HAS HE EVER BEEN TO WISCONSIN?

Reason's J. D. Tuccille attempts a comparison that doesn't quite work.

Canada appears to be governed as you would expect of Wisconsin if California's snotty political class were exiled to Madison. This puts generally nice, compliant people under the rule of an especially self-regarding and contemptuous gang. But some Canadians have been driven to revolt against that ruling class's pandemic policies in the form of the trucker-led Freedom Convoy. So powerful are the shock waves of this unprecedented uprising that they crossed the border and flipped the positions Americans of the left and right take on the legitimacy of political protest and suppression of the same. More importantly, the movement cautions the political class everywhere against pushing people too far.

I submit that current Wisconsin governor Tony "Pencil Neck" Evers (D-Public Instruction) is at least as snotty and incompetent as any of the leading Californians.  There's more legislative oversight, though, which led relatively quickly to an easing of the corona tyranny in Wisconsin.  And the pencil neck at least had the good sense not to antagonize the Packer fans or lumberacks too much.  Where did Canada's prime minister mess up?  I mean, those "nice, compliant people" watch nationally televised fist-fighting on ice on Saturday nights.  Why should a continent be governed by an island, whether it is with the sensibilities of Manhattan or of Montreal?  Maybe they could take an education from their neighbors who wrote the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment into their governing documents.

The more protest-prone United States likely avoided this scenario by not just decentralizing but often ignoring rulemaking. The split may best be captured by the media's constant contrast between locked-down New York and wide-open Florida. Even in restrictive states, many local officials refused to enforce curfews, mask orders, and business closures. Within or in defiance of the law, local policies in-line with local sentiment mean fewer pissed-off people. If the U.S. had widely imposed national mandates, politicians in Washington, D.C., would probably now be wishing the pushback had stopped at traffic jams and honking.

There is that subset of the political class who would like to smear some large segment of the electorate as "insurrectionist," but that's not going to go anywhere.  But that subset of the political class overlaps, substantially, with the corona tyrants, and their future doesn't look so bright right now.

"Two years after the world first heard about covid-19, the coronavirus pandemic has led to a huge extension of state power over people's lives and the erosion of individual freedoms," the Democracy Index 2021 observes about conditions around the world. That loss of liberty inspired waves of popular but disconnected protests in country after country among people seeking the return of liberal norms and respect for their personal choices. Now, improbably, those protests may be coming together under a maple leaf and a #HonkHonk hashtag.

None too soon, either, but it's on voters to recognize that corona tyrants pivoting, relatively recently, toward freedom, ought be replaced wherever possible with office seekers who were dubious in the spring of 2020.