If you hadn’t heard, there’s a blockade of Canada at Port Huron by people protesting the recent requirement by Canada that truckers be vaccinated against Covid-19. This blockade is impacting the car manufacturing industry in Michigan negatively. Given this requirement would impact Canadian truckers, you might think this is an organic[1] protest, but think again:
Although Canadian drivers have a high vaccination rate, the Canadian Trucking Alliance contends many of the Freedom Convoy protesters “have no connection to the trucking industry and have a separate agenda beyond a disagreement over cross border vaccine requirements.” [MLive]
Yes, the wording is a little odd. This is rather remindful of the George Floyd protest in Minneapolis in 2020, where the property destruction and violence is thought to have been instigated by a right-wing extremist. But the right-wing is pushing the blockade for all they’re worth, and their commentators are without nuance on the matter, as Erickson demonstrates in a piece that has really no virtue to it, nor is it worth quoting. Yeah, it’s that bad.
This is a risky move for the right-wing. Endorsed by conservative elites such as Fox News, former President Trump, Senator Cruz (R-TX), Senator Paul (R-KY), and no doubt others, if the independent voters, who hold the balance of power in the United States, discover commerce with our siblings to the north is being sabotaged by right wing extremists masquerading as Canadian truckers, it could result in a deeply negative view of what passes for the conservative movement these days, and that would mean lost votes and elections.
The Democrats do have a story to tell, if they can make it stick. Senator Cruz (R-TX), up until the end of 2021, was “slow-walking” nearly all State Department nominees in a spat over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is a new pipeline running from Russia to Germany. Meanwhile, Senator Hawley (R-MO) is doing something similar with Pentagon nominees. These two Senators, by ensuring the inadequate staffing of the Pentagon and the State Dept, are basically betraying the United States.
Combining these stories with the Canadian truckers story and a potentially imminent war in Ukraine with Russia, and it’s not hard to make the case that the Republican elite only cares for power, and not the safety of American interests here and overseas. Connect that with jobs lost and economic growth hurt, and that could be a powerful brew to use against the Republicans.
And economic growth is at the heart of it all. It’s a bit shocking, but this story from yesterday tells me that the economy is doing enormously well:
The U.S. government posted a $119 billion budget surplus in January, the first in more than two years, amid strong growth in tax receipts and a sharp drop in pandemic-related outlays, the Treasury Department said on Thursday.
The January surplus compared to a January 2021 deficit of $163 billion, a record for the month as direct payments to individuals from COVID-19 aid legislation enacted in December 2020 were distributed.
The surplus last month was the first since the $83 billion reported in September 2019 and the largest since the $160 billion in April 2019. April and September are traditionally months with high tax collections. [Reuters]
Obviously, there are one-time contributors, and no guarantees that February will continue the trend. In fact, I doubt it will continue.
BUT, for the Republican Party, which for decades, nearly a century, claimed to be the superior economic manager of the country, the terms of Presidents Clinton, Obama, and now Biden are turning into disasters for the Republicans. The latter’s quasi-religious tenets on the evils of taxation and regulation have been proven to be nothing more than sloppy, fallacious slogans of little worth, and their proponents to be power-hungry frauds.
The Democrats, which have their own host of demons they refuse to acknowledge, have a story to tell. And if they can connect it to the internecine warfare mentioned in Secular Cycles, so much the better. The basic post-modern denial of truths inherent in the Republican Party these days is deeply offensive to the typical American citizen trying to raise their kids and run their lives these days, in the shadow of the Web that brings content of unknowable trustability into their lives every day. By connecting that post-modernism to the deep-seated, pathological need for power demonstrated by Republican elites, and how it is usually incompetents who practice corruption for a living, the Democrats could put a permanent hole in the ship that is the Republicans. If they do it well enough, the moderate Democrats may also damage the post-modernists to their left as well, an important step to freeing themselves from a political force which, because of its disdain for grounded truth, is unpredictable and could turn on them in an instant, if it perceives that doing so will bring it more power.
The next three years should be most interesting.
1 By which I mean organized by Canadian truckers for Canadian truckers. I’m sure there’s a better word than organic, but I cannot think of what it should be.
