The No Kings protests that took place across the country on Saturday were massive. Americans once again turned out in large numbers in thousands of cities and towns, in both red and blue states, to protest against President Donald Trump’s authoritarian presidency.
The huge size of the protests is a stirring demonstration of democratic expression. It drives home how Trump’s imperial presidency is not only unpopular, but unpopular in a manner that infuriates and mobilizes people. These protests don’t only galvanize activist types, but also people who rarely protest — or have never protested before in their lives. They are also altering our political geography: Harvard researchers have found that the No Kings protests are spreading deeper into Trump country over time.
But something is missing. There is an absence of friction. The contained and routinized choreography of these demonstrations every few months is central to their mass appeal. Paradoxically, it is also what limits their power.
Massive street protests are best understood as the tip of the iceberg.
Implicit in highly-curated street protest is an orderly return to business as usual by the end of day. Thus, they serve more as a barometer of anti-Trump sentiment than as a model of resistance. Ultimately, Americans interested in using collective action to push back against Trump’s authoritarian agenda will need to show more ambition and creativity.
No Kings is, by design, meant to be as broadly appealing as possible and serve as a big tent for a wide coalition of social movements opposed to authoritarianism. And size matters: it helps signal disapproval more powerfully than a poll number does.
No Kings’ the-more-the-merrier framework opens up the possibility that a day of anti-Trump protest hits that golden 3.5% of the population benchmark — the proportion of the population engaged in nonviolent protest that some social scientists say historically corresponds with successful campaigns for sweeping social change. (In the U.S., that would be roughly 12 million people on the streets.) But as Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes last year, that number tends to correspond with a wide range of pronounced political activity, and is not in and of itself a silver bullet for social change:
[Hitting 3.5%] usually suggests that there is a much broader range of support for the movement than just people actively participating in that movement. What does that mean? It means that this is at a peak of a movement that has been building over the years. Building, organizing, engaged in lots of other low-level tactics, protests, non-cooperation, everyday forms of resistance.
In other words, massive street protests are best understood as the tip of the iceberg rather than the apex of dissident energy. Even when the numbers are huge, they serve as a portal into movement energy rather than an endpoint.
“There’s not any one way to get people into a movement. You want to have as many doors open as possible because you have to reach people wherever they are,” Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University recently told The Guardian. “The bigger challenge is, once they’re there, how do you keep them there, and then how do you channel that engagement in collective ways?”
There are a few ways for the left to think about how it should direct energy that is coalescing at No Kings protests.
The first is to remember that the art of protest is drama: a protagonist contesting the power of an antagonist. The effective ones are often animated by some type of refusal to cooperate with unjust policy, and specific in their grievances and policy demands.
In this vein, the most widely cited and admired protest movement in American history is civil disobedience during the Civil Rights era. Protesters merged theory and practice, nonviolently insisting on laying claims to rights with their bodies. Noncooperation invites repression, but repression of these kinds of protests often only serves to underscore the righteousness of the cause of the protesters. It’s a story that activists often win when they are organized and dogged enough.
Minneapolis activists’ resistance to federal immigration agents showcases the outsize power of civil disobedience laser focused on a specific goal. Activists nonviolently refused to cooperate with the wishes of federal agents by surveilling their movements and raids; alerting immigrant communities to incoming Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids; shutting down significant parts of the economy; and demanding the agents leave by constantly whistling and honking in their presence and banging pots and pans to interfere with their sleep. The vicious repression of these protesters was broadcast across the country, and provided a preview of what the rest of the country might see if Trump had his dreams fulfilled: cities occupied by secret police bent on shredding up our civil liberties. After weeks of terrible press and federal agents killed two protesters, Trump was forced to retreat as his poll numbers on his signature issue of immigration dropped.
There are many ways in which activists can use noncooperation to effect change. Some scholars who study political dissent argue boycotts are uniquely effective — when well-organized — because they require relatively little effort and can attract first-time protesters easily. Some big labor unions are putting call-outs for other unions to coordinate on efforts to put together a general strike in the U.S. — widespread workplace stoppages across the country — in the coming years. Bolder displays of dissent from people in ordinary spaces can help inspire more noncooperation among the elite echelons of civil society which were depressingly quick to capitulate to Trump, from big business to law firms to academia to corporate media companies.
None of this is to say No Kings protests are frivolous or a waste of time. They are impressive exercises in solidarity on behalf of American democracy, and a reminder of the possibility of coalition-building across a factionalized left. But the kind of sustained collective action that moves the dial and truly contests authority needs to go beyond intermittent street protests. It requires confrontation.
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