No Kings Protests Failed To End Fascism on Saturday. Curious.

Protesting alongside mom is not cool. It never has been, it never will be. Mom, you see, is uncool. She is a font of uncoolness, in fact. It emanates from her pores.

But mom and her friends and their friends and coworkers and church and mosque and synagogue acquaintances and maybe some folks they met during co-rec softball are tired and furious and a little scared of the fascists running the U.S. government today and they need others to see their disdain and fortitude and yes, their hope that Better Things Are Possible, that the country’s content-obsessed fascist regime is wildly unpopular and has a soft underbelly that can be poked and prodded by those ready to move on from a political era defined by a movement that hates everything that is human. 

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That the largest single-day protest in the history of the United States was not a hyper-disciplined left-wing organizing machine making specific policy demands of a government that has eroded basic freedoms doesn’t really matter. That the anti-constitutional government remains in place today is no surprise. This isn’t Europe. We don’t have snap elections. We don’t have any of the good shit that comes with a parliamentary system. We have two goddamn parties captured by capital to varying extents and elections every couple years. That’s what we have right now. That’s what we have to work with. 

We Don’t Have Kings In America

Democratic messaging can be very simple: No kings.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Saturday’s No Kings rallies across the US drew between 8 and 9 million people who engaged in something that matters beyond political strategizing or immediate, tangible victories for Americans who would like to save representative democracy and self governance: These folks saw each other, face to face, not online, not on TV. They looked at each other and they shared their mutual fear and loathing of the Trump regime; they did not feel bad about harboring such disdain for rulers who deserve nothing but disdain and derision. They danced and smiled, and for an hour or two or three, extracted themselves from the bleakness and sadness of our current moment.

The machines in their pockets armed with sadness algorithms couldn’t touch them here. At No Kings rallies they saw up close that they are not alone – far from it, in fact – and that the median pro-democracy American has changed dramatically since the shock of 2016. 

Americans of varying political experience and views got together and experienced joy for a little while on a weekend afternoon, and asked fellow Americans driving on nearby roads to honk if they too felt alone against the Leviathan. No, they were not dressed like Che Guevara, and no, they have not read the Communist Manifesto. They don’t know what the fuck “praxis” is and they think it’s weird when you sneer and label anything you don’t like as “neoliberal.” Many of the well-meaning folks at No Kings rallies this past weekend are, at worst, dimly aware of a certain unease in the air, they’ve gotten sick of harmlessly passing their time away, and they very much want to make the buggers' eyes water. 

At the No Kings rally a few miles from my home there were older folks and young women and some middle-aged guys having a good time dancing to protest music and waving signs and laughing hysterically at the drivers who screamed and made rather rude gestures to the libs on the side of the road suggesting the optimal number of kings in the US was precisely zero. My kid dressed in a panda costume. People took pictures with him. I talked with an older guy who disagreed with my unkind thoughts on Tesla drivers honking in support of democracy.

"We're going to need everyone we can get," the old man said to me. I was owned by wisdom.

The No Kings rallies are good. Nothing the skeptics say changes that, even when they use big words like "inchoate" to describe a mass movement of people who want to defend and shore up representative democracy against a ferocious, unprecedented top-down assault. It's not all that complicated: Some people who oppose authoritarianism are not going to understand No Kings because they don't want to understand No Kings.

Like a lot of overly-earnest libs posting pictures of themselves Saturday at No Kings protests – a signal of virtue, you might call it – I got some blowback from people online who for the past year have roundly and happily dismissed No Kings as a political nothing, as a vapid parade organized by so-called wine moms who might have voted for John McCain or Mitt Romney, or god forbid, Hillary Clinton, that queen of neoliberal rot.

I hesitate to label these folks as leftists because I desperately don’t want to paint the left as uniformly scornful of No Kings. I heard from plenty of self-identified socialists and communists online this past weekend who attended their local No Kings rallies and were heartened by what they saw: The activation of normies. Differences on healthcare and housing and education and tax policy set aside for another day, the normies did something they almost never do: They took the time to be seen by other pro-democracy Americans and a media that has been loathe to acknowledge the widespread opposition to the Trump regime (just look at media outlets’ absurdly low crowd estimates if you don’t believe me). 

Leftists who have backed No Kings over this past year know in their guts that authoritarian entropy is real and it is accelerating. It's reflected in every major public poll, including the one from today showing our atrophying tyrant with a 33 percent approval rate. Thirty-three percent is fucking crazy. Normies, even those who inexplicably voted for him in 2024, fucking hate this guy's fucking guts.

Those on the left who support the exceedingly uncool and lib-coded No Kings movement seem to understand that the 2016 Democratic Party primary has to end if we are going to topple the bad guys and have a chance – however slim – of reforming our institutions to withstand attacks from bad-faith operators. All the rage and angst and hurt feelings left over from that brutal 2016 primary were put aside in 2020, revived in 2024, and still linger today. Ten years is long enough for a primary.

The Analytics Say We're On The Right Track

There were, however, some No Kings haters on Bluesky, the only legitimate microblogging platform, who on Saturday gazed upon millions of and millions of pro-democracy demonstrators on Saturday and said haughtily: This pales in comparison to my plan of firebombing a Walmart then not firebombing a Walmart. They watched 200,000 people gather in Minneapolis, a city that was terrorized by the president's secret police for a solid month, and they were not impressed, not in the least.

If these No Kings people were so effective, they would have simply ended the international fascist movement in one afternoon. And yet they did not. Curious!

This raises an awkward question for the haters, of whom there are many. If you didn't do the firebombing and you didn't go ahead and establish worldwide socialism and you didn't join the burgeoning pro-democracy movement gathered in every corner of your own damn country, what exactly did you do besides lie on the couch and post from an account that identifies you as a Stalinist because that triggers the libs?

You did nothing. That's what you did. Nothing.

The generous part of me – a part that's struggling for oxygen at the moment – wants to offer these folks the benefit of the doubt and say they do not understand we live (for now) under a system of competitive authoritarianism in which opposition forces are going to face government repression and bias from a media apparatus that has largely been taken over or bullied into silence and submission by the country's authoritarian rulers.

Maybe, if I'm continuing to be generous, these ostensibly pro-democracy No Kings haters, folks who maybe see mom when they see No Kings rallies, are unaware of the analytics of anti-authoritarian movements. Perhaps they don't know that research shows popular movements against tyrants "ensure serious political change" when around 3.5 percent of the country's population "actively participates" in a nonviolent protest movement against those in power (interestingly the researcher who popularized this threshold, Erica Chenoweth, was deeply skeptical of nonviolent political movements; her mind was changed during her years of research).

It's called the 3.5% Rule, and while it's not an ironclad threshold that guarantees sweeping political change, it has proven true in many countries that had moved much deeper into authoritarian rule before popular opposition gained traction. If No Kings hit the 9 million mark this past Saturday – reliable estimates are hard to come by – that means we're about 1.5 million people away from the 3.5 percent mark. That's not bad. You might even say it's good.

Of the 25 largest protest campaigns studied by Chenoweth and her colleagues at Harvard, 20 were identified as nonviolent, and 14 of these were "outright successes." The nonviolent campaigns attracted four times as many participants as the average violent campaign.

This isn't hard to understand. Normies – non-political people who usually have a lot to lose – are going to say absolutely the fuck not to violent anti-authoritarian movements. The nonviolent stuff – holding signs, chanting slogans, being seen – is more like it. That won't cost you anything. That won't get you fired or get you beaten up and arrested by government thugs because (for now) we have the right to assemble and say pretty much anything we want. Free speech – not the libertarian kind but the real kind that challenges authority – a powerful tool if you choose to use it. The analytics say it's more effective than firebombing big box stores with reasonably priced meat, for one.

I came across a handful of social media posts on Saturday, amid the joy an exuberance of No Kings rallies in cities large and small and tiny, that seemed to gatekeep resistance to authoritarianism. The message appeared to be: If you haven't had your skull cracked by masked government agents or had your life ruined by the legal machinations of a regime bent on vengeance against its critics, then you haven't really done anything to oppose authoritarianism. If you haven't dedicated your life to stopping the bad men, your opposition doesn't really count (I'm not going to link to these posts because I don't want anyone to be dogpiled online).

The most polite way to describe this critique of America's pro-democracy movement would be counterproductive. Some might call it "wrecker behavior" that (intentionally?) undermines a coalescing movement against the nation's first tyrant, whose name will one day be washed away if we do this thing right. I'm going to resist alienating potential allies and say we should, for right now at least, share courage and and determination and seek reasons to ally with those we might see as feckless, weak-kneed libs or frightening online leftists instead of finding reasons to splinter and open a path to authoritarian consolidation.

Bleating and babbling we might fall on this authoritarian regime's neck if we keep up the good energy so present and promising at No Kings protests. Our collective belief in a better future might just march cheerfully out of obscurity into real life, skeptics or no skeptics, haters or no haters.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.