Reality Honks Back: The Canadian trucker convoy suggests a new class divide originating in our experience of reality itself.

The world is watching what’s happening in Canada with a mixture of fascination and horror. The weeks-long saga of the “Freedom Convoy” protest against pandemic restrictions, spearheaded by Canadian truckers, has taken an authoritarian turn. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to crush the peaceful protest, suspending civil liberties protections, arresting hundreds, and taking the unprecedented step of ordering dissident citizens entirely frozen out of the financial system. What brought Canada’s normally placid politics to this point?

Many have slotted this drama into a familiar framework of right-wing populists versus left-wing elites. But a different way of looking at it may be more helpful in explaining not only what has happened in Canada but also why the political divide now looks so strikingly similar across the developed world, from Ottawa to Wellington.

While much has been made of the “working class” and its alienation from “the elite,” this phrasing comes with associations about material wealth and economic class that aren’t necessarily helpful. Many of those who support “populist” politics in opposition to the elite tend to be relatively solidly middle class, while many a starving artist supports the establishment Left. The character of one’s work and lifestyle seems to shape the common values of each side of the class divide more than income does.

Consider instead two main classes of people in society, who tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways. The first are those people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands and buy or sell or move things around in the real world, like a transport logistics company. This class necessarily works in a physical location or owns or operates physical assets central to its trade.

The second class of people is different. They are, relatively speaking, a civilizational innovation. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases, the information exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents who can themselves act in the physical world—a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this process, these people build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role have any direct relationship with or effect on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore often do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and its members have recently realized that they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.