The No Kings movement needs a next step
The American people are finally rising up — but rising up is only the beginning.
More than eight million people participated in last weekend’s No Kings protests that took place in all 50 states and at 3,000 locations across the country, making it the largest single-day protest in American history. More than one in every 50 people in America participated.
Collective action in the form of protests and marches like No Kings are critically important acts of resistance against authoritarianism and the Trump presidency. They are a form of symbolic power signaling that the regime has not yet achieved total control.
The president’s MAGA coalition knows this. That’s why the White House dispatched a spokeswoman to preemptively describe the protests as “Trump derangement sessions.” That’s why a National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman labeled them “hate America rallies.” And that’s why, after the No Kings marches in October, Donald Trump himself posted a video created with artificial intelligence showing him dumping human waste on the protesters.
These are the acts of a defiant — and shaken — administration. Trump’s approval ratings have continued to collapse; according to the latest YouGov/Economist poll, they stand at 35% overall. Once his signature issue, the president is hemorrhaging support on the economy, even from Republicans. The U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has failed to produce a rally-round-the-flag effect. Except for his MAGA diehards, most Americans are repulsed.
But as hopeful as the protests were, what happens next will determine whether No Kings is a moment or a movement.
Research by Harvard University political scientist Erica Chenoweth and her colleagues shows that it only takes 3.5% of a population engaging in non-violent protests at a key moment to force a government to enact positive reforms. In the U.S., this translates to roughly 12 million people. The next No Kings protests — which are scheduled for July 4 — will almost certainly surpass that threshold.
It is the years and decades of careful planning and building that truly separates transformative movements from protests that may win a tactical victory, but ultimately fail to renegotiate the terms of power in a sustained way.
But for now, No Kings is more a powerful slogan than a coherent strategy. As its organizers explained to the Guardian, this is mostly by design. No Kings is supposed to be a broad coalition of Americans — left, right and independent — united by a belief in real democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. The organization, as much as it can be called one, is bottom-up, nimble and local. But it is the years and decades of careful planning and building that truly separates transformative movements from protests that may win a tactical victory, but ultimately fail to renegotiate the terms of power in a sustained way.
The No Kings organizers seem to understand this challenge. They are conducting training seminars and distributing organizing tool kits, which consists of educational resources about mutual aid, protecting the right to vote, helping communities to peacefully resist ICE and, more generally, tips for organizing on the local level. The successful resistance campaign against Trump’s mass deportation campaign in Minneapolis is an example of this model in action.
The central strategic question No Kings must now answer, according to political scientist Hahrie Han, is not whether the protests are legitimate, but whether they are durable. Han argues that movements do not require charismatic figureheads. What they do need are mechanisms for collective decision-making for maximum efficacy — identifying people the movement trusts “to sit at the table” and deliver a better outcome.
The Long Black Freedom Struggle and Civil Rights Movement provide many examples of this principle of organizing. The Montgomery bus boycott held for 381 days due to sustained economic pressure, even as the bus company bled money, because leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association could credibly represent the people on the front lines. This was both top-down and bottom-up, organizing and working together.
Like what happened in Montgomery, No Kings has the potential to own the streets. But it is still building the infrastructure for strategic and long-term community organizing.
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New research by the Protest Project, led by sociologists Dana Fisher and Arman Azedi, suggests that No Kings is having a positive effect on encouraging political engagement, efficacy and momentum among participants. People who attend a march or protest — many of them for the first time in their lives — are being converted into long-term pro-democracy activists.
But to reach its full potential, No Kings needs to explicitly name what is at stake in moral terms. The administration’s depraved policy agenda — which includes gutting the social safety net to transfer more money to the richest Americans and corporations; militarism and a war of choice against Iran; mass deportations and a de facto concentration camp system; and attacks on civil rights, human rights and the rule of law — are not mere policy disagreements. They are gross violations of the social compact between an ostensibly democratic government and the American people.
As No Kings attempts to mature from a series of protests to a sustained mass movement, its participants and organizers will also need to decide what relationship they will have to the Democratic Party.
Given the structure of America’s political institutions, the pro-democracy movement has few viable options except to support the Democrats as a potential bulwark against Trump and the larger neofascist movement. Supporting third parties in a presidential election or not voting altogether due to litmus tests is to effectively surrender the political battlefield to Trump and the anti-democracy right-wing.
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But the Democrats are an institutional party, dominated by centrists who still value bipartisanship and collegiality with the Republicans, even as the GOP are servants to Trump. Further complicating matters, the polls have repeatedly shown that the Democratic Party is as unpopular as Trump and Republicans, if not more so. The party can potentially be used as a tool for protecting and reinvigorating social democracy, but it will need to be dragged kicking and screaming in that direction.
Donald Trump and the larger anti-democracy right have shown they will do almost anything to acquire and retain unlimited power. This includes engaging in a nationwide campaign of voter suppression and voter nullification, supporting political violence and other forms of extremism, and the possibility of invoking martial law and the Insurrection Act, and rigging elections.
The years and decades ahead will be hard and dangerous. No Kings must be focused, disciplined and organized. If not, it risks becoming not just a footnote but an alibi for the Trump administration’s crackdown on civil rights and American democracy. In that case, No Kings will be proof that tens of millions marched — and little changed in the end.
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