Early in the afternoon of Saturday, October 18, while Duke Football put forward a strong first half before a heartbreaking loss to Georgia Tech, organizers in various Duke student organizations gathered in front of the East Duke building. Led by the Duke Human Rights Center, they marched to Durham Central Park to join Durham’s second “No Kings” protest, one chapter in a nationwide day of protest with a collective turnout of millions.
In Durham, the march was varied in tone. Many waved typically austere, fascism-is-on-our-doorstep signs with messages like “No Human is Illegal on Stolen Land” or “For Fear of Democracy, I Dissent!” For those participants, the mood was somber, and the stakes couldn’t be more dire.
And then there were the protesters dressed in inflatable cow costumes carrying signs reading “Eat Mor Fascists.” One protester bore a sign with Shadow the Hedgehog holding a bottle of Tylenol with the text “Come + Take It.” These participants (and many others) brought a sense of irreverent humor to the march, often with references to pop or internet culture.
The tension inherent in this stark juxtaposition was on display at the marches nationwide, which the Associated Press described as having a “street party vibe.” Per NPR reporting, the Washington, DC edition of the march included an “impromptu dance party,” protesters continued to carry signs with messages like “Trump Must Go Now” as they danced. In one photo from the Austin, TX protest, multiple protesters are shown carrying American flags turned upside down, while next to them a sign reads “So Bad, Even the Introverts are Here!”
So what is “No Kings” for? Is this a mass mobilization of Americans who are genuinely terrified of authoritarianism? Or is it an anti-Trump social gathering of upper-class progressives who would have been at brunch if Kamala won? It’s hard to tell. “No Kings” represents the first American protest movement at this scale with no defined political program. Successful peaceful protesters throughout American history routinely pushed clear, specific, and actionable policy objectives. Dr. King’s March on Washington wasn’t just gospel music and the “I Have a Dream” speech – its political program, laid out in the “Ten Demands,” detailed specific policy proposals based around living wages and school desegregation. The 2020 Black Lives Matter movement’s success is debatable, but its prescriptions around police reform were explicitly laid out in an extensive policy platform. Although, perhaps there’s some similarity between the tone of BLM and No Kings protesters. While many involved in BLM were sincere, there was a performative nature to much of the “activism” around it, and No Kings may be an inheritor in that respect– but more on that later.
Moreover, the lack of coherent policy demands in the No Kings protests is reminiscent of Occupy Wall Street’s lack of any coordinated demands beyond snappy populist slogans. While some championed Occupy’s leaderless structure, it led to little effect beyond changing the language of the progressive movement in America. Wall Street was never punished for 2008. The No Kings protests are collectively animated against Trump’s overreach, but the actual change that the protests see as necessary isn’t clear.
Part of this is indeed because No Kings is a mass movement with many diverse perspectives – over 200 organizations from across the nation are partners in the protests. But because of the movement’s enormous size and lack of unifying demands, it functions as a vehicle for the Democratic party to perform protest without achieving meaningful opposition to Trump in Washington. Indivisible, the 501(c)(4) that originated the No Kings movement, is an established part of DNC infrastructure via its familiar funding sources of ActBlue and the Open Society Foundations. While many protesters are dissatisfied with the Democratic leadership, the lack of coherence in the movement’s politics and its ties to special interest groups mean that the only cause that they can push forward is the common denominator of Trump’s most powerful political opponents, the DNC establishment.
No Kings is the DNC’s smokescreen keeping the young and politically active from seeing the party for what it truly is. By campaigning with a massive, largely young, and flamboyantly costumed movement, the Democrats can appear like they are young, hip, and ready to oppose Trump and his tyranny. But in reality, the Democrats (perhaps unintentionally) put us in the place of tyranny and fear that we are today.
The opportunities to put together a coherent political program and rally behind it were many, but instead, No Kings serves only the party that anointed Kamala Harris with no primary to compete in a general election that she predictably lost, being one of the least popular candidates when she actually ran for president. Kamala Harris’s merits as a politician are up for debate, but the preceding mess of Joe Biden’s deteriorated mental state and the lack of political clarity around her campaign during the short period of time that it had to develop meant that her presidential bid was doomed from the beginning.
Beyond Kamala Harris, recent history displays that the Democratic Party indulges in anti-democratic behavior so much so that they’ve kept themselves from winning time and time again. Beyond nominating an unelected and vastly unpopular candidate, this is the same party that made no attempt to make Ruth Bader Ginsburg step down in the Supreme Court, even when it was clear she was nearing the end of her life. Various Supreme Court justices had been circumspect enough to step down, like Anthony Kennedy in 2018. Why not RBG? President Obama met with her multiple times to discuss the Court, and by her own admission never pressured her to consider retirement. There’s a case for strategic retirements hurting court integrity, but when one side uses them, the other side failing to do so is damning. RBG remaining on the court until her passing gave Trump the golden opportunity to solidify a conservative supermajority in the Supreme Court by nominating Amy Coney Barrett – a majority that the Democrats now blame for their political program never seeing the light of day.
As it stands, the out-of-touch Democratic Party establishment brought it on themselves – and some of the largest figures of that establishment (Nancy Pelosi, Cory Booker, and Hillary Clinton to name a few) have been the loudest supporters of “No Kings.” All the while, the DNC has done everything in its power to stop new blood from bringing life to the party, expelling David Hogg from its leadership after he tried to use his Vice Chair position to get more young, outspoken Democrats into Congress. Time and time again, Democrats try to stamp out fresh, new candidates– like Maine candidate for Senate Graham Platner.
While controversial statements Platner has made in the past (and a very unfortunate tattoo) demand criticism or at least examination, what is objectively true is that Platner honestly built up a base of support in Maine and built himself off of small individual donations over months of campaigning. Meanwhile, when Janet Mills entered the race with Chuck Schumer’s blessing, she found her campaign a million dollars richer within 24 hours, before the stories about Platner’s past even broke. Mills didn’t even decide to run until Platner had been campaigning for months. Where Platner relates to a bipartisan working class coalition in Maine, Janet Mills represents what has put the DNC establishment in power for years now – age, Chuck-Schumerian nothing politics, and a vastly inflated treasury of uncertain origins.
No Kings is ultimately snappy slogans without substance. It is the work of a well-marketed, directionless opposition that mirrors that lack of sincerity in the Harris, Biden, and Hillary Clinton campaigns. And while protests have always been at least partially theater, when a protest is all theater, it becomes a useless performance that only exists to soothe, not galvanize, those who are dissatisfied with the status quo.
by Nathan Hertzberg
