After absorbing two weeks of criticism for doing too little in response to the “Freedom Convoy” that has blocked border crossings across Canada and paralyzed the capital city of Ottawa, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared a national emergency on Monday, giving the federal government broad powers to restore public order.

Copycat demonstrations have already cropped up in countries around the world, from the United States and France to Israel and New Zealand. Each has taken aim at vaccine mandates and other pandemic-related restrictions and sought to challenge elected governments. So far the immediate political effect has been fairly limited because the people protesting constitute a minority just about everywhere (though sometimes a fairly robust one).

But that doesn’t diminish the potency of this specific act of dissent, which has already proven quite effective at delivering a swift kick in the Achilles’ heel of the center-left politicians and parties the world over. The trucker protests have gone a long way toward demonstrating the limits of the progressive capacity to represent the interests and outlook of the working class.

The progressive left likes to tell itself a story about political life. Yes, there can be legitimate alternation between parties and governing ideologies. But over the longer term, history moves in the progressive direction, toward ever greater freedom, justice, and equality — as the left defines them. Sometimes such progress slows or is halted for a while. At other times it unfolds gradually. And at still others, popular protest demands it accelerate. Those are the options, and they show both that the movement of history tends toward the goals progressives favor and that popular protest is a kind of fuel powering that salutary change.

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