Why conservatives want to use trucks as a protest tool

Why conservatives want to use trucks as a protest tool

Paul Waldman — Read time: 4 minutes

Columnist

Your average 18-wheel tractor-trailer is over 13 feet high and around 50 feet long, which makes it an extraordinarily useful tool for political protest. If, that is, your preferred means of protest involves blocking traffic, getting in people’s way or interrupting the flow of commerce. The truck is a fantastic force multiplier; with just a few of them, you can create a lot of chaos no matter how small your numbers.

Which is part of why the American right, particularly Fox News, is so thrilled by the protests that have occurred in Canada recently. Tucker Carlson called them “the single most successful human rights protest in a generation,” which is certainly an interesting assessment; his network has been covering them with an absolute manic glee.

A key part of that coverage is not just to make heroes out of the small number of Canadian truckers who want to travel back and forth across the U.S. border without being vaccinated, but to try to create similar protests, using trucks, here in America.

Asked about whether that would be a good thing, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said this:

I’m all for it. Civil disobedience — civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.

It’s unclear what mandates Paul is referring to, but it’s hard to imagine he’s just talking about the vaccine mandate on truckers crossing the border, which affects only a small number of people, the vast majority of whom are already vaccinated.

At the moment, the only national vaccine mandate in America is one for health-care workers. The Biden administration tried to create a mandate for employees of large companies to either be vaccinated or tested frequently for covid, but the Supreme Court blocked it. Some state and local mandates for masks and vaccines are in place, but those are being eliminated by the day, in the apparent hope that once the omicron wave has receded, the pandemic will be pretty much over.

While there’s no question that we’ve had lots of contention and ugliness around these issues, it seems as though just at the moment when they might be getting less contentious, many on the right want to amp up the intensity and division of the pandemic debate, in part by encouraging the most disruptive protest tactics possible.

Which is where the trucks come in. Those like Paul and Carlson are desperately trying to create a truck-based protest movement in the United States, but so far it doesn’t seem to be working. The Department of Homeland Security warned last week that there could be truck protests beginning around the Super Bowl. But it didn’t happen.

Perhaps they just couldn’t find any takers among American truckers. Or perhaps some started to have second thoughts about whether “clogging things up” is really the best way to achieve their goals.

Whenever a significant protest movement begins, we wind up having a discussion about both the objectives of the protesters and the tactics they’re using. Oftentimes those who disagree with the former will couch their criticisms in terms of the latter. That has always been true; when Martin Luther King Jr. was leading sit-ins and marches, he was condemned as a radical who might have more success if only he engaged in more polite forms of action (and if you think Paul would have been praising him were the senator around at the time, I have a bridge to sell you).

And people opposed to the substance of your demands can become outraged even by protests that aren’t disruptive. When Colin Kaepernick knelt silently during the national anthem to protest police brutality — just about the least disruptive protest imaginable — he was drummed out of the NFL as a result. (You might have noticed that conservatives who complain about “cancel culture” were unconcerned with this actual case of a famous person losing his livelihood because of his political beliefs.)

Disruptive protests are meant to get maximal attention, but they can also create a backlash; I’m sure more than a few conservatives got uneasy when the Canadian protesters shut down the Ambassador Bridge that links Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, and carries about a quarter of all trade between the United States and Canada. Some on the right might be wondering whether it’s such a hot idea to have truckers clogging traffic all over the country, especially when their political position is not exactly lacking a hearing or people in positions of power who embrace it.

On the other hand, for some the goal might just be chaos, creating a sense that events are spinning out of control and President Biden ought to be blamed. But if they’re going to shut down entire cities for extended periods, they might end up learning that using trucks as a weapon won’t win you many converts, no matter what they tell you on Fox.