“Populism” without material benefits, or popular support
By 
As Eric Levitz observes, one reason American conservatives are obsessed with the anti-public health and anti-democratic Tonka Twucker protests is that they’re an, er, vehicle for “populism” that is consistent with the Republican Party’s most unshakeable commitment — upward wealth distribution:
There is nevertheless a kernel of truth in Subramanya’s thesis: The protests are not really about ending the vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers but rather about ending all public health mandates and restrictions. Yet she buries this simple fact beneath a bunch of populist abstractions that only confuse the issue. The protesters she speaks with do not feel “ganged up on” by the powers that be in some generic sense. They are not complaining about excessively high drug prices or calling for higher taxes on tech CEOs or antitrust action against tech companies. Virtually every interviewee in the piece is an unvaccinated Canadian who joined the protests out of outrage over the social exclusion they’ve suffered in their capacity as vaccine resisters. Subramanya’s editorializing notwithstanding, her own reporting demonstrates that this isn’t about much more than vaccine mandates.
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Subramanya’s repeated equation of the protestors with the “have nots” – and of supporters of public health regulations with white-collar “elites” – is similarly manipulative. Perhaps, this characterization accurately reflects the Freedom Convoy’s self-conception of the conflict over COVID mandates. But Subramanya’s piece endorses this viewpoint as correct: The divide over mandates “largely” maps onto the chasm between Canada’s “haves” and “have nots.” To make this claim, without once citing a single opinion poll, or any other index of popular support for the protests and their animating cause, is plainly misleading.
An Ipsos poll taken in late January found that 67 percent of Canadians wanted “the government to impose further measures on the unvaccinated population.” A separate survey conducted around the same time found that 60 percent of Canadians endorsed a fine on the unvaccinated. At the end of January, a poll from the Angus Reid Institute did find majority support for the statement: “It’s time to end restrictions and let people self-isolate if they’re at risk.” But this is inconsistent with most other available data. The COVID-19 monitor, a public opinion study that boasts an extraordinary 100,000 respondents, found 70 percent of Canadians supported vaccine mandates for all non-exempt adults and majority support for requiring proof of vaccination to enter most public indoor venues.
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In truth, it is obscene to portray the supporters of vaccine mandates as being uniquely indifferent to the downtrodden’s despair. Canadian truckers with a perverse phobia of vaccination are genuinely suffering from the burdens of social exclusion. But the hundreds of thousands of North Americans who have needlessly lost an unvaccinated loved one to anti-vaxx ideology are suffering from a far worse deprivation. And this great mass of mourners is far from an elite constituency. One of the many relevant facts that Subramanya chooses to elide in her piece is that, contrary to her interviewees’ claims, vaccines work. They do not work perfectly. But they do make those who accept them 97 times less likely to die from a COVID infection. For this reason, Omicron deaths have been disproportionately concentrated in underprivileged areas with low rates of vaccination. In other words, the Zoom class’s proponents of vaccine mandates are less callously indifferent to the well-being of the unvaccinated than the latter are to their own well-being and to that of all who love them.
It is important to understand anti-vaxxers’ concerns and to avoid caricaturing their movement. And it is reasonable to argue that Canada’s exceptionally strict vaccine passport system is doing more to undermine social peace than advance public health. But it is journalistically bankrupt to portray a small, wildly unpopular movement for repealing public health regulations as a mobilization of “countless” have-nots against social inequality. Reporters who do so tell their readers far less about the “world as it is” than about the world as right-wing populists wish it to be.
The Twuckers are an unpopular, nihilistic minority proposing absolutely nothing that would help working people. Which is perfectly consistent with MAGA, whose marginal core is Buddy Garritys, not health care workers or meat packers.