an unprecedented sense of discord and division, both on and off reserve. In recent weeks, I have spoken with several relatives and their contacts who participated in and organised portions of the Convoy. What emerged was a sense of division that is a microcosm for a more fundamental rupture in mainstream Canada and beyond.

This is to be expected: no matter how hard policymakers and even indigenous leaders try to convince us otherwise, the issues faced by indigenous people are not so different from those faced by people around the world. Like so many groups, they are torn between the demand for freedom and the demand for safety. It is a conflict faced by governments and populations that predates Covid-19 — but which has become manifest with lockdown measures and the resistance to them.

While Trudeau dismissed the protests as sexist, racist outpourings of white supremacy, the indigenous participants I spoke to were keen to emphasise their diversity. Some indigenous people arrived in full regalia; a mother marched with a papoose on her back and two small children in traditional dress. “We met so many people from every background,” said an Ojibwa woman from a Northern Ontario reserve who helped organise protestors in her area. “Because we’re just like everyone else. We want the mandates to end. We want freedom of choice and autonomy over our own bodies. We want a good life and we want our children to have a good life. We want the same things.”

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She pointed to problems on reserves but linked these to broader issues in Canadian society. “Like the rest of the population, we have suffered from so many drug-related deaths and suicides. Covid just made that worse. We don’t want that anymore. We’re so sad seeing this and we’re just hoping for change. Just like everyone else.”

Yet many in the indigenous community disagreed. Leaders issued statements condemning the protests, and in particular the use of traditional ceremonies and objects by both indigenous and non-indigenous people without “permission from us in order to proceed”, dismissing them as “ignorant acts of cultural appropriation”. While there was some controversy about a kitsch “pipe ceremony” that was posted online, the broader message underscored that ceremonies and ceremonial objects only have a place in certain approved protests and in relation to certain approved issues. Indigeneity, it appears, is the sole province of those who toe a certain line. And that line is not about freedom, but safety and protection.

Indeed, all these pronouncements highlighted was the insularity of Canada’s indigenous movements. Grand Council Chief Reginald Niganobe said: “Once again, we ask that you please remain vigilant within your communities where you are continued to be needed.” In a statement shared on social media, he argued: “It is counter-intuitive to the progression of our communities to be caught up in anti-government sentiment which fails to address the complexities of Anishinabe realities.”

Others framed the protests as a clear indication of racist inequality in Canada, pointing out that an indigenous-led convoy would have been met with swift suppression. The author of one such piece reflected that while some indigenous people might be attracted to the movement’s anti-establishment rebelliousness, “this is not the cause that we need to get behind because they’re not here to help our issues”.

But as Kenan Malik recently observed, racial specialness has often been used as a means of dismantling cross-race “fusion” movements that threatened the existing order. Take the struggle that brought together poor black workers and poor white farmers in the American south during the early 20th century. Rather than organising together, white workers were persuaded that their interests lay not in their class position but rather in their racial uniqueness. Of course, certain groups undoubtedly suffer individualised issues. Historically, however, the distinctiveness of one’s struggle was preached precisely to destroy the power of solidarity movements to achieve change.

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And this is a danger that still runs deep today. Indigenous people are constantly invited to believe that their problems are distinct and rooted squarely in the past. When news broke last summer about the alleged existence of unmarked children’s graves at a Kamloops residential school, the media was awash with tales of suffering and horror. While many indigenous people did suffer greatly in these schools, it is important to note that not all children attended them. Nonetheless, a predictable narrative began to emerge: that, however indirectly, all indigenous people are essentially traumatised by this past. As one academic put it at the time, indigenous people have “ongoing issues in our communities that are a direct result of these schools”, and the failure to recognise this ensures “that new generations are continuing to suffer”.

Such claims about the colonial trauma experienced by all indigenous people have not been dampened by more recent evidence that the evidence of mass graves is shaky. It fits too well with the dominant ideal of the indigenous victim. As one young woman put it: “We’re still experiencing the effects of the residential school from our parents and grandparents. We’re all damaged, and we’ll pass it on to our children, so it will never end.”

With victimhood now all but regarded as an innate indigenous characteristic, it is hardly surprising that indigenous frauds have started to fabricate entire identities grounded in this trauma: Saskatchewan professor and public health expert Carrie Bourassa was revealed last year to have fabricated claims to indigenous heritage, appearing publicly in elaborate dress as ‘Morning Star Bear’ with attendant melodramatic theatrics. While organisers of the Freedom Convoy have similarly been outed for making shaky assertions about their mixed roots, it is interesting how long Bourassa’s claims went undetected.

Bourassa climbed the career ladder for years, steadily growing bolder with expanded claims to indigenous heritage and cultural roots. Why? Because Bourassa told a story that people wanted to hear. She talked of suffering, addiction and “endemic” sexual abuse — experiences that were likely a far cry from her comfortable middle class upbringing in Regina. “Everybody around me was either an alcoholic, drug addict or suffered from some sort of addiction,” she embellished. “There was a lot of violence in my family.”

True or not, here we had a story of a virtuous indigenous victim — the sort of victim that inspires a carefully positioned Justin Trudeau to be photographed with a single tear running down his cheek; the sort of victim that legitimises his decision to exclude indigenous citizens from obeying his draconian emergency laws without needing to explain why.

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And for the people I spoke to, this can have an unintended effect: it makes them feel like frauds because that narrative of trauma is not their experience. Even if it were, I am not convinced it would be capable of fulfilling their desires for more control and freedom to decide how to live their lives.

Quite the opposite. As indigenous scholar Dian Million has warned, this narrative of virtuous victimhood runs expressly against claims to self-determination, a long established goal of indigenous communities. This is because when we assume victimhood, we often relinquish power. Constantly invited to confess endless tales of suffering and damage, the call for “self-determination” fades into “self-management” and the therapeutic “empowerment” of outside agencies.

And this is echoed throughout Canada at large. In recent years, indigenous communities have started to groan under the weight of expanding bodies of surveillance. It’s striking, then, that during the recent protest, truckers spoke of the encroachment of endless managers into their work, subjecting them to increasing surveillance, such as fitting their trucks with cameras in their cabs. And like indigenous leaders’ disavowal of indigenous participants’ demands for freedom in favour of safety, so too did the truckers’ unions retreat into threats, seeing their main role as providing not self-determination but safety.

Indigenous experiences, then, are a microcosm of Canada. We are not so different. Like so many others, some of us reject the vision of virtuous victimhood. And it is testament to the power of this unity that our community leaders should respond with such horror. They’ve finally sussed out that we too are the “Average Joe” — and as one indigenous participant told me: “The average Joe has had enough.”

Yet Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act is also a bizarre moment. Consider that the law stipulates that the government can fine people violating the act between 500 and 5,000 dollars. On the face of it, these are not numbers that seem commensurate to punish violators of the most powerful emergency law in the Canadian state’s armoury. But the reason these numbers seem so strange is simple: the law hasn’t been updated to keep up with the times, or inflation.

The oddness doesn’t end there. A law that in a real sense was forgotten — and designed to handle the most extreme situations a nation state can find itself in — is now dredged up to deal with a fairly routine political protest. Trudeau, and his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, have also called on financial institutions to freeze or suspend any bank accounts without a court order if they are being used to fund the protests. They believe, as David Frum writes in The Atlantic, that the truckers represent a “form of performative intimidation”.

Compared to the mass burning and vandalism of Catholic Churches in Canada last summer — which Trudeau both denounced and sympathised with, calling the arsons “understandable” at one point — the truckers hardly represent a nadir of public order. Across the border in the United States, the rioting that occurred there in the summer of 2020 involved loss of life, and massive damage to property. Back then Kamala Harris’s response was markedly similar to that of Trudeau — hand-wringing, sure, but also sympathy with the motivations of those who rioted.

Perhaps buildings being burned down, sometimes with their occupants still inside them, is just part and parcel of living in a vibrant democracy. Meanwhile, a protest that has led to zero loss of life and no torched buildings is cast as a grave threat to democracy. Put up bouncy castles for kids to play in and have public barbecues, as the truckers have done? Then, in the words of the New York Times’ editorial board, you are “far-Right”, and represent a “test of democracy” itself.

Or you will be accused of “sedition” by the usually phlegmatic Mark Carney. The former Bank of England governor may support Trudeau’s use of emergency powers, but by all indications it is a spectacularly ill-conceived move. Many provincial leaders are already openly rejecting the necessity of such extreme measures.

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But the presence of open division among Canada’s political class — though fatal enough on its own — pales in comparison to the much deeper issue here. Throughout the protests, it’s been clear that the authorities — from Trudeau’s government down to the city of Ottawa itself — have lost control of the situation on the ground.

Tow truck companies openly refuse to tow trucks, and even the police force has proven itself to be unreliable. After an order came down to cut off the demonstrator’s supply of fuel for their trucks, the OPS did some perfunctory confiscations of jerry cans, but the only real result was that demonstrators started carrying around jerry cans en masse as a form of resistance. Not that they had to resist too hard; few police officers seemed interested in doing any policing in Ottawa — they were too busy being filmed hugging and greeting the protestors.

The same can be said of the Canadian Armed Forces, who do not seem bothered enough to play a role in resolving these demonstrations. In fact, the military is now investigating at least six of its members for actively supporting the trucker protest. Two of those under investigation belong to the elite Joint Task Force 2. Compared to the total manpower of the CAF, this might seem like a trifling matter, but as an indication of overall political reliability, it cannot be dismissed. The US military has seen similar indications of political unreliability with its own Covid mandates, so this is hardly some issue unique to Canada, either.

Where does all this leave the Trudeau government? Critics talk about creeping totalitarianism in Canada — though with the invocation of an outright legal state of exception it’s hard to say whether totalitarianism is actually “creeping” anymore. Others, mainly Americans, mutter darkly about “a certain F-word”. One can sympathise with the alarm informing these remarks, without fully buying into them. It only takes a couple of minutes thinking about the situation in Canada to realise how incredibly weird it is — and that weirdness requires some serious explanation.

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When was the last time we saw totalitarianism associated with a government that has unreliable control of its police? That can’t control the roads of its own capital? A government calling for something akin to martial law but emphatically rejecting using the military — because they probably wouldn’t follow any orders to enforce it that they were given?

Tucker Carlson is calling Trudeau “the dictator of Canada“, but this seems like a very odd dictatorship indeed. One of the reasons given for calling this state of exception was that it allowed Trudeau to draft tow truck companies into performing paid but involuntary work.

This may well prove to be a crisis that undermines yet another plank of the post-Cold War liberal era, but V for Vendetta it is not. In that dystopian society, the state of exception is simply a normal way of life. Here, the police will not hesitate to shoot you the moment you cause trouble, and the fall of the totalitarian government comes after it is no longer able to keep the population in check through violence and intimidation. In Canada right now, however, the truth is much stranger than fiction. The state of exception has belatedly arrived only after clear signs from the police and the military that they are absolutely not going to be shooting anybody to begin with.

In regards to Trudeau’s actions being a form of “fascism”, that is perhaps an even harder case to make. It’s a point understandably overlooked today, but fascism, seen in its own day, was most definitely a forward-looking political force. The official hymn of the Italian fascist party under Mussolini, Giovinezza, literally means ”youth”. In the context of the early Twenties, fascists saw themselves — and were seen by many Western contemporaries, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and David Lloyd George — as a rejuvenating, revolutionary force, whether for good or ill.

So let’s be honest with ourselves: it is impossible to look at this weak Canadian government — barely capable of enforcing its will on its own security forces — as a Mussolini-style fascist New Dawn. This sputtering display is about as far from a youthful springtime of the nation as it is possible to get. Trudeau seems mostly tired, under siege, and bereft of ideas, and politicians like him — who self-style as “defenders of democracy” — are now clearly becoming a sort of spent ideological force, barely able to muster a lick of respect from their unruly subjects.

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But perhaps that is the new day that is dawning. Perhaps we are all headed in the same direction as Canada, where political polarisation between the rural population and the urban managerial classes, between the people who give orders and the people who are supposed to follow them, eventually produces a situation so untenable that the system simply snaps.

Not every part of the system, though. It is notable that Trudeau is calling on the banks and tech firms to help restore public order, while excluding any meaningful role for the military. The banks, as well as various parts of the tech sector, are increasingly looking like the only powerful institution that the managerial classes can expect to count on in a true crisis. Especially once the cops, truckers, firemen, pilots, rubbish collectors, special forces operators, sailors, and meter maids bid their politicians farewell and thanks for all the fish.

Unfortunately (or maybe not), those who derive an almost pornographic pleasure from fantasising about imminent totalitarian dystopia are likely to be sorely disappointed in the days and years ahead. Acts like the one just undertaken by the Canadian government amply illustrate that there’s no ten-thousand year Reich of Technocracy coming anytime soon.

The gulf in our societies between the people who work in the real world — those who keep the planes flying and the power on — and the restive and radicalised “email workers” of the urban class keeps growing more and more ominous and intractable. Trudeau can freeze as many bank accounts as he wants. If he thinks it’s a workable solution to this crisis, then the chaos is just getting started.

As the protests enter another week, Ottawa’s mayor has declared a state of emergency. Jim Watson described the truckers — ostensibly protesting against Canada’s harsh Covid mandates — as “out of control”. Watson sees anarchy; the truckers fulminate against Covid authoritarianism. But this battle is really about working-class discontent.

The naive among us could be forgiven for thinking that this protest signalled something auspicious about “late capitalist” society. For decades, the common folk wisdom for both the Left and the Right was that the West’s working classes had been completely neutralised as a political force, and that class conflict itself was a relic of the past.

This idea took hold in the Sixties, when Herbert Marcuse theorised that Western workers had been subjected to a “socially engineered arrest of consciousness”. Their vested interest in the existing capitalist order made them impossible to radicalise. Ever since, finding new theoretical models to explain the unreliability (and stodgy conservatism) of workers has been a recurring activity on parts of the Left. Marxists had made a horrific discovery: the working class were not their foot soldiers. As Joan Didion once put it: “The have-nots, it turned out, mainly aspired to having.”

Many on the Left came to believe that without their corporatist union structures, and without their shop stewards and political organisers, the working classes were done for. They were little better, to paraphrase Marx, than a “sack of potatoes”.

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Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight. As such, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union (and the defeat of the strike waves of the Eighties) saw many Leftists indulge a wistful nostalgia for a time when the workers stuck it to the powers that be. Celebration of the good old days of the Left, and of “working-class power” in general, was thus central to the aesthetics of the now completely defunct wave of Left populism in the 2010s.

With that backdrop in mind, the explosion of worker militancy over vaccine mandates — and, on a related note, high fuel taxes in Europe — ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The truckers in Canada have instead triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes, in the people who Canadian trucker Gord Magill has dubbed “the email job caste”.

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

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By Malcom Kyeyune

Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

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This divorce has happened all over the world in recent years. After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles. In Germany, the Left party Die Linke has endured several rounds of severe internal fighting and strife. As in the UK, the younger, more urban, more credentialed parts of the Left have fought a running battle — and thrown pies — against pro-worker “racists” such as Sahra Wagenknecht.

In Canada, that loathing has now turned into fear — and into outright hatred. The problem of the truckers is not really the honking (which the Guardian sniffily calls “crude behaviour“), because sooner or later, that honking will stop. The state of emergency will end. But the protests, significantly, have shown how confused and weak the opponents of the working classes are today.

During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste loved to talk about essential workers, and luxuriated in public displays of gratitude for them. But this caste of genteel urbanites never realised that this choice of nomenclature was in fact much more meaningful — and ominous – than they understood. Some people, it seems, simply are critical to the functioning of the economy, pandemic or no pandemic. Once those people — and truck drivers are perhaps the most critical of them all — start to demand to be listened to, they have ways to make those demands felt.

For the Left, the problem of the truckers is their newfound political independence. Nostalgia really is a thing of the past now; the dinosaurs that were thought long extinct are back now, and they are hungry. Gone are the halcyon days of dreaming about halcyon days – where serious working class militancy was just a distant myth.

The real danger of any trucker’s strike, or any pilot’s walkout, or any fuel tax protest in Europe, is that every new confrontation sets a precedent: a precedent that says that the Gord Magills are done taking orders from the Nora Letos of the world.

The story blew up for no other reason than Canadian politics is not usually known for producing unruly sights like this one. While broader Western politics have been marked by rising populist fervour against elites over the last half-decade, Canada has, true to stereotype, remained quiet, contented, bland and unexciting. The patron saint of liberal elites was, after all, re-elected last year and continues to rule over a country that prides itself on its inoffensiveness.

There is every reason to believe that this is how things will remain: the global populist revolution that gave us Trump, Brexit and the gilet jaunes has had a hard time getting a foothold in Canada for structural reasons. It is unlikely that the protesting truckers will have changed many minds, much less public health regulations, or accomplished anything other than increasing traffic congestion in Downtown Ottawa. The industry association representing truckers has disowned them, pointing out that 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, while a recent poll put nationwide popular support for the convoy at a paltry 28%.

Canada’s general incompatibility with populist politics goes back to its roots. Ask an American why the United States was founded and he might say something like: “We had a revolution to secure freedom and government of, by and for the people…” The foundation of Canada was an explicit rebuttal to this notion.

As a country, it was designed to serve as a bulwark against the spectre of revolution and the idiom of popular sovereignty. Its two main political cultures descend from peoples who were defined by their conspicuous non-participation in the great revolutions of the eighteenth century, the American and the French, from which much of the modern rhetoric about liberty, rights, and the will of the people is derived.

Subsequently, the evolution of Canada’s political identity can be thought of less as having a liberal or conservative orientation, but as, quite simply, anti-revolutionary. This means that when change does happen, it is actively managed and mediated by elites at the top rather than brought about by uprisings from below. Though the country has had its own bouts of populism of the Right and Left varieties (and a few failed revolts), it has never been the dominant tradition.

This is because historically, Canada’s elites have proven to be expert not merely at resisting the pressures of revolutionary change but at pre-empting the causes of it.

English Canada was shaped in large part by Loyalist refugees who fled north because they did not want to be a part of the revolutionary experiment of 1776. Disavowing Yankee radical individualism and republicanism, the colonies that would become Canada were suspicious of mass democracy, more deferential to authority, and more mindful of communal obligations: they were said to be “more Tory than the King” and their progeny retained the so-called “Tory touch”.

Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, looked south of the border with horror (as many Canadians do now) at the chaos of the American Civil War and vowed to establish a strong central government that would have unquestioned supremacy over its constituent provinces. Thus, modern Canada was born in 1867 with the motto “peace, order and good government” — a somewhat authoritarian-sounding reply to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

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French Canada is different but the same. Its people are the descendants of pious habitant colonists who were insulated from the influence of the Jacobin revolution across the Atlantic by the British conquest of Quebec in the Seven Years War.

Macdonald’s chief French Canadian ally, Sir George-Étienne Cartier, claimed that despite the trauma of defeat, the conquest was actually a blessing in disguise sent by Providence to save French Canada “from the misery and shame of the French Revolution”. The Ancien Régime, with its spirit of conformity and obedience to Catholic orthodoxy, lived on in Quebec until the Sixties, when secular nationalism replaced Catholicism as the de facto state religion.

In that decade, Canada would prove yet again that it was the anti-revolutionary country par excellence. While American cities burned in riots over race and the Vietnam war, Canadians smugly congratulated themselves for living in “the peaceable kingdom”. When, in 1968, the streets of Paris, Chicago and Prague were racked with revolutionary violence, Canada witnessed a peaceful transition of power to the new generation as embodied by a charismatic action-intellectual named Pierre Trudeau, who unlike LBJ, Nixon or De Gaulle, was definitely with it.

The first Trudeau’s rise to power, much like the second, was greeted by fawning crowds and adoring fangirls: it took on the feel of a Beatles tour and was dubbed “Trudeaumania”. What might have looked like a spontaneous democratic outpouring was actually the result of backroom dealing by ruling party elites, who recruited Trudeau and practically fast-tracked him to the premiership: Canada’s own Ancien Régime had found a way to adapt itself to the Age of Aquarius.

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Trudeau’s chief task was to keep Canada together in the face of Quebec separatism. With the exception of the brief terrorist October Crisis of 1970, which Trudeau met with heavy-handed repression, his 16 years in power were marked by vigorous but non-violent political debate culminating in the 1980 Quebec independence referendum. Unlike other interethnic hotspots, say Northern Ireland or the Balkans, Canada resolved its divisions through the ballot box — and through occasionally heated but mostly boring conferences where elites could hash things out.

Fast forward to the second Trudeau. The world is once again living through revolutionary times. But Canada seems to be immune. US or UK conservatives might look at the insufferably progressive rhetoric of Justin Trudeau and wonder why ordinary Canadians haven’t tossed him out in favour a more populist alternative. Have they all been brainwashed up there?

Yet once again, like Macdonald and Trudeau Sr. before him, Justin Trudeau is the face of a Machiavellian elite that can maintain itself in power by diffusing and pre-empting the pressures of revolutionary change. Looking past the often-deceptive rhetoric and surface-level imagery, one will see that Canada is not nearly as liberal, progressive or cosmopolitan as it is perceived.

Trudeau Jr, like his father, is a promoter of official multiculturalism and is fond of uttering slogans like “diversity is our strength”. But as Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath has pointed out, unlike the United States, the Canadian government “does not engage in race-based classification of citizens [just as] the census does not impose racial categories”.

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And though Canadian universities are prone to indulging in critical theory jargon — as a certain University of Toronto psychology professor will be able to tell you — Canada has nothing like the American policy of “affirmative action” or race-based admission quotas, which is the source of interminable racial and ethnic animus in the US.

When it comes to immigration, Trudeau has been depicted by both liberal fans and conservative critics abroad as a bleeding-heart advocate of open borders. But look at Canada’s actual immigration system; in many ways, it is far more stringent than the US immigration system was under Trump. Canada may not have a border wall but it has a ruthlessly efficient “bureaucratic wall,” in addition to having invented the famous “points system”, emulated by Australia, and now the UK.

What shocks, particularly from the American vantage point, is that Canada has its own version of “mandatory E-Verify”, an employment verification policy for the purposes of immigration enforcement. In the United States the measure is usually only advocated for by hard immigration restrictionists. Not even Trump (for understandable reasons) and the Republican establishment are willing to support it. 

The drivers of Right-wing populism — divisive racial preferentialism, permissive immigration policy, a widespread sense of the loss of control — are thus not present in Canada. In other countries, pandemic restrictions may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, the latest in a long line of elite excesses that long predated Covid-19.

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But in Canada, whatever the policy on restrictions or vaccine mandates, absent those other factors, the camel’s back is not nearly so overburdened. Save for in the perpetually dissatisfied energy-producing region out west, populism will remain a hard sell. It is simply not favoured by Canada’s political culture.

This is not to say that the truckers are “un-Canadian” as their liberal opponents will paint them, though the decision by some of them to carry Confederate and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags does not help — nor does desecrating the National War Memorial. Shameful hooliganism aside, there is a place for dissenters in what is still (contrary to their cries of “tyranny”) a free country. 

They will just have to accept that they are up against one of the most entrenched and hegemonic ruling classes anywhere in the Western world: the “Laurentian elites” and their instrument for wielding power, the Liberal Party. As veteran journalist Peter C. Newman once observed, they have “reigned longer over Canada than … Communists ruled Russia”. If the Freedom Convoy is looking to overthrow this regime, they will have a very long drive ahead.

Some stand up better than others. Matilda and Danny the Champion of the World are still wonderful, as is George’s Marvellous Medicine; The Enormous Crocodile feels, frankly, phoned in (“Will this do? Roald”), and the posthumously published Billy and the Minpins is formulaic. But it was after reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and moving — naturally enough — onto the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, that I pulled up short, and suddenly found myself skipping several pages. I hadn’t remembered it being so spectacularly racist.

It’s one bit, when the US president is ringing around other world leaders to arrange a response to an apparent alien attack (which is in fact Charlie, Willie Wonka and the Buckets in the elevator; don’t worry, it doesn’t make a great deal more sense when you’re reading it). One of the leaders he phones is the Chinese premier. But his red-phone hotline to party headquarters first accidentally rings a Chinese takeaway, because, ha ha, everyone’s called Wing and Wong in China, so it’s very easy to, ha ha, “Wing the Wong number”. Then there’s an awful lot of “velly solly Mr Plesident, the plemier is unavailable”. The Chinese politicians are called Chu-On-Dat and How-Yu-Bin.

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The joyful anachronism of kid lit

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I don’t think of myself as especially easily shocked, and I try to remember that different times had different mores — at my grandmother’s house, there were books from her childhood that I’d read on holiday; I am still amazed at the existence of Little Black Sambo, among others. But the fact that it was fine for Dahl to put all that in a children’s book — a book published in 1972, only eight years before I was born — seemed remarkable, as was the fact that I must have read it as a child, several times, without it making a huge impression on me.

(The less said about Tintin in the Congo, the better.)

People get very concerned about the books that children read shaping their minds. It’s hard to find books for very small children that don’t have some trowelled-on message: it’s OK to be yourself, people are different and that’s fine, isn’t having friends lovely, that sort of thing. This isn’t a new phenomenon, or specific to children’s literature; every generation thinks the generation after it is being warped by something, computer games or video nasties or pulp novels.

And it’s not limited to any particular part of the political compass. The Right gets just as worked up about pasteboard books called Timmy’s Two Mummies or A Boy Called Rosie as the Left does about ones called Girls Are Princesses And Boys Are Firefighters or whatever. The theory, I think, is that children’s books have great influence on the attitudes and behaviours of that child as they grow up. Give me the child to the age of seven, and I will give you the man, and all that.

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For the record: I’m sceptical. There’s a huge and ongoing argument about whether literature reflects or shapes its age; and obviously the truth will be “a bit of both”, but I suspect it’s usually a lot more reflection than shaping. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator wouldn’t get written now because society has changed; but I doubt it inspired a great deal of anti-Chinese racism in the children who read it.

We all have books that we feel changed our lives, I realise. I read The Blind Watchmaker at a formative age and felt it twist my destiny. But it’s hard to tease out how much that is actually a book shaping my personality, or a book fitting neatly into the shape my personality already had, like a key into a lock. And I don’t imagine many people have that experience with books for the under-sevens anyway. In general, the people in a child’s life — their parents, their teachers, and, probably most importantly, their peers — must outweigh the impact of the books they read by an order of magnitude, when it comes to shaping their attitudes.

But even if you don’t think they’ll warp their tiny minds, you still might not want to read them Tintin in the Congo — or Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator — just because they’re nasty and mean-spirited and unpleasant.

We had another experience, though. When I was young, my parents used to read me the Noggin the Nog series, by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin. Postgate and Firmin are probably best known for their TV work – Bagpuss, The Clangers, Postman Pat, Ivor the Engine. But they also wrote children’s books, notably the Noggin series, and my parents bought us a box set of them to read the kids, not long after we got the Dahl collection.

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There was a hint of trepidation when I read the first one to my son for the first time, with the Great Glass Elevator experience in mind. In the first book, Noggin ventures up north from his Viking-ish lands to “the Land of the Midnight Sun”; here he meets his bride, Nooka, daughter of Nan, king of the Nooks. The Nooks are obviously Greenland Inuit. Later in the series he travels to “the Land of the Silver Sand”, an orientalised Middle East, full of magic carpets and genies. The potential for cringeworthy stereotyping was enormous.

It’s not that the books avoided stereotyping altogether — the Nooks live in cartoon igloos, the Sultan has long black moustaches and lives in a palace with an onion-shaped dome on the top. But the books consistently made everyone human. The Sultan is greedy and self-interested, but only in the same way as the books’ villain, Noggin’s uncle, Nogbad the Bad, is; another Middle Eastern character, Haroun ibn Daud, is gentle and kind and unworldly, rather like Noggin himself. Wherever Noggin goes, he encounters characters — whether tiny elf-like Omruds, enormous ice dragons, or thinly disguised Inuits and Arabs — who turn out to be people, silly and self-absorbed but basically decent.

I interviewed Terry Pratchett years ago, himself the author of some wonderful children’s books — the Nome trilogy, Truckers, Diggers and Wings, have much the same gentle tone as Postgate and Firmin’s books. He identified a certain kind of voice among a certain kind of English writer of the middle decades of the 20th century — Jerome K. Jerome, Richmal Crompton, RJ Yeatman and WC Sellar, Kenneth Grahame — a “slightly satirical, people-are-rather-silly-but-they’re-not-that-bad voice, friendly about humanity, fond of its foibles”, which paved the way for him and, I’d say, for Douglas Adams. The Noggin series fitted that description perfectly.

We read the whole series, my son and I; then read it again, from the beginning, and the second time he was starting to be able to read some of it himself, which was joyous. And my parents read him some, which had me quietly dabbing at my eyes.

I’m not suggesting we strike Roald Dahl from our children’s reading lists (although you won’t be missing much if you strike Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator off it; even if you skip the racist bits, it’s just not very good). There’s a place for that misanthropic, kids-against-adults thing he has going on; I found such kicking against authority thrilling, when I was old enough to read James and the Giant Peach or Matilda myself. And as I say, I don’t think it’s going to warp your kids’ minds, in any detectable or significant way. But it’s just nicer, sometimes, to read books by people who like people. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’re off to listen to Alan Bennett reading Winnie-the-Pooh.