Stupidly, I was in an argument about my support for the Freedom Convoy with an old acquaintance on Facebook the other day. I generally prefer to do my arguing on the Twitter because it’s easier to have arguments in which professional censors do not intervene. But, because it is probably the least socially partitioned platform these days, one can have experiences there that just don’t happen so much on Twitter anymore.
I suggested that, while the proponents of the dangerous ideology of Truckism might staged the longest, largest, loudest tailgate party to date, the Convoy was far less physically dangerous, far more law abiding and, most importantly, far less lethal than comparable mass protests like the George Floyd protests, the Occupy movement or the Indian farmers’ march. It lacked the open air drug market scene of Occupy and consequently did not produce the masses of overdose deaths and close calls Occupy camps did. It lacked the vigilantism, vandalism and mob violence of the Floyd protests and so, did not get anyone shot, unlike the protests sponsored by Black Lives Matter.
So, why was it so much worse than these rallies? And why was it necessary to use emergency powers against it?
My interlocutor replied that it was because of all the horn honking at all days and hours. That would be annoying, I responded. No. It’s actual torture. It’s an atrocity. It’s banned in the Geneva Convention. (Of course, so is putting men in women’s prisons but no matter!)
One of the biggest problems I have speaking across the social partition with my friends who continue to reside in the progressiverse is that I often do not credit that they sincerely hold some of the beliefs they espouse, that saying obvious falsehoods is such an important boundary maintenance practice these days that I tend to go that route more frequently and more ungenerously than I should.
But I felt a real note of urgency, of sincerity. This person could not imagine suffering more profound than a couple of weeks of frequent and annoyingly loud car and truck horn blasts through the night in a major city. This was such extreme violence, such extreme suffering, such trauma that Nuremberg-style trials should possibly be empaneled to punish the Truckists for this heinous crime!
Having just spend a year living in Dar Es Salaam with my neighbourhood’s late night bars and pubs and my apartment complex’s chickens, I was tempted to suggest that your average Canadian could not handle the noise culture of any major world city, even when a massive protest was not going on.
On the same day—yes, I managed my time very poorly that day—I found myself in an equally useful but similarly illuminating debate about British Columbia’s Bill 7, an actual enabling act, one of many tributes to the original 1933 version, very much in the style of Nicolas Maduro and other authoritarian strong men who periodically ram a bill through parliament declaring a continuing state of emergency, necessitating that the head of government rule by decree. In this case, BC’s government wants two years to rule by decree, collect personal information unhindered, restrict speech and mobility rights and enact or amend any provincial law without resort to the legislature.
Why? Well, because these aluminum tariffs really hurt BC. In fact, they are causing such unprecedented disruption, such extreme hurt that of course the government needs unfettered powers. Canada, the story goes, has never faced so great a threat as the Trump Administration’s punitive and arbitrary tariffs. Donald Trump is the biggest threat to Canadian rights and liberty because he is depriving us of our fundamental right to sell Rio Tinto’s aluminum ingots to foreigners, unobstructed.
But again, I sensed the genuine fear, desperation, need for order.
But if we didn’t need this kind of legislation when the far more impactful softwood lumber tariffs went into effect four separate times through the 1980s, 90s and 00s, why do we need an enabling act now? Because this is worse. Because the real threat is what Trump says he wants to do, to annex Canada, to punish Canada—he’s revealing his mind to us, the fact that the tanks will be rolling across the border any day now.
But we didn’t need such sweeping authoritarian legislation even when we were fighting Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo eighty years ago. Why now? Because this is literally the scariest thing that has ever happened to Canada. Scarier than Ronald “Nuclear Warning Shot” Reagan was elected, scarier than when we headed to Vimy Ridge or the Battle of the Bulge, scarier than our actual war with the US back in the 1810s.
I think people are sincerely feeling these emotions because fear is contagious but also because exhibiting fear and panic strengthens authoritarian social impulses and that is what our leaders want right now. Rule by decree is saleable only to bullies and cowards, to the extent that the two categories are separable.
In other words, I believe that core to the rise of cultural authoritarianism among Anglo Canadians has been a new politics of personal fragility, one inextricable from the rise of Justin Trudeau and the new nationalism he hawked. I wrote about this disturbing trend and where it might send us in the early days of the 2015 election campaign following a striking and bizarre moment at the first federal leaders’ debate:
I was initially so surprised by Justin Trudeau’s sudden pivot, echoed in pre-rehearsed, stage-ready tweets and Facebook posts from campaign surrogates, to immediately assert that his continued feelings of bereavement surrounding his father’s death a decade and a half ago required some kind of disability accommodation by everyone else in Canada. Gerald Butts and other Liberal surrogates instantaneously reacted to Tom Mulcair’s assertion that the NDP’s multi-generation track record of standing up for Canadians’ liberty was demonstrated in their opposition to the War Measures Act in 1971. Apparently, this implied criticism of Trudeau’s dad was dirty pool and had hurt the prospective Prime Minister’s feelings. The recent emergence of medically invalid but nevertheless popular “trigger warnings” on US college campuses had, somehow, leapt across the border and now, fifteen of the past fifty years of Canadian politics were off-limits for fear of causing one rich white man to experience hurt feelings.
But I am no longer surprised. This bullshit is totally working. All kinds of random people, veterans struggling with amputations and PTSD, precariously employed minimum wage workers, racialized populations being stripped of their citizenship rights—these people, ordinary Canadians, are getting really concerned about how Mulcair was insufficiently considerate of Trudeau’s hurt feelings. How is it that the feelings of one attractive, privileged, successful, white adult male could become the object of so much sympathy that the entire narrative of the campaign changed in one day? How could Butts and the other Liberal strategists have calculated that so many Canadians whose easiest day is tougher than Trudeau’s hardest would have become so concerned about another national leader being inconsiderate of his feelings?
In hindsight, this scene was a harbinger of what would go wrong with this country over the past decade. The man who would later unconstitutionally use emergency powers against his citizens couldn’t be grilled on the subject because to elicit his opinion about the use of the War Measures Act during the FLQ Crisis because it might hurt his feelings.
But I want to go further: Justin Trudeau’s use of performative grief, of his own tears as the linchpin of his rhetorical strategy helped Canadians slide faster towards cultural authoritarianism. You see: Trudeau’s tears functioned as both sword and shield. They could be used to indict the behaviour of others not by demonstrating its wrongness but rather by how it impacted the Prime Minister’s emotions. The tears were, more importantly, a shield. They allowed Trudeau to dodge questions, not just those he was took choked to answer but, more importantly, all the questions his tears stifled in the throats or on the lips of his interlocutors, the passive-aggressive intimidation of a very powerful man crying.
As I observed in my original commentary, there is nothing new about linking social and political rank and power to a politics of sensitivity, fragility, even. The Princess and the Pea is, in some ways, the ultimate Enlightenment description of political legitimacy, that only a true princess would be so sensitive as to feel a single dried pea through seventeen goose down mattresses.
Last week, in Nanaimo, a criminal trial took place of a man who assaulted a woman on her way home from a parents’ rights protest. More than a foot taller than the fifty-two-year-old, the man who had more than a decade and a foot on his victim explained to the court that he had to punch her in the face because she made him feel “unsafe.”
Those present to support the victim were baffled that this appeared to amount to the sum total of the assailant’s defense. But he clearly believed (and the courts might agree with him), that feeling uncomfortable or whatever “unsafe” means to an individual like this was a nothing short of a threat to his very existence.
More importantly, as with Justin Trudeau in that fateful debate, it is clear that preventing certain people from experiencing unpleasant feelings, even if those feelings might only last moments is more important than Canada’s national leaders being able to debate emergency powers legislation and its abuse. After all, stopping certain people from feeling bad is enough reason to use those very emergency powers; it is even sufficient reason to breach our society’s state monopoly on violence to permit the dozens of unprosecuted assaults against women rallying and speaking in support of their rights and those of their children.
But, of course, the problem with the success of efforts to punish, chill and silence speech high-status individuals find hard to tolerate is that the more people are protected from speech that makes them feel bad, the less able they are to handle such speech when it somehow gets around the barricades. Consequently, offense-based speech restriction produces an ever-receding horizon of offense. And that means an ever-increasing demand for new legal, social and technological tools to manage the increasingly fragile personalities.
In essence, we are becoming addicts of censorship, state censorship, community censorship, self-censorship and even compelled speech and like addicts of all things, more censorship creates more tolerance (i.e. speech sensitivity) which then requires more censorship.
Those we coddle by acceding to their authoritarian demands inevitably grow ever more despotic and fragile. People who are so used to other people preventing them from having experiences that elicit negative or challenging emotions lose their ability to manage their own emotions and become increasingly convinced that it is the job of everyone around them to manage their emotions for them. Those who refuse to be conscripted into changing their speech and that of those around them to accommodate the acquired fragility of special persons are understood to be hate criminals, bigots who deserve whatever is coming to them, firing, beating, incarceration, whatever!
As this vicious cycle of offense-taking and new forms of punishment and overreaction, we are generating a society that genuinely believes that it is the president of the United States’ duty to make sure foreigners like us are prosperous, that believes our prosperity must be guaranteed by the US government and that it is not merely a nice thing but a fundamental right. We expect coddling in a widening set of contexts.
Canadians have experienced far greater hardships than these tariffs but, when one asks why the BC government did not require the ability to rule by decree during the Softwood Wars, the Salmon War or the two actual World Wars, the answer is “but Donald Trump keeps talking about the ‘51st state.’ Can’t you see the tanks are going to roll across the border and begin killing us!” Unlike our reaction to Reagan’s far more serious threats of a nuclear first strike, our interpretation a 10% duty on aluminum ingots, because these very fragile, sensitive folks all believe they can read Trump’s mind, is that it is identical to soldiers marching into town and shooting our family members and neighbours.
What an increasingly number of Canadians cannot handle and require unprecedented measures to handle is being taunted and trolled by Trump. Of course, we really need sweeping emergency powers because those powers must be used to prevent Trump from making us feel angry, scared, powerless, humiliated, insecure because we have lost the ability to manage those normal emotions and how need not just a media bubble lying to us about our ability to vanquish the US in a one-on-one trade war or even conventional war; we need the full coercive power of the state to shut people up, shut people down—anything to solve the emergency called “our feelings.”
Of course, not all Canadians are understood to deserve or can conscript the state and those around us into managing our emotions. Obviously, women and girls wishing to protect their sports, spaces, privacy, etc. must manage their own emotions, even “reframe their trauma,” to make sure that the Hearers of this Manichean system are the exclusive beneficiaries of this external emotion-management.
Our society is growing more authoritarian by the day and that authoritarianism is powered by inculcating novel and escalating forms of fragility, concurrent with the expectation that this fragility is everyone’s problem except one’s own. And when people see no difference between special, designated individuals hearing words they would rather not and such things as murder and assault, we know where that goes: exactly where Canada is going now, concurrently descending into both increasing vigilante violence and increasingly authoritarian government.
Sensitivity is important; empathy is important; but so is taking responsibility for one’s own emotions, even if they are a reaction to the actions of others. This country needs a corollary to Pink Shirt Day, maybe Blue Shirt Day, the day where we celebrate those who are continent and responsible, who manage their own emotions and learn the most important thing about bullying: how to stand up to a bully. Because if you don’t learn to stand up to bullies, you are fated to become one, like the petty authoritarians with whom the Canadian establishment is replete and who constantly seek new means of lawfare, intimidation, threats and violence to prevent themselves experiencing feelings they have made themselves too fragile to handle.
