The Revolt of the Canadian Truckers

Canada's "Freedom Convoy" started three weeks ago, with truckers converging on Ottawa to protest a law requiring that they be vaccinated to come back into their own country.

The Canadian Freedom Convoy will likely suffer a similar fate—and its American counterpart may never even materialize. Some of the other recent protest movements have been more successful in pushing an agenda, but all have lost urgency and effectiveness as they became more centralized or enmeshed with partisan politics. Just like the heads of the governments they were protesting, some leaders of Black Lives Matter, the Women's March, and Time's Up abused their power, lost their moral authority, and damaged their causes.

But that doesn't mean new protest movements don't matter. Far from it.

Even if they don't succeed at achieving their stated goals, they are blows against the status quo whose cumulative force will make governments and elites become more accountable to the very people they ultimately rely on. As with the collapse of communism, eventually there comes a tipping point where the seemingly impossible becomes the inevitable.

In a country where arbitrary COVID policies still run rampant; trust and confidence in government, business, and organized religion continues to fall; inflation is at a 40-year high; and just 17 percent of us are satisfied with the way things are going, expect new movements to keep rising up.

As a society, we're like the Marlon Brando character Johnny Strabler in The Wild One. "Hey Johnny," a woman asks him, "what are you rebelling against?" His laconic, iconic response: "Whaddya got?" We may not know the best way forward exactly but that won't stop us from pushing into the future.