Elite policymaking without sufficient democratic participation causes problems for the ruling class. We’ve seen it with Canadian truckers, Californian independent contractor haulers, and now, farmers.
Dutch farmers have brought the country to a standstill with their fury over the government’s climate plan. Livestock emit nitrogen in their intestinal gas and their manure, and the new proposed nitrogen emission regulations could lead to the closing of more than a quarter of Dutch livestock farms. The farmers won’t have it. Since the plan was announced in June, some 40,000 of them have been protesting, using their tractors to block major highways, setting fires, and dumping manure on roads. As the protests went on, they grew more extremist, and now farmers have even threatened state construction workers who were sent to remove the hay bales and the upside-down Dutch flags from the roads, doxxing them on social media. Yet through all this, authorities have been pretty meek, but they seem reluctant to go up against the massive farm vehicles—just as Canadian police did little to stop truckers who took over Toronto last winter. If the government caves to the agriculture industry’s demands, it will teach Dutch society that peoples’ movements can matter.
The government ignored the nitrogen “problem” for years before ham-handedly unveiling several emissions-cutting measures at once. The new policy offers no vision or perspective for the future of the agricultural sector but instead leaves that industry—the leader in EU meat exports and the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural goods overall—to bear the costs of his climate goals. If this policy goes through, many Dutch farmers will simply be forced to kill off their livestock and sell their land.
This has given the right opportunity in this clash. Right-wing populists in the Netherlands and abroad have seized on the farmers’ cause as a symbol of working-class anger against “green” policies. French politician Marine Le Pen tweeted in support of the protesters, while Donald Trump told a conference of conservative youth, Turning Point USA, that Dutch farmers were “bravely resisting the climate tyranny of the Dutch government.” Fox News covers the protesters as heroes. It remains to be seen, however, how many farmers are actually ‘turning right’ as opposed to expressing concern with a particular policy—the MSM after all loves to portray, like it did with the Canadian truckers, anyone who rocks the system as extremists, no matter how valid their concerns.
The protest has already gone global. The Dutch policy has its roots in EU climate goals, but this summer has seen solidarity marches among farmers not only in Europe but also as far away as Argentina and Canada. And the political repercussions are likely to be just as widespread. The center-right governing party is losing supporters by the day, while membership in the populist Farmer Citizen Movement is surging. Another cautionary tale: look at Sri Lanka, where the government’s forceful and devastating anti-nitrogen regulations caused a food shortage that sparked protests; that whole saga ended in the storming of the presidential palace and the toppling of the government.
The upshot: governments targeting farmers are playing with fire. The problem, however, is that each of these groups is agitating for one particular aspect of a systemic problem: capitalism. So long as it is only isolated groups protesting isolated policies, the overall system will adapt. It is only by linking groups together for a General Strike that real change has a greater possibility of happening.