Aren’t these the same Democrats who hailed obstructive protests in American cities during the spring and summer of 2020? Yes indeed, although one can say in some fairness that the wind blows through both parties a bit when it comes to who’s protesting and how. A new Trafalgar poll shows Democrats have become big fans of Justin Trudeau and his use of wartime emergency powers to shut down a non-violent but still obstructive truckers’ protest over COVID-19 mandates in Canada.

And when I say “big fans,” I mean … yuuuuuuge (via Leah Barkoukis):

That’s a nearly 4:1 level of support for Trudeau’s “handling” of the protest, which consisted of arrests, confiscations, seizures of bank accounts, and so on. It’s not easy to determine just how well Democrats grasped the totality of Trudeau’s actions, but it doesn’t appear that they cared much about it. And this was without any of the urban-rioting, “autonomous zone” insurrections, and attacks on government buildings and private businesses that accompanied the uprisings Democrats either backed or excused in 2020.

In this case, Democrats are well and truly on their own.  Republicans oppose Trudeau’s handling of the protests by an 87.3/8.1 split, with only 4.6% of GOP respondents being unaware of it as opposed to 17.1% of Democrats.  Unaffiliated/other voters also opposed Trudeau’s actions by a whopping 74.4/20.8, with a similarly small share of respondents unaware of the controversy (4.8%). That makes roughly eight in ten non-Democrats who oppose Trudeau’s protest suppression while more than six in ten Democrats approve of it. Yikes.

That is a significant disconnect, at least culturally if not politically. Would Republicans have been as opposed to actions to shut down BLM protests that blocked highways? That seems veeeerrrryyyyy doubtful, but the context of those protests also included a lot of violence at least correlated to those demonstrations, even if they were perpetrated by others. The connection is even clearer in the seizure of blocks of various cities to set up insurrectionist “autonomous zones,” tolerated for weeks and months by Democrat-run cities at the expense of the people trapped within them. Trudeau’s government claims that they found weapons caches at some protests and had intel on potential attacks, but there was no violence associated with the protests in Ottawa or elsewhere, even correlatively.

A recent analysis by William Galston and Elaine Kamarck warned Democrats of their dangerous disconnect from the mainstream culture of America. This poll puts that disconnect in stark terms. For all the screaming from Democrats about the coming onslaught of fascism, oppression, and threats to democracy, they certainly appear sanguine about it when it actually happens and and benefits their perceived interests. That’s something American voters can keep in mind as the midterms approach … and for a lot longer than that.