 What are you rebelling again? What do you got? Canada's Freedom Convoy started three weeks ago, with truckers from the east and west coasts of that country converging on Ottawa to protest a law requiring that they be vaccinated to come back into their own country. Given that well over 80% of the truckers are vaccinated, what exactly are they protesting? As one reporter who talked to dozens of demonstrators put it, it's less about vaccine mandates and more about a sense that things will never go back to normal. A sense that they're being ganged up on by the government, the media, big tech, big pharma. Truckers complained about inflation and about being demonized as dumb and irrational. They feel underappreciated by elites who tell them what to do without giving them any say in their own lives. One protester gave eloquent voice to populist resentment, saying, there's a group in power that always manages to create panic among the masses and siphon off public funds. The trucker protests remind me of the Tea Party in 2009, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, The Women's March in 2017 and Black Lives Matter protests after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 and George Floyd in 2020. Whatever specific event ignited each of those movements, they all quickly took on greater proportions and expressed a vast generalized anger, not simply at overspending bailouts, income inequality, sexism and police brutality, but at governments and cultural elites that seem at best indifferent to ordinary people's lives and at worst, downright malevolent. These movements typify what former CIA analyst Martin Gurry wrote about in the revolt of the public and the crisis of authority in the new millennium. Governments and elites have lost the trust and confidence of the people they supposedly serve. Social media and other forms of communications empower protest movements that are authentic, decentralized and leaderless, at least at the beginning. They're much better at articulating rage and anger at the status quo than they are at proposing anything like concrete proposals for reform. That was certainly the case with the Tea Party, which started out as a revolt against wild spending and bank bailouts during the financial crisis. The movement brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets all over the country. It captured the libertarian imagination with its simple message of controlling government spending and holding businesses and people accountable for bad decisions because capitalism is supposed to be a system of profit and loss. The Tea Party wave got a handful of people elected to Congress in 2010 and 2012, including Senator Rand Paul, who's cheering the Canadian truckers on and even calling for an American version of the freedom convoy. Clock things up, make people think about the mandates. But the Tea Party ultimately faded into insignificance and impotence, in large part because it could only articulate frustration and negativity. It was quickly absorbed into a Republican Party that failed at every step to reduce the size, scope, and spending of government. The Canadian Freedom Convoy will likely suffer a similar fate. Some of the other recent protest movements have been much more successful in pushing an agenda, but all have lost urgency and effectiveness as they became more centralized and enmeshed with partisan politics. Their leaders, just like the heads of the governments they're protesting, abuse their power and thus lose their moral authority. But that doesn't mean new protest movements don't matter, far from it. Even if they don't succeed at achieving their stated goals, their blows against the status quo whose cumulative force will make governments and elites become more accountable to the very people they ultimately rely on, as with the collapse of communism. Eventually there comes a tipping point where the seemingly impossible becomes the inevitable. In a country where arbitrary COVID policies still run rampant, trust and confidence in government business and organized religion continues to fall, inflation is at a 40 year high and just 17% of us are satisfied with the way things are going. Expect many new movements to rise up soon. As a society, we're like Marlon Brando in the wild one. We may not know the best way forward exactly, but that's not gonna stop us from pushing into the future.